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VDOT seeks feedback for Route 53 safety improvements

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Thursday, February 2, 2012

The Virginia Department of Transportation is holding a design public hearing this evening for a set of projects to improve safety on a 1.7-mile stretch of the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, Route 53, in Albemarle County.

“Route 53 is an incredibly important thoroughfare in the Scottsville District,” said county Supervisor Christopher Dumler. “It’s also a road that carries many visitors and tourists to some of our community’s greatest cultural treasures like Monticello and Ash Lawn and Michie Tavern.”

Source: VDOT Brochure for Route 53 safety improvements

VDOT records indicate there were 94 crashes on the stretch of road between 2005 and 2007, including three fatalities. Those high numbers caused the road to be selected for a new VDOT program called “Strategically Targeted Affordable Roadway Solutions,” or STARS.

“This VDOT program was designed to identify and find solutions for high-crash corridors,” said Lou Hatter, spokesman for VDOT’s Culpeper District.

The cost for three proposed improvements is anticipated to be $831,000. The money will come from VDOT’s Highway Safety Improvement Program.

Albemarle moves ahead with wireless policy changes

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Efforts are moving ahead to speed up the process by which applications for new towers for wireless telecommunications are approved by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

Representatives from wireless companies have been asking the county to streamline its cell tower ordinance before a series of applications for next-generation antennae are filed this year.

An existing monopole located in Albemarle County

“What we’re trying to do there is identify some things we can do quickly in terms of amending the ordinance,” said Bill Fritz, the county’s chief of special projects.

Fritz told supervisors Wednesday that staff has been able to identify ways to shorten the application process by at least one month for towers that require a special use permit.

The county will retain Kreines & Krienes, a California-based company, to provide information on the current state of the wireless industry to see how Albemarle might change its ordinance to accommodate industry claims that more visible towers might be necessary to provide reliable data service to mobile customers.

UVa architecture school to spend next 10 days imagining a new Belmont Bridge

By Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

If you see teams of university students and faculty circling around downtown Charlottesville over the next 10 days, they’d like you to know that they are part of the “Belmont Vortex.”

This whirling academic energy is being directed by Iñaki Alday, the chair of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Alday convened the entire school at Culbreth Theater Wednesday and challenged them to find new solutions for the redesign of the city’s Belmont Bridge.

Daniel Bluestone, Architectural Historian, University of Virginia Photos by Sabrina Schaeffer, The Daily Progress. Used by permission.

The studio desks and class schedules at Campbell Hall have both been cleared for everyone to participate in a grassroots design contest that the faculty says is unprecedented.

“This is the first time ever that all the designers in the school have worked on one project,” said Elizabeth Meyer, an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. “This might be a model for how we can rethink how we teach.”

The “Belmont Vortex” design workshops will be led by a visiting professor from Spain, Eduardo Arroyo, described by Meyer as being both “relentlessly pragmatic and visionary.”

“A vortex is a place where many things happen at the same time,” Arroyo said. “I’m here with a mission to make you imagine the city, to use your imagination, your fantasy, and that’s a different field.”

Live streaming of Albemarle Board of Supervisors meeting for February 1, 2012

 

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Charlottesville Tomorrow will be streaming a live audio broadcast of the February 1, 2012 meeting of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

Click here to view agenda materials from Albemarle County's website.

Broadcast starts at 9:00 am

Stream videos at Ustream

Planning Commission discusses possibility of more uses in industrial zones

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The Albemarle Planning Commission has been briefed on the status of changes to the county’s zoning code that would allow for more types of businesses to operate in industrial districts.

“The type of industrial district we may need to be focused on is probably very different from when our industrial districts were established more than 40 years ago,” said Wayne Cilimberg, Albemarle’s director of planning.

Tuesday’s discussion was the latest in a series of conversations that have occurred since the Board of Supervisors adopted an economic vitality action plan at the beginning of 2010.

One of their directives was to find ways to alter the county’s zoning in order to promote economic development.

“The zoning code changes allow for more flexibility for modern industry, better protections to our environment [and] assignment of more appropriate uses to the industrial districts,” said Susan Stimart, the county’s economic development facilitator.

The changes would alter the county’s zoning matrix in several ways, including allowing industrially zoned parcels to have “supporting” commercial space and office space on up to 25 percent of the land with a special use permit, and would allow retail on 25 percent of the parcels by-right.

Federal and state laws on transportation funding could change

By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Legislation currently pending before the General Assembly could have a far-ranging impact on how Virginia decides what road and transit projects should be built.

“We think it has the potential to broadly change the way transportation planning and programming and funding [takes] place in Virginia,” said Stephen Williams, the director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

The two bills, HB 1248 and SB 639, lay out Gov. Bob McDonnell’s transportation priorities for 2012.

State law already requires localities to include a transportation section in their comprehensive plans. The new legislation would require those plans to be approved by the Virginia Department of Transportation to make sure they are “consistent” with the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s state plans.

“The department could withhold federal or state funds until the local government came into consistency,” Williams said.

Trip Pollard, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said that could be problematic.

“There’s no definition in the statute of what that means and it leaves it up to VDOT to assess what is consistent,” Pollard said.