Virginia Beach's Resort Area is evolving into a diverse, world-class, year-round coastal community for both residents and visitors. Recognizing the need to adapt to changing lifestyles, on June 2, 2020, the City Council adopted the Resort Area Strategic Action Plan 2030 (RASAP 2030) to establish new goals and priorities for this growing part of the city.

Creating a mobility plan that recognizes the need for new - and balanced - transportation options for getting around the resort is a top priority. The goal is to form a strategy for traffic calming; vehicular, pedestrian and bicycle circulation; shared mobility devices; curbside management; public transit; and parking.

What is the Resort Area Mobility Plan (RAMP)?

• An extension of the Resort Areas Strategic Action Plan (RASAP) vision/process with a multimodal plan for the RASAP study area
• A detailed look at challenges and opportunities with short- and long-term actions and strategies
• An alignment of diverse types of mobility (e.g., vehicles, bicyclists, pedestrians, shared mobility, transit, transportation network companies (TNCs), parking) in a way that optimizes how people access the Resort Area and move around within it
• New concepts for key corridors that illustrate changes to support optimizing mobility​​​​​​​​​​​​

Process

The City hired Kimley-Horn, a planning, surveying, engineering and design consulting firm, to work with the RAMP Steering Committee composed of area stakeholders to develop a Resort Area Mobility Plan. The planning process will include:

• Visioning and Goal Setting: In this phase, a mobility vision and goals will be developed to help guide the identification of mobility concepts and provide a framework in which they can be evaluated.
• Defining Challenges and Opportunities: This phase will involve reviewing information from past efforts and engagements to define the issues of today and the future.
• Exploring Different Approaches for Mobility: A scenario-based and analytic planning approach will be employed to identify and measure diverse transportation approaches intended to best meet mobility goals for the Resort Area.
• Identifying a Preferred Approach for Mobility: Based on goals and objectives of the planning process, evaluations and analysis, and engagement, a preferred approach to transportation will be identified.
• Drafting a Plan: Draft a plan that incorporates input from participants in the process and will identify definitive plans to achieve an integrated mobility system for the Resort Area.
• Validating: Leverage the next resort season to validate and confirm some outputs discovered through the planning process.
• Adopting a Plan: The draft plan was presented to the Planning Commission for public comment and referral to the City Council in November 2022. The Council adopted it in January 2023.