As RM3P expands southward from its original geographic scope, the program team welcomed Fredericksburg-area stakeholders into the fold via a pair of engaging virtual summits in May. These summits were a crucial first step in gauging agency partners’ perceptions of RM3P’s two program elements being extended to Metropolitan Fredericksburg (including Stafford County, Spotsylvania County, and the City of Fredericksburg)—the Commuter Parking Information System (CPIS) and the AI-Based Decision Support System (AI-DSS). Over the course of two events, attendees heard an overview of the program and shared their input on the biggest challenges and benefits of the CPIS and AI-DSS. This feedback is already shaping the deployment and implementation of RM3P, as the technical teams are gearing towards finalizing the procurement groundwork and documentation.
The first summit, attended by 47 stakeholders, focused on introducing agency participants to RM3P more broadly, with a high-level look at the program’s structure and panel discussions with technical experts around the two relevant program elements. Polling questions interspersed throughout made for a lively session and helped generate real-time feedback from the group.
For instance, when asked to select the component of the AI-DSS most relevant to their agency, one-third of attendees chose the AI-DSS’s ability to predict congestion, and another third selected the improved ability to communicate and understand the regional transportation system; the final third was split among the ability to predict incidents, the AI-DSS’s multi-modal response plans, and the calibrated model for a what-if analysis. Another poll asked attendees to pick the most important element of CPIS, and a majority (59 percent) selected the CPIS’s ability to provide 
accurate and reliable real-time parking availability information. Animated videos describing AI-DSS and CPIS also helped introduce the program elements.
At the second summit, attended by 30 stakeholders, the focus shifted to collaborating with agency participants in the directly impacted Fredericksburg area. The group held a lively, interactive discussion with all attendees to explore how RM3P could be most useful to local agencies and how local agencies could lend their expertise to improve RM3P. Participants discussed how commuters currently access parking information, the level of infrastructure needed to deploy and gauge parking availability, and the strategies necessary to reduce the cost of data validation, all questions that help inform the development of the CPIS.
The majority of participants support an innovative no-field technology approach for collecting parking availability data. The group then examined several AI-DSS-specific topics, such as what decision-response plans and procedures already exist, specific hotspots that would benefit from coordinated responses the most, and what level of advance prediction would be most helpful to agency responders.
Thanks to the videos, virtual whiteboards, and live polling, the team kept the virtual format as engaging as possible, and feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive.