After a postponed deadline, officials behind Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s massive transit/land-use master plan dubbed “Places29” (www.albemarle.org) say that the process turned out to be just as complex—if not more—than they anticipated. It’s called Places29, after all, not Place29.
Places29 covers a 10-mile stretch of Route 29 between Route 250 and Greene County, encompassing the four northern development areas. While a draft of the master plan was scheduled for release before Christmas, the County recently announced that consultant firms Community Design + Architecture and MMA, along with VDOT and the Thomas Jefferson District Planning Commission, will showcase ongoing efforts in a County Planning Commission work session January 16. The updated blueprints—including a framework map, a master plan, design principles and an implementation plan—will be finalized and presented to the public toward the end of February.
Harrison Rue, executive director of the Thomas Jefferson District Planning Commission, says the consulting firms charged with working on the process have been visionaries for the plan. “We’ve really challenged them with this,” Rue says. “…We had hoped to do it quicker, but as we dug into this, it’s not been done before at this level anywhere around here, and it’s just really a tremendously complicated project.”
The last public meetings were in May, and in the interim, consultants had major issues to resolve, such as modeling traffic flow, predicting future traffic influxes and deciding how to make the renovated land usage areas not only attractive, but functional. One ongoing need is the addition of a split-grade interchange for Hydraulic and 29, and an extra lane from Hydraulic to the onramp.