Archive for the 'Transportation' Category

Western Bypass Bids a Rorschach Test

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 11, 2012 in Government, Taxes and Transportation. 7 Comments Tags: .

The construction bids are in for the Western Bypass, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow, but it’s not yet clear whether they’re good news, or bad. Seven bids were submitted, ranging from $136M to $214M, all of which exceed the $125.6M budget. A Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman says that they’re all within the entire $139M design-build budget, but Tubbs points out that pretends that none of that additional $13.4M engineering budget has been spent when, in fact, $9.3M of it had already been spent as of June 17 of last year. That seems to make it pretty clear that all of these bids are beyond the state’s financial means, unless VDOT chooses to allocate additional funding to the project.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board is scheduled to name the winning bidder of the design-build contract on June 20, which is also when the public will be able to see the design that was submitted.

City Recommitting to Bypass’s 35 MPH Limit

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 22, 2012 in Transportation. 36 Comments

With a study supporting the 35 MPH speed limit on parts of the 250 Bypass, City Council intends to keep it there, Megan Davis writes for the Waynesboro News Virginian. (No, I don’t understand, either. Let’s chalk that up to a production error.) The study found that while most people are going faster, it also found that the lack of sufficient space for acceleration and slowing down necessitates the seemingly unreasonably slow speed limit. The westbound stretch after McIntire, in particular, is what strikes a lot of people as unreasonably slow until it hits 45 MPH just before the firehouse. (Councilor Dave Norris is one of those people.) Council intends to pass an ordinance restating that speed limit. All of this came about after a half dozen people appealed tickets for speeding, who argued that the limit is unreasonably low and was set in 1967 without a necessary study to demonstrate cause for it to be set so low.

Survey: Two-Thirds Support Bypass, Same Percentage Supports Alternatives

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 11, 2012 in Development, Government and Transportation. 2 Comments

Sixty-nine percent of area people believe that some kind of a Route 29 bypass is necessary, according to a survey (PDF) commissioned by Charlottesville Tomorrow and conducted by UVA’s Center for Survey Research. The survey asked a wide range of questions of its 1,096 respondents in Albemarle, Charlottesville, Louisa, Fluvanna, Greene, and Nelson about topics including infrastructure, open space preservation, developer proffers, growth, and traffic. Just over half of respondents believe that traffic is a “major problem,” and 67% believe that elected officials should consider alternatives to the Western Bypass to see if they’d be cheaper and more effective than building a major new road.

County Portion of Parkway Opening in January

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 7, 2011 in Transportation. 3 Comments Tags: .

VDOT expects to have the Albemarle portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway open in a month’s time, Aaron Richardson writes for the Daily Progress. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ask the Virginia Department of Transportation to open the county’s completed chunk of the road, and City Council doesn’t oppose that, though they want some minor improvements made at the road’s beginning and end.

Albemarle’s Red Light Camera Income Ledger

Published by Waldo Jaquith on November 29, 2011 in Business, Government, Law and Justice, Taxes and Transportation. 15 Comments Tags: , .

It’s been tough to understand how things are going, financially, for Albemarle County’s red light camera at the Rio/29 intersection, because the stories have conflicted. In September, CBS-19′s Rachel Ryan reported that it wasn’t making any money:

“It’s not a revenue maker for us,” [Sgt. Darrell Byers] explained. “It’s actually about safe driving habits. That’s what we’re out there for, that’s what the cameras are out there for and that’s what we want to see.”

That’s good because Byers says revenue from ticketing has yet to match the $10,000 monthly cost of operating the cameras.

But then, last week, NBC-29′s Henry Graff reported that the county is making lots of money off of the outsourced justice system:

New numbers show that the controversial red light cameras in Albemarle County are keeping drivers safe. Those same numbers also reveal that the project is a cash cow for a county strapped for dough.

Police and county supervisors point out the cameras are to make the intersection of Rio Road and Route 29 safe. That’s priority one, but the extra $82,000 – to date – is pretty nice as well.

So, which is it? To clear things up, I asked Albemarle County Community Relations Director Lee Catlin to send me the data. This is a PDF of the helpful document that she sent me, and here it is boiled down to the basics of the number of citations, estimated income (based on the number of citations), and net income, by month:

Month # Est $ Net $
Dec 322 $16,100 $0*
Jan 574 $28,700 $0*
Feb 484 $24,200 $1,390
Mar 588 $29,400 $12,314
Apr 637 $31,850 $8,643
May 711 $35,550 $12,505
Jun 558 $27,900 $10,692
Jul 562 $28,100 $9,759
Aug 542 $27,100 $13,492
Sep 383 $19,150 $13,992
Oct 217 $10,850 $0***

* Not enough fines collected to reach RedFlex’s $10,000 threshold.
** Redflex advises the month of September figures were higher than normal due to more fees collected from delinquent accounts.
*** System down because of damage to sensors due to VDOT repaving. Only $8,167.67 in fines were collected, which was not enough to cover the monthly payment. That payment will roll over until enough fines are collected to make up the difference. The county is not responsible for paying the difference.

So that’s $82,769 that Albemarle County has made to date, with the remainder of the money—the $10,000 monthly fee—going to RedFlex, the Australian company that owns the cameras. That’s the source of the gap between the gross and the net. (You can read the county’s contract with RedFlex, if you’re interested about the specifics of the agreement.)

I don’t know what was up with CBS-19′s story—whether Ryan just got the story wrong or Sgt. Byers was giving her bad information—but it sure looks like Graff got this one right.

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