Check out the City’s Draft Sidewalk Priorities! 

City staff from Neighborhood Development Services and Public Works has drawn from previous plans and studies, including the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, the Streets That Work Design Guidelines, and several small area plans completed since 2015, to identify and prioritize locations for new sidewalks. These new sidewalks would be designed and constructed over the coming years, as funding is available. The map below shows the proposed locations for new sidewalks and will allow you to give us your feedback on each location.

How were these priorities determined?

In 2022, the City was awarded grant funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment to re-evaluate city walk priorities with updated data. The aim was to produce a consolidated list that would draw priorities from various plans and studies into a implementation plan for the City’s sidewalk program. Over the course of 2022 and 2023, the project team conducted analysis on a range of factors, including:

• Connectivity: evaluating length of the sidewalk need and the number of connections in the network that the sidewalk would create
• Safety: determining where the most crashes are occurring and where there are streets with higher levels of automobile use
• Suitability: considering the Walkscore of the area, as well as the proximity to schools and transit, and identifying difficult-to-climb slopes
• Demand: calculating demand for trips between different areas of the City that are served by the segments where sidewalks are needed, both in terms of pedestrian trips specifically and all trips more generally

City staff evaluated the outputs of this analysis to determine if there were other factors that could impact the need for a sidewalk at a given location. These factors included issues like right-of-way availability, utility conflicts, presence of trees, current schedules for roadway paving and other scheduled maintenance, anticipated feasibility for securing funding, and equitable distribution of investments.

How do new sidewalks support equity and inclusion in our community?

The provision of sidewalks in Charlottesville has not always been done in an equitable manner. Like many other investments in our community, there is an alignment between areas where infrastructure investments like sidewalks are needed and areas where populations of non-white, low-income, youth, elderly, disabled, or having limited English proficiency live. According to EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, 94 percent of the proposed sidewalks are in locations where one or more of these populations are currently living in the City. More specifically:

• 55 percent of proposed sidewalk locations are in areas where the majority of households are below local median income
• 26 percent are in areas where the majority of the population is non-white or Hispanic
• 23 percent are in areas where more than a quarter of the community members are under the age of 18
• 47 percent are in areas where the proportion of people who are above age 65 is higher than the state average
• 53 percent are in areas where the proportion of people have limited English proficiency is higher than the state average
• 26 percent are in areas where the proportion of people with disabilities is higher than the state average

In addition to verifying how these draft sidewalk priorities might provide connections to the potentially most vulnerable community members, City staff reviewed the projects in terms of distribution both for physical locations and timelines for design and construction. In areas of the City where the quantitative analysis did not identify high-scoring priorities, City staff looked for opportunities to include connections that could serve currently underserved neighborhoods. Estimated timelines for construction were developed to ensure that the pacing of construction did not favor one neighborhood over another by rotating throughout the City rather than focusing on completing one neighborhood’s sidewalk needs at a time.

What do the Tiers mean?

When evaluating the difficulty and feasibility of the proposed priorities, City staff found that some projects were substantially more difficult than others. A range of factors, including right-of-way availability, stormwater and utility conflicts, presence of trees, current schedules for roadway paving and other scheduled maintenance, and anticipated timelines for funding opportunities, had serious consequences on the City’s ability to progress these priorities toward completion. By identifying the scale of the problems each project would face, the City is able to manage its workload better and provide an honest assessment of what’s needed to deliver on the sidewalk priorities. City staff assigned each project to one of these Tiers:

• Committed: New sidewalk projects that are already funded and potentially underway
• Tier 1: Shorter segments where the construction conflicts (right-of-way impacts, stormwater/utility conflicts, trees, etc.) are expected to be fewer
• Tier 2: Longer segments or whole blocks where there is more uncertainty about potential conflicts and associated construction costs
• Tier 3: Large projects that are certain to have conflicts, require coordination with outside partners (University of Virginia, Albemarle County, VDOT, etc.), and will require additional state, federal, or private funding

Tiers should not be confused with priorities. City staff will be moving forward with projects from all tiers simultaneously. All of the listed projects are priorities for the City.

What will it cost to build these sidewalks?

As part of evaluating which tiers projects would be placed into, City staff determined that for some proposed locations there was low confidence in any cost estimates because of the degree of unknowns involved with either the design or construction phases. Proposed Tier 1 projects were able to be cost estimated for both design and construction phases, based on recent work completed by the City, including the E High St and Elliott Ave sections that were completed in the past year. Tier 2 sidewalks will require more information to develop a reliable cost estimate for construction, but that would be largely resolved during the design phase, so a design phase cost was estimated for those proposed projects. Any project proposed as Tier 3 will require further coordination with outside local, regional, state, and/or federal partner to move forward with the design phase, so no cost estimates were developed. The estimated costs would result in about 1 mile of proposed Tier 1 sidewalks constructed by 2030 and another 3.5 miles in proposed Tier 2 sidewalks fully surveyed and designed by 2030.

The tables below provide the estimated costs for new sidewalks that the City has so far and assume this is the level of needed local investment to tackle the proposed projects with their associated proposed timelines. Tier 2 and 3 projects will require additional funds, but those projects would be opportunities to pursue grant funding. The following tables include 3 percent inflation, a surveying/design phase with costed at approximately $125 per linear foot with a 10 percent contingency, and an engineering/construction phase costed at approximately $320 per linear foot with a 20 percent contingency.

What can you do to help build sidewalks in the City?

The City needs your feedback on the draft sidewalk priorities so that any adjustments to locations and schedules can be coordinated with funding needs. Please check out the map below and click around on the various projects. Each proposed project location will have information on project tier, project extents and length, estimated costs, and estimated timelines for design and construction. You can provide comments on any project right in the map– let us know what you think about any element of any proposed project. You can also download an Excel spreadsheet of all of the proposed projects with the associated data and provide general or specific comments in the box below. The City will be collecting comments through April 30 and will spend the month of May making adjustments based on your feedback. The final sidewalk priority list is currently scheduled to be published in June 2024.