Zoning Committee Work Session - Regular Meeting

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Good evening, everyone. Sorry for the abrupt start. My name is Andrew Blumenthal, chair of the Planning Committee. Welcome to the meeting of the Mecklenburg Planning Committee, Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission's Planning Committee. It is 5.05 on April 21st. We are meeting in room 280 of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Government Center. And this meeting is being streamed online in accordance with all of the requisite statutes. We'll go ahead and get things started with introductions, starting with our commissioners, with Commissioner Russell.

Will Russell, Planning Committee.

Sean O'Neill, Planning Committee.

Clayton Sealy, Planning Committee. Gary Lansdale, Planning Committee.

All right. Happy Cornette Planning Staff. Happy Bonnevac Planning Staff.

Gretchen Flores Planning Staff.

Warren Wooten, Housing and Neighborhood Services, City of Charlotte.

Caroline Fortney, City of Charlotte Real Estate.

Bob Cook, CRTPO Planning Department.

Will Snyder, CRTPO Planning Department.

Thank you both. Gretchen, is everybody online?

Yep.

Okay. That's great. First order of business will be approval of the minutes from our previous meeting on March 17th. Before we do that, are there any questions, comments? No. Hearing none, I'll entertain a motion, please.

Lansdale, motion to approve the minutes. I want to thank staff for including the special meeting minutes in this approval as well.

Neely, second.

All right, motion by Lansdale, second by Neely. All in favor? Aye. And to Commissioner Lansdale's point, we actually, Lansdale, excuse me, we actually need to approve the special meeting minutes separately. So I'll let you make that motion, Terry.

Lansdale, a motion to approve the special committee meeting minutes of, do we have to get the date right? March 23rd.

Second.

Motion by Lansdale. Second by Seeley. All in favor? Aye. Thank you very much. We only have one mandatory referral this evening. It's 2613. All right. Did you pull on it? Do we have any questions, comments, concerns about the mandatory referral this evening? Any questions for our staff that's here with us this evening? We're not hearing none. I understand the motion.

I'd like to make a motion for no additional comment. The planning committee has reviewed mandatory for reports 2613 on April 21st, 2026 and have no additional comments for the submitting agency.

Second, Sealy. Motion Lansdale, second, Sealy. All in favor? All right. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Now to the exciting part of our agenda. We have a presentation from CRTPO regarding an update on the comprehensive safety action plan. And Will, thank you for coming tonight. I know it was somewhat short notice, but I appreciate you being here and look forward to hearing from you.

Happy to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. I was looking on my calendar. Last time I presented on the CSAP was in front of the full committee on December 9th, 2024. So we've done a lot of work since then and looking forward to providing you all an update. A little education session as well on our comprehensive safety action plan. My name's Will Snyder. I'm a transportation planner and CSAP project manager with the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization. Just a little overview in case you're not familiar. So the CRTPO is the Federally Designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for the three-county Charlotte urban area. So that includes Iredell, Mecklenburg, and just that urban orange portion of Union County. It includes 24 member jurisdictions, and we essentially operate on a 3C federal transportation planning process in which we are continuing cooperative and comprehensive planning in everything we do long-range transportation planning. So that's a good segue into kind of the purpose of our study that I'm going to be talking about tonight and generally a lot of the scope of what we work within. So we found a couple of different needs for why we decided to pursue this regional traffic safety plan. The first really focusing on North Carolina crash rates. So unfortunately, we lead the country in being one of the highest states with the highest crash rates in the US. And so fundamentally, from a data standpoint, we know that we have a very serious problem with fatal and serious injury crashes. And no system exists today really at our own regional level to inventory what types of crashes these are, what the contributing factors are, where they're located related to land use, development, demand growth, all of the things that we're talking about, especially in this region. And we just have a gap in that kind of data system. It exists kind of at the state level where we're cataloging what kinds of crashes are occurring where, but that's not really kind of parsed down into our own urban area and our own region. Um, and really how that translates is we've done some preliminary work with our consultant already and found that every week in our planning area, more than 10 people are killed or seriously injured on our streets. And so that's not just in Charlotte, that's in, you know, our whole three County planning area. Um, and that's a substantial number, I think pretty unacceptable for really anyone to, um, really process that those are how many lives are being altered by this kind of public health crisis we have. of lacking traffic safety, lacking conditions that really lend themselves to having a safe transportation network. In the data, what that looks like is over the past five years, about 250,000 crashes have occurred from 2021 to 2025. About 2,600 of those are fatal or serious injury crashes. I emphasize those are just your fatal, what are categorized as K crashes, or serious injury, what are categorized as A. you still have many more minor and possible injuries. And we can assume as well that there's many, many more unreported injuries. So folks that, you know, were involved in a crash, maybe left the scene, you know, stayed for the police report process, but then realized later that night that, hey, I actually feel like I'm concussed. I feel like I actually have some sort of bodily injury and, you know, self-report, go to the emergency department later. So this data is really just, I think, a snapshot in many ways of a serious problem affecting many of our residents, but also probably many more that are going unreported. While we're finding that crash rates per year are generally starting to tick down in 24 and 25, the point being is we still have 48,000 crashes that occurred in 2025. And we have, you know, almost 600 fatal and serious injured crashes that occurred last year. If you follow the news, many high profile crashes, but again, many more that have gone unreported or underreported, not necessarily been captured by any news. Where that breaks out, especially with our vulnerable road users, our road users that are biking or pedestrians or individuals with disabilities that are navigating the transportation network, that breaks down to about 3,000 ped and bike crashes that have occurred over that same five-year period and resulting in about 440 ped and bike fatal and serious injury crashes. We know from the data that that is an over-representation relative to how many vulnerable road users are involved in these crashes. So while they only make up about one, just over 1% of overall crashes in the planning area, they're making up about 16% of fatal and serious injury crashes, hence an over-representation, hence a need for a very focused study to identify what are those contributing factors? What is our infrastructure missing that is not keeping those individuals safe that are choosing to do things other than drive? Really, our second impetus for why we pursued this study is we have local efforts occurring in our planning area. But those have been very successful. We have Charlotte Vision Zero. We have the town of Huntersville getting ready to start their Vision Zero process, the town of Waxhaw. Davidson, different communities that are individually pursuing this really important work locally. But many times that falls kind of into a silo. So we know that folks are commuting, they're traveling across political boundaries. This data, these crashes do not really, you know, discriminate based on where they occur. It's really, we're seeing this crash pattern occur throughout the planning area. And so we need to look at a unified regional vision to address this issue. Today, again, those communities that have completed those plans are Davidson, Matthews, Morrisville, and Waxhaw. And then those locally-led plans that are in progress are in Huntersville, Marvin, and Monroe. The reason Charlotte is not on this list is Charlotte does have a Vision Zero policy baked into its strategic mobility plan, but the city actually does not have a standalone Vision Zero plan. So through this work I'll talk about a little bit later, we are supporting CDOT to help them develop a standalone Vision Zero action plan as part of this study. Another reason is we're just generally positioned to convene a lot of leaders in the transportation space. So we, on a monthly basis, have our technical coordinating committee. Those are appointed staff from our member communities that are coming and voting and providing recommendations to our board on transportation issues. And then our board is made up of appointed locally elected officials that are essentially adopting and making those policy actions. So we are already doing this, and this is a great forum to really leverage the traffic safety discussion. And finally, that we are really able to, through a lot of our federal funding and policy, able to embed traffic safety improvements in a lot of these mega infrastructure projects that we're funding through long-range plans, through short-range plans, and again, through our general federal obligation that our region receives. I won't go too deep into this, but if you're familiar, our current surface transportation bill is called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Due to expire this September, Congress is currently working on a new reauthorization bill to set those new federal priorities. One of the important priorities of the previous administration was traffic safety. So having a standalone program called the Safe Streets and Roads for All program. This was a competitive grant program that our organization applied for. Many communities, including the city of Charlotte, have also applied for and been awarded funds from this program. And they're basically funding community safety issues and then seeking to provide communities with the opportunity to create those local coalitions and local priorities, local infrastructure investments targeted at safety, reducing crashes, and just improving the overall comfort of being a road user in any form. So our organization took action, I think, again, on these different pillars of seeing the data, seeing the need and seeing the interest from our local jurisdictions and applied for the Safe Streets for All program. We were awarded a little over $3 million in addition to another $500,000 from NCDOT. And our board supported this application, again, providing us with the charge to pursue this funding and pursue this planning work. So this was back in 2024, and we've kicked off that study this year. This is all based on the safe system approach. So if you've heard of this one as well, this is kind of an evolution of the traditional engineering enforcement education approach to traffic safety, where we're looking at it more as a holistic system. So we're acknowledging yes, infrastructure and safe roads, but also how does safe road user behavior play into this? How are vehicles made safer through Just basic counter crash technology in vehicles, but we're also having a big EV autonomous vehicle discussion. How is that bringing safety along at the forefront of that technology? But also looking at things like post crash care. So what care are victims being given immediately after and in the period beyond being involved in a serious crash? How are our first responders protected when they're responding to a crash? And this all contributes to a system of a redundancy in making sure that if one part of our transportation system fails to keep you safe, there's another part right behind it that will at least make that crash you're involved in not result in a serious injury or fatality. And that that responsibility is shared in reaching that. So the safe system approach is kind of what the Safe Streets program is founded on. And so we are going through this process and doing just that. So we're making a connection between planners, engineers, stakeholders, and the public through this coalition. We are identifying areas of focus where crashes are occurring the highest in our planning area, not just using existing crash data, but also predicting risk. So if there is a lack of crosswalks or lighting or a large gap over 500 feet where there's no safe crossing location, we can predict using much of the modeling software we have today that that is prone to some sort of serious crash down the line, prone to someone making a choice to try to cross unsafely, prone to someone being inclined to speed or taking a turn too hard and having an off-the-roadway type crash. So we can... feed these contributing crash factors just as well as we can look at historical data. But this is an evolution of even high injury networks where you're mapping historical data. We want to prevent those crashes, not just accept that they've happened and move on. Because again, this is life-altering stuff beyond just the crash victims that are involved. So we're looking at best policy practices, doing a national search of other MPOs and other cities that have really successful Vision Zero policies and funding structures. And we are going out into the field. We're doing road safety audits, walking on these corridors once they've been identified, working with our local communities to really assess what their priorities are in funding and being able to really achieve some quick wins just as much as those bigger long-term infrastructure investments. We are proposing, again, location specific and region wide countermeasures. So rather than, hey, we need to reconstruct this intersection 10 years from now at a tag of $100 million, what can we do that's more short term? Can we retime signals? Can we repaint crosswalks? Can we add flex posts, improve the lighting? Things that are shorter term, shorter cost, but again, saving lives and have that bigger impact short term. And then at the end of this, we're developing one single crash dashboard where all of our 24 member jurisdictions will be able to continue this work on their own with our technical support behind it. So they'll be able to have their own high injury network, their own predictive tools to again, look at that risk beyond the study, and then they will receive their own local safety action plan. So again, I mentioned the city of Charlotte being one of those communities. But again, 17, 16 others aside from Charlotte that will receive their own new local safety action or vision zero plan as it's commonly referred to beyond those that have already adopted one. So this is important work, not just for the region, but individually for our communities. Those will all feed back into our single comprehensive safety action plan, which will be our MPOs policy document to guide again, our bigger federal policy investments. And so, yeah, important work taking place there. We've already done a lot. So since January, we've been working with our consultant. I think this can best be rationalized into two buckets. So we have a data and plan development side to our contract. So that is a consultant that is actively working with us. We've held a few task force meetings. This is targeted primarily at our local staff working with again, local, planning staff, engineering staff, public health officials, first responders, really targeting more of the technical side of the plan. And we're asking them more technical questions around, based on your experience with your own local crash data, what priorities matter to you? That's not to say then that we will not go out and have a public version of this. So there will be a resident advisory group that launches later this year That's a separate contract with a separate consultant that's going to be supporting us. And they will be leading kind of our bread and butter outreach that we typically do. So we'll have workshops with students, we'll be tabling in communities, and we will have a core resident advisory group made up of advocacy groups, community organizations, more of your grassroot type organizations that are throughout the planning area. And that will encapsulate the public involvement process to ensure that it's data informed, but also driven by those local needs and local priorities. Um, excuse my animations. Those are a little out of order, but, uh, so again, we've kicked off in January. We've had that resident, or we will have the resident advisory kickoff later this summer against still getting that on its feet. Um, we will complete the regional high injury network around that same time and be able to allow our advisory group and our technical task force to review that. We'll come up with those priority project locations and then review those again through the task force and the advisory group. And then we will complete those local safety action plans in mid to late 2027 and then fully finalize our regional CSAP and adopt that through our board and close out the project in early 28. Okay. We will be updating our website, crtpo.org slash CSAP, C-S-A-P, for any updates on the project. We also have some good general overviews, pretty much summing up what I just talked to you all about this evening. And with that, I will take any questions.

Thank you very much. Any questions? Commissioner Russell?

Well, thank you for your presentation. Just a quick question here. We know that the goal of most traffic engineering is to move as many cars as you can as fast as you can. But that seems to be at odds with safety and specifically intersections and pedestrians because of the speed and volume. Is CRTPO looking at changing the engineering approach? changing how the engineering is done and reflecting on the road networks and how cars move versus people, people moving in those same spaces.

Yeah, so today we are not involved so much in how projects are designed, but more reviewing those designs and then allocating funds to them. So in terms of what that looks like beyond the plan, we host a couple of different programs. Our Metropolitan Transportation Plan really puts all of those regional needs into kind of some fiscal constraint. We horizon that out to 2050, 2060. That's using existing designs that our members may submit to us. We also have a discretionary grants program, which is smaller transportation projects. And again, they're submitting designs to us and then we're awarding those. I think where we can move the needle on those types of projects is using more of a carrot method. So we're elevating the scoring criteria on safety rather than efficiency and capacity. So then rather than us dictating the engineering, it's really If you would like to be awarded a certain amount of funding, we're expecting a higher design quality from you. So I think that maybe hits at your question of, again, using kind of the power of the purse with, again, the regional priorities that we line up on a four-year annual cycle.

What would be a few examples of smaller projects in line with what you just outlined? I'm sorry. What would be a few examples of smaller projects?

Yeah.

With your carrot approach, right? What would qualify for that?

Yeah. So our discretionary grants program typically is like the $2 million to $5 million range on individual awards. So sometimes it's gap funding. So it's a jurisdiction that just needs a few million more dollars to complete a larger grant. multi-million dollar project. Many times though, it can be completing a segment of sidewalk, completing like EV charging type projects. I'm going through our most recent kind of awards that we just issued, but it's typically roadway projects, non-roadway projects, air quality projects, and transit projects.

Thank you. And then my next question is, can you only give money to kind of municipalities in the service area, or can it go to private projects as well?

It's only projects from our member jurisdictions.

Okay. Correct. Understood. Yeah. And the reason I ask is because sometimes some of those smaller projects that I think fit the bill – are completed by developers, but mandated by the municipalities and the jurisdictions, right?

Yeah, in this case, this is jurisdiction led. A good example of a really small project, community in our planning area called Mineral Springs. It's down in Union County next to Waxhaw. We awarded them just shy of a million. I think it was like $800,000 to complete a sidewalk build out. So our staff were able to go support, you know, a pretty small award, I think, in the transportation space. But really impactful to that community to have sidewalks in a downtown area that doesn't really have any sidewalks today. So I guess that's more specific.

And a lot of Commissioner Russell, I'm thinking things like hawk signals. Right. Sure. In parts of Charlotte where it kind of functions as a highway, even if the speed limit is 35 miles an hour. But now you have residential surrounding it. And so, you know, ways to improve pedestrian and bike safety in kind of more the core of Charlotte specifically. Right. Any other questions?

Sure, I've got a few. I just want to make sure you guys are okay. No, no, no. Since we only had one mandatory referral, we're up to eight, right? I am not, Terry, but I'm sure someone will be here.

I got a bus to catch.

Very good, very good. A couple things, I want to go back. I'm sorry we weren't involved in more of the first wave of meetings with technical folks. I think in our conversations, I was alluding to that miss out on... kind of being a part of that original conversation you may not might know may or may not know the people my colleagues may or may not know but i am on the executive committee for the highway safety plan and have been on for the past two cycles for ncdot's statewide safety plan that uses your foundational safety designs for an action plan for the the entire state it was interesting your comment on that you're going to be mapping Places where there are gaps. I think your map's going to be pretty much kind of like the Poutin, whatever the French band's name is. But you're going to have a lot of dots where things are really right. And it's going to be a lot of blanket coverage on roadways. I don't see a lot of complete streets or complete roadways in Mecklenburg County. You've got missing gaps of sidewalks. You've got sidewalks on one side only. You've got missing legs and intersections that don't have crosswalks. You don't have a blanket leading pedestrian interval policy that allows for preemption at the time of the beg button. It's going to be a critical factor to be evaluating. We don't really have a design and engineering analysis for the Charlotte Department of Transportation that helps them understand that the trigger devices at intersections, that magnetic strip that you see in the ground and the asphalt, that really should not extend in past the stop line or into a crosswalk. Don't know whether you're going to get into that granularity, but that behavior profile by design and engineering creates conflict and unsafe actions. If a car has to move into a crosswalk, a driver of a car has to move into a crosswalk to trigger a light to change for them is a problem. It establishes a pattern of neglect and abuse of a driving privilege. Thank you for letting me get some of those pieces out based upon your, your, um, Presentation. Having sat in remotely on a recent MPTA meeting, as we look at their request to have all 2300 bus stops in Mecklenburg County service area to be ADA compliant, that's a pretty significant challenge. I made jokes with our director of CDOT recently saying you guys can do that next Tuesday, right? that's a big step. That's why I think it's going to cloud your map. But we've got to figure out a way to manage that. And we're restricted in many ways and being punished in many ways in Mecklenburg County by having to pay for this ourselves, especially in the application of state roads. The last thing I'll say is more of a commentary. Will, I'm trying to be kind to you, but I want to make sure that I Since I've missed out on several meetings and we're going to be hopefully catching up together, as we look forward, I'm always concerned when staff, some of the folks at the dais have heard me say this before, looks to national and international examples for leadership, direction, and best practices. Durham has done some great work in creating a near-miss data tracker. We have the hospital systems across the state providing us information for those injuries and crashes that go unreported, but by the police or to the police or to the local law enforcement agency and are reported at the hospital scenarios. So capturing that data is very, very important. The reason why I get to this point is that we've got to do better and this safety plan has to do better in enabling Vision Zero to maintain its Vision Zero network. And I think in last night's zoning meeting, there was a situation where in District 6, A question was asked, is this particular intersection or section of road, is it in the high-injury network, and it wasn't. But looking at that data, we see that there's a lag time, not only in data, but the application of that data for public consumption. So it may be two years, things might have changed, and I love the idea of making it very specific and granular to what's happening here in Mecklenburg County in the CRTPO region. I commend you for that. So I've covered my basis on your presentation for let's look at the state. There's some communities that are doing some very good work. Let's make sure we have a clean eye for CDOT to talk about their engineering practices. Maybe we talk about these opportunities in policy that will increase safety by software. So a software enhanced safety program should be a part of the conversation in our action plan and a significant part when you're seven times more likely to be seriously injured or killed with shoes on your feet than with wheels on your feet in Charlotte. And that's a problem that we can solve. And it's not about victim behavior. It's about privileged driver behavior. And even when we have a pedestrian crosswalk in front of this building, even yesterday when I was here, we still had a driver while I was in the first lane still drive by in the second lane right in front of me. We have to have an enforcement component to this as well in the future. So thank you for letting me kind of get through my pieces and hopefully it'll, we'd love to chat with you more about this, but we desperately need more funding. And if there's an opportunity to track funding, because when we have a rezoning for affordable housing, our council has a report quarterly monthly on affordable housing trust fund additions by developers, but we don't track developer investments in transportation improvements as part of the rezoning process. So if a developer commits $100,000 for a partial traffic light enhancement There's no report on that. We don't know if it's committed, obligated, or built. Or when it will happen, because it's an occupancy certification piece. So we'd love to also dive in and connect those silos internally as part of our safety action plan. And I think that's important to this community and our service area. But I know that those silos are going to be very different for Marvin and their solutions than they are for the city of Charlotte. So it's a tall order, a good task. And I'm so grateful that staff put in the application for the SS4 grants and we were awarded. This is the second one, right? The second grant from SS4A. So Fantastic job. So thank you very much for letting me wax non-poetically on this important transportation topic.

Yeah, of course. And if I can respond to a couple of your comments. So great to hear you're on the SHAP committee or SHSP committee, excuse me. I'm on the work group that is assigning tasks to MPOs. So very engaged in that work. It's obviously very important. And so You know, again, another charge from our state partners to be pushing this forward. We're very pleased to be engaged in that group, just as well as Campo and Triangle West MPOs. So that's a great committee. And that's really where we're framing out against some of our policy implementation is staying aligned with the state's safety plan, making sure that we're carrying those forward in our region. As for kind of the map and mapping a lot of the gaps that exist, that's why we'll be ensuring that it is layered through a lens of where existing crashes and where it's high risk and really refining that to a list, starting with top 100 locations. Because we want to kind of take a small bite off of the elephant to start, right, is really focusing on where the locations that we can have the most impact today with our limited dollars. Um, so that's why we're not just going at this from a, what has already happened with crashes. High injury networks are important. They're valuable and they're very informative, but we'll be pulling in other data layers to really refine that because I agree with you. We don't want to just have a clouded map with a lot of dots on it. I think we still will have a lot of priorities, but we want to make sure that those that are overrepresented along a certain line of criteria are the ones that rise to the top that we can really address quickly. We'll be distributing those across many of our member jurisdictions. So it won't be top 100 in Charlotte or Mecklenburg. We'll be sure that every jurisdiction receives some benefit through that process. The next piece on the MPTA meeting with the bus stop ADA compliance. So something I did not mention, we are working with every transit provider in each county to create a separate transit access safety plan as well. So that kind of falls into the local safety action plan bin. So we are working with CATS, soon to be MPTA, to work with their bus stop consolidation tool, where they'll be assigning where bus stops go away versus where bus stops are approved or realigned based on the new headways being proposed from the referendum spending We are working with them to ensure that that quarter mile or, again, kind of defining the parameters, but the area around those new stops are most supported. So if we have a high injury network flag next to a proposed stop location, we'll be ensuring that those improvements are made concurrent with CATS' effort. So we're, again, trying to maximize funding. We're doing that in Iredell County because they run some fixed route service. And then our demand response providers in Union County and here in Mecklenburg with MTS will be working with them on frequent stop locations as well. In terms of kind of the near miss data in Durham. So I misspoke. It's not purely nationally. We are looking inwards as well. We absolutely want to look at the successes here. We're not the first MPO to do this in the state. So we want to build upon the other great work. I've been emphasizing with our consultant. I don't want you all to just sit there and bill us for reinventing the wheel. We're really trying to pull from what works best here in the state, but also some great, again, peer examples nationally is kind of what I was alluding to there. And CDOT, on the last comment, has been a fantastic partner. So we're really eager to work with them. Culturally, I think there's a lot of flavor there to reevaluate how Vision Zero is addressed in the city. And I won't speak on their position, but I will say they've been a fantastic partner. And we're piloting some new software that essentially assigns countermeasures to crash types. So it reads the narrative and then develops some countermeasures and associated costs. So just wanted to cover bases because, again, I think everything you speak to is very critical, and we're working on all of those pieces. $3 million is a lot for a plan, and we want to be sure that this is a world-class plan for this region.

And just to confirm that this is a non-fiscally constrained plan. This is an overarching guideline, vision for the opportunity that you'll have maybe greatness and layers of issues that you talked about earlier on about where the gaps are. That's fantastic. Absolutely.

This is a policy document. I mean, five years from now, we should reevaluate like this is evergreen. So I agree with you entirely.

If you have a chance to take a look at 51 and Park Road, it's a really challenging area.

51 Park Road, take a look.

Excuse me, Will. My name is Shauna Neely. I have a question as well. So while I can't imagine that Mecklenburg, Iredale or even parts of Union County are high on the list of driverless cars, I can't imagine that not being an issue coming for the future. So how are you guys taking that into consideration with the data that you're providing and collecting now?

Yeah, we have not looked at that yet. We're kind of just getting into the next phase of the study that'll pull a lot of kind of emerging technology type data. Anecdotally, I know that's coming. I've seen the Waymo pilots driving around. But again, just a lot of hands-free technology in cars now is becoming increasingly more common. So I'll be very candid. One of the unfortunate parts about kind of where we sit is we cannot tell auto manufacturers include these features, this must be required. But what we can do is work with the infrastructure to improve the way those react to their environment. So for something like Waymo, where it's relying on LIDAR and looking at the striping in the street, if that's missing, it's kind of just guessing, right? And of course they're training that model, but even hands-free technology is really reliant on well lit streets, good striping, and even will slow itself down if the lane width starts to narrow. So we can play with some of the best practices and design that work great for human behavior in some of the same ways that we can for AV type technology. So, yeah.

Mr. Chair, if I could have a follow-up on that one.

Yeah.

So we'd love to maybe also have you ensure that you have a conversation with the Fully Autonomous Vehicle Committee. Yeah, of course. From the North Carolina General Assembly. You know, they're doing some work for legislation right now around some of the topics that you were talking about. Commissioner just spoke of around autonomous vehicles. So you've got some great assets and resources within the state that may offer us some guidance. I think there's an opportunity as we do that introspective look for our action plan to really make sure that we're bringing in the sources and the opportunities where legislation and policy are being made at the state level that we're trying to influence locally. If we stay in our silo and solve it ourselves, we might be missing a whole other action plan and path that people are already tracking on. So I know you went straight to that we can't control the vehicle piece, but at the state level, they have made it legal that no municipality can stop any deployment of any automated vehicle in North Carolina. So there's no way we can write a city code saying we're banning Waymo because it's a state law that says we can't do that. So That's a complicated piece as we move forward for how we manage our transportation future and our safety action plan. Thank you.

Thank you all. Any additional questions? I only have one. If you wouldn't mind going back to the timeline, please. Sure. They're perfect. So my question, and obviously understanding, wanting to be thorough before hopefully having this wrapped up by January 2028, Will there be either updates on the website or otherwise kind of as certain, call it important data points are reached? Like, for example, the high injury network, right? Those are things that we could use, staff could use, even as a part of the rezoning process, right? If there's a rezoning that's occurring close to one of those sites. So is this going to kind of be... Not to say withheld with a negative connotation, but is this something you're going to keep it all close until you can publish one final comprehensive document? Or do you anticipate kind of having limited releases of some of that information throughout the process?

Yeah, so the high injury network, again, being fed by the retroactive data, that's a data set that exists. So we're much more quickly completing that. The thing we'll need to wait a little bit longer on is some of that risk-based analysis, because that'll be all new data that's generated. So probably right around the priority projects list release is when we will have a draft crash data dashboard that combines all that information in one. The release of that publicly, though, I think mid-27 is a good target for that. I'm trying to recall our project schedule a little bit more in granularity. But that's, again, mid-next year, we will have that full interface that'll be publicly accessible and usable by staff.

Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, of course. Barring any other questions, Will, thank you very much for your time and the presentation. And please keep us updated as this progresses, and hopefully we'll have you back next year before it comes.

All right.

Thank you so much. I think that's it. Am I missing anything else on the agenda? All right. Yeah, I think that's it, everyone. Thank you for coming. Have a great evening. And adjourned. Do I need a motion? Motion to close.