Recent Transportation and Land Use Planning Experiences in Charlottesville, Virginia

摘要

I've been in the Charlottesville area for about 7 months; before that, I was in Honolulu for about 4 years, and in Miami for 6 years before that. Charlottesville is a very different area, and I'm intrigued and delighted to be there. It is a five-county region along with the city of Charlottesville. The population of the region is about 200,000, about half of that in the MPO. We have four rural counties with 15,000 to 20,000 people each. So with the complexity of the politics and all of this creative work we're doing, I'm actually working for a majority board whose elected officials are from very small, rural counties. Every time we go to the public, we have to explain who we are. These figures are a small sample of what we use in public presentations. You have to explain what an MPO and a planning district are. You take them through the different things we do just to begin to get them thinking about coming up with solutions. If you are going on public process, people have to feel like you might actually be able to do something about it, which is very complex when you start talking regionally. It is really hard to make things happen regionally.