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Fairfax staff outline Comprehensive Transportation Analysis to weigh pedestrian, bicycle, transit and vehicle trade'offs
Summary
County transportation staff described a new CTA framework to add pedestrian level of comfort, bicycle level of traffic stress, transit access and crash severity to traditional vehicular metrics; supervisors asked how the metrics will be used in entitlement, equity screening and the Transportation Priorities Plan.
Fairfax County Department of Transportation staff presented a new Comprehensive Transportation Analysis (CTA) framework intended to expand traffic studies beyond traditional vehicle'centric measures.
"The purpose is to collect data to make more meaningful decisions," said Tim Kutz, transportation planner, describing CTA as the codification of additional measures of effectiveness developed with stakeholders from 2020'2022. He said the CTA will not prescribe fixes but will quantify tradeoffs between vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and transit so decisionmakers can weigh competing objectives.
Staff described the CTA suite of metrics that will be applied depending on context: pedestrian delay and pedestrian level of comfort, bicycle level of traffic stress, transit access and amenities, crash hot spot analysis including severity, and vehicle miles traveled for area planning. The framework groups county areas by context (area 1 urban centers and transit station areas; area 2 suburban centers and community business centers; areas 3'5 more auto'dependent) and applies different thresholds accordingly.
Greg Stevenson, acting director of FCDOT, and Jeff Herman (site analysis team) said the approach has been developed with VDOT, Planning, Health and industry and that thresholds are tied to average daily trip triggers used in entitlement review. "This is sort of telling the rest of the story," Kutz said: it makes explicit the tradeoffs that have previously been assessed informally.
Supervisors pressed how CTA data will translate into capital or spot improvements and how it will be used after pedestrian incidents or crashes. Staff pointed to the spot improvement program and the Transportation Priorities Plan (TPP) as channels where CTA results can reprioritize funding and flagged that entitlement studies will include the new measures based on ADT thresholds. Supervisors also urged that CTA be used to address equity by identifying infrastructure gaps that residents may not be able to advocate for themselves.
No formal action was taken; staff will continue outreach and said they will return with implementation details as CTA is applied to comprehensive plan studies, entitlement reviews and the next tranche of the TPP.
Next steps: staff will share the CTA website materials, continue stakeholder outreach with the development and traffic consultant community, and bring targeted guidance to the Board in future briefings.
