Charlottesville City Council voted on September 6, 2016 to authorize city staff to apply for funding for a project to improve the intersection of Barracks Road and Emmet Street that would include a ten-foot wide shared-use path up Barracks Road to Rugby Road.
In June 2017, the Commonwealth Transportation Board awarded $8.6 million in funding to the project through the Smart Scale program. This was the fourth award the city would receive through the program in which localities and planning districts compete for funding through a process in which candidate projects are scored against a series of criteria.
The original idea behind Smart Scale was that projects had to be completed within six years. According to an image on the city’s website, the city’s work on the Barracks / Emmet project did not even begin until the fall of 2021.
The City of Charlottesville has so far not broken ground on any of their projects and have returned funding for several of them in an attempt to get back in the good graces of the Virginia Department of Transportation. In 2024, the agency found Charlottesville “deficient” due to an inability to complete projects…