Agenda - 11-01-2022; 5-c - 2022 Orange County Transit Plan Update

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2 Governments (TJCOG), the Triangle Area Rural Planning Organization (TARPO), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In January 2020, Orange County Planning staff began work with Renaissance Planning, Inc., the consulting firm chosen to update the Orange County Transit Plan. Over the past two years, Planning staff and the consulting team have established key project deliverables and the timetable for their delivery, defined the scope of the consulting work, established a project website (www.octransit2020.com), created the public participation and outreach plans, and conducted regular meetings with the PSC, transit service providers, and key stakeholders with updates on the plan's progress. Both the PSC and the staff team provided direction and guidance to the consulting firm whose tasks included analyzing data, facilitating public input processes, soliciting feedback from specific stakeholders, and drafting the Transit Plan. The new Plan is intended to outline transit investment priorities through 2040. Following is a list of key process milestones carried out by the Renaissance, PSC, transit service providers and staff teams: • Bi-monthly staff meetings with progress updates for the PSC during the 2020 calendar year (May 2020) • Completed the Transit Choices Brochure (TCB), a visual document that illustrates the concepts and continuums of transit planning, and the Regional Connections Opportunity (RCO) Report, a technical assessment of key issues and opportunities for effective transit service (July 2020) • Held the first Transit Summit over the Zoom platform and documented key themes from the summit discussions and first public survey (October 2020) • Developed draft versions of conceptual scenarios and graphics with an accompanying memo (January 2021) • Held recurring monthly PSC meetings over Zoom with updates for first half of 2021 (January 2021 — June 2021) • Received final versions of conceptual scenarios and graphics with an accompanying memo (May 2021) • Held an in-person Transit Summit for PSC members to discuss core values and visions for the fiscally-constrained plan and learned of aspirational future projects (July 2021) • Received draft recommended network and plan as well as draft conceptual vision map for transit service provider feedback and scheduling of future PSC meetings (October 2021) • Held PSC Work Session #1 to look at the final recommended network and conceptual vision map with goal of beginning round 2 of public outreach (January 2022) • Created public outreach opportunities with a second round of surveying (over 1,000 surveys were collected) and two focus groups (held on February 8th and February 16th) that included local stakeholders (February 2022) • Held PSC Work Session #2 to look at the feedback received from public outreach and assess the draft network, which resulted in a request to provide check-in presentations to the local elected boards (March 2022) • OUTBoard received a presentation on the draft Transit Plan Update (April 2022) • Orange County BOCC received a presentation from its consultant on the draft Transit Plan Update (April 2022). The projects and service improvements included in the draft received by the BOCC last April are the same as those included in the final Draft plan for current consideration by the BOCC along with a recommendation to add funding to the Chapel Hill North-South Bus Rapid Transit Project to facilitate the project's application for eighty percent (80%) federal funding.