As some of you remember, Project Connect was a subset of CapMetro that did some planning and input in the 2014 Rail proposal. @rcauvin and @harren participated in a focus group back in July to form the making of this new effort.
It has been revived in the context of identifying next steps for enhancing and investing in corridors of high capacity transit which are a part of the regionally-adopted plan.
In the midst of these processes, Project Connect has reached out to a number of community stakeholder groups, and asked them to send a representative to help refine the methods and measures around those projects. I’m operating as FAN’s representative on that Community Advisory Council, and there are a few other members of FAN who are also representing community organizations that they belong to.
The duration of this committee is set for 2 years, with quarterly meetings and some interim feedback given via email to CAPMetro.
And those of you who subscribe to the lovely Austin Monitor (you should!) may have heard that this Community Advisory Committee also got an expansion of scope and membership. The entire endeavor wasn’t going officially public until January, but I’ll spill since we’ve been mostly outed.
The curent scope is being expanded to include some directives of the Austin Transportation Department (ATD) as a means to affect the city’s Strategic Mobility Plan
The new group will be called the Multimodal Community Advisory Committee (MCAC) and have the same operating guidelines (2 years & quarterly meetings). The next committee-wide meeting will be in mid January, and the newer members would have met in Dec to get caught up.
So far I’ve attended one meeting and had an ask to return feedback on some of their evaluation criteria and project scope definitions.
I’m providing links below to the feedback document I’ve turned in so far and most of the supporting digital materials. There is also a binder of printed materials that identifies a number of the naming conventions of corridors and the ongoing or previous studies associated with them. I’m working to see about getting digitized copies of these materials as many of the maps exceed the size of most standard scanners.
I’ll be sure to post recaps and updates and am happy to take some suggestions on the direction of input FAN might want to provide through the process.
- October Meeting Summary
- Operating Guidelines
- Purpose & Need
- ID Methodology
- Phase 1 Evaluation Criteria
Input Request Provided by A Haggerton shown in purple font *Provided prior to the conversion to the MCAC.