Federal transportation funding and land use

With proposals for a new federal transportation bill percolating through Congress, it is worth reflecting on one of the larger ironies in the current system of federal transportation project funding. Contrary to popular belief, there is actually substantial precedent within the federal Department of Transportation for the linkage of land use and transportation investments. But that linkage is used as an analytical criterion only by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) under the New Starts program, not by the Federal Highway Adminstration (FHWA) for the federally funded highway projects which have far greater cumulative impacts on the form and sustainability of cities.

As pointed out originally by Edward Beimborn and Robert Puentes in the Brookings Institution’s valuable 2005 book Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform, this is one of a long series of criteria that are rigorously applied to transit projects seeking federal funding, while federal highway funds are virtual entitlements, apportioned to the states by formula with minimal project-level evaluation. The criteria applied to New Starts projects include mobility improvements, environmental benefits, operating efficiencies, cost effectiveness, transit-supportive land use patterns, and even anticipated future land use patterns. Within these general criteria, FTA applies a series of specific measures, which include several that directly serve regional smart growth, such as:

• Change in regional pollutant emissions
• Change in regional energy consumption
• EPA air quality designation
• Existing land use
• Transit-supportive plans and policies
• Low-income households served
• Employment near stations

 

Application of such criteria to federal highway projects, needless to say, would dramatically change the profile of the projects that get approved. Necessary as these criteria are, their application only to transit projects further hampers the development of those projects relative to highways. Furthermore, some transportation funding experts argue that the culture of the FTA is one that seeks to punch holes in project proposals and find reasons not to dedicate scarce funds to applicants, whereas the FHWA is seen as a problem-solver on behalf of its applicants’ project proposals. While undoubtedly a by-product of the relative funding levels available, this compounds the double-standard.

The more positive flipside of this dynamic, though, is the simple fact that there is precedent within the DOT for the application of such criteria to transportation projects. Were such criteria ever to be required for highway projects, as they must eventually be if we are to achieve sustainability, FHWA could learn a lot from how FTA reviews projects. To get there, we will first have to stop apportioning highway funds to states by formula and instead make highway project proponents compete for funds as transit proponents now must. We should also create processes by which transit projects can be considered directly as potential alternatives to highway projects (a comparative evaluation process that does not currently exist) and enshrine a mandatory preference for the transit projects whenever impartial analysis documents equal or superior overall benefits.

Scofflaws by Design

I recently attended an event on bicycle facilities in San Francisco at which Andy Thornley, Policy Director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition, gave a great presentation on how our challenge is to design bicycle facilities that work not just for serious cyclists, but for everyone. In order to draw this distinction, he showed a few slides distinguishing between people on bicycles—businessmen and women in work clothes on their way to the office, a mother toting her kids on an Xtracycle—and spandex-clad racers and tattooed bike messengers. One of these compared a “scofflaw,” riding the wrong way up a one-way street, to a “lawmaker,” bike-riding Supervisor Eric Mar. I nodded in agreement. After all, in order to meet our climate goals, we’re going need a significant shift away from driving toward other modes, including bicycling, and cycling is never going to take a bite out of driving unless we re-design our streets to appeal to normal, law-abiding citizens who are currently intimidated by the prospect of riding in traffic.

Then, on a ride the other day, I ran a red light. And not just any red light: it was a red light at the intersection of Scott and Fell Streets, which is located along one of San Francisco’s most popular bike routes, the Wiggle. 

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The city has done a lot of work to improve this intersection for cyclists. Fell is a busy one-way street running east with a bike lane on the left side of the street, and the city has striped a dedicated left turn lane for the many cyclists who head north on Scott and turn into the bike lane on Fell to head toward Golden Gate Park. However, the city overlooked a crucial detail: the light at Scott and Fell doesn’t stay green for traffic on Scott very long, and there is often a queue of southbound cars heading straight through the intersection that makes it difficult or impossible for cyclists to turn left during the green cycle.

Most riders seem to do what I did that day, and took an illegal left on red. When I looked around, most of my fellow lawbreakers didn’t look like the bike punk scofflaw in Andy’s presentation. Instead, they were what I’ll call “scofflaws by design:” riders who are generally law-abiding, but who end up breaking the rules on poorly designed streets.

This distinction between illegal behavior where the traveler is to blame and illegal behavior where the designer is at fault has a precedent in the world of transportation. Traffic engineers distinguish between the posted speed limit and the design speed of a road. The former is a number on a sign, while the latter refers to a set of physical variables, such as the sharpness of curves and the length of sight lines, which determine the maximum speed at which a vehicle can be operated. Though police can hand out the occasional tickets to drivers who exceed the speed limit, if you really want to slow down traffic, you have to change the design speed.

Likewise, if you want to get normal people bicycling, you have to design your bicycle facilities for normal people. The City of San Francisco has determined that the design speed for utilitarian bicycle travel is a steady 13 MPH, and has timed the signals on an eight-block stretch of bike-friendly Valencia Street accordingly. Contrast that to California Street in Berkeley, which is designated as a bicycle boulevard, but has stop signs every block or two, requiring cyclists using the street to either expend much more energy and travel slower, or roll through the stop signs. The former option isn’t that appealing, particularly to normal people who have places to go and don’t necessarily want to show up all sweaty, so they become scofflaws by design.

Once I started noticing scofflaws by design, I realized that they’re everywhere—rolling through stop signs, maneuvering through crosswalks in complicated intersections, and hopping onto the sidewalk when a bike lane disappears on a busy street. While I wouldn’t necessarily argue against a police officer ticketing any individual cyclist who risks taking the law into her own hands, I do think that planners, engineers, and designers need to recognize the distinction between plain old scofflaws and scofflaws by design. Understanding where our bike facilities fail normal, law-abiding people is an important first step in designing cities that get more normal, law-abiding people riding.

If you have examples of bicycle facilities that encourage scofflaws by design, please reply to this post with pictures or links to Google Map views. I’m interested in collecting other examples of cases where our cities turn normal cyclists into lawbreakers.

Consistency is the key to understanding SB 375

At public workshops in California’s major metropolitan areas, regional agencies have been getting residents’ feedback on how their regions should grow as they prepare to create the first round of sustainable communities strategies (SCSs) under SB 375. While it’s critical to engage the public in these decisions, it’s also difficult to know how these land use plans matter. After all, any local government will be quick to remind you that regional agencies don’t have any say over land use changes. Many of the planning experts that I interviewed for our report on SB 375 implementation were unequivocal about what does matter: whether the bill leads MPOs, the regional agencies in charge of implementing SB 375, to channel more transportation dollars toward supporting growth in areas where people drive less through their regional transportation plans (RTPs), the multi-decade transportation plans for which SCSs provide the land use scenario. 

The Air Resources Board (ARB), the state agency that oversees the SCS process, recently released its draft methodology for determining whether an SCS meets regional greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets. ARB’s methodology focuses on examining whether the different land use and transportation measures identified in an SCS indeed add up to the GHG reductions specified in the target. This is an important question, but I’d add another, even more important question to the list: do the transportation projects in the RTP support the land use pattern identified in the SCS?

A more succinct way of asking this in transportation-speak is, “is the plan internally consistent?” and RTPs are required to be internally consistent. However, the way that MPOs usually create RTPs doesn’t do much service to the notion of internal consistency. Here’s how it typically works: an MPO creates a land use scenario through a combination of modeling and stakeholder outreach, and this scenario becomes an input in the computer travel model that the MPO uses to analyze transportation investments. This approach accounts for land use’s effect on transportation, and the travel model will show that not a lot of people will use a road or transit line that connects two areas where there aren’t a lot of jobs or housing. However, transportation can also influence land use if people or jobs move to take advantage of new transportation facilities, and this approach is not well suited to analyzing these reciprocal effects, because the land use scenario can’t change once it’s entered into the travel model.

The draft RTP/SCS for San Diego that was recently released by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), illustrates the problems with this approach to planning. Its land use and transportation elements each reduce GHGs, but they do so in mutually incompatible ways. The SCS calls for substantial growth in neighborhoods that are close to the city of San Diego and are well served by transit, where residents drive less.  Meanwhile, the RTP funds several freeway expansions on the metropolitan fringe, which reduces congestion and leads to more efficient vehicle travel.  The problem is that these freeway expansions will likely induce growth in the suburbs, drawing people and jobs away from the neighborhoods that the SCS targets for growth and undermining the transit investments that are needed to support new development in these neighborhoods.  Many groups, including TransForm, the state Office of Planning and Research, and us here at CREC, picked up on these inconsistencies, and we didn’t need fancy computer models to do it; in fact, the way that SANDAG reports its modeling results seem designed to obscure the fact that the agency isn’t putting its money where its mouth is.  All it took was a little common sense and the time to slog through a rather opaque document. 

And therein lies the good news for ARB, which is currently working to shore up its travel modeling knowledge in preparation for evaluating all of these SCSs: in the short term, examining these plans for internal consistency won’t take a lot of technical work.  ARB simply has to include a discussion of induced growth in its SCS methodology and ask MPOs about how the transportation projects that they fund support the land use pattern identified in the SCS.  In the short and medium term, simple quantitative answers based on the growing number of studies on the economic effects of transportation investments should suffice.  In the long term, ARB and the California Transportation Commission need to outline exactly how they expect travel models to account for induced demand and induced growth.  But what’s really important is that ARB signals to MPOs that it is going to go beyond a thumbs-up-or-down approach to evaluating SCSs and begin to examine whether their transportation investments are consistent with how they spend their money.  After all, these investments are where the rubber meets the road, the transit meets the tracks, and the feet meet the pavement.

How we (under)estimated the GHG reductions due to "Carmageddon"

Last Thursday afternoon, CREC got an e-mail from a reporter from the Huffington Post, asking us if we could help calculate the GHG reductions due to "Carmageddon," the closure of a 9.9 mile stretch of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles.  As geeky as this is, it made my day: not only is doing a back-of-the-envelope carbon calculation always a fun exercise in whole-systems thinking, but this is also the type of question that, in a better (and probably cooler) world, we'd be asking ourselves frequently as we planned our cities.  Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm to help meet the Post's deadlines, I made a rookie mistake that led me to underestimate the GHG reductions by roughly tenfold.  For those curious about how I arrived at an estimate of a reduction on 1.6 million pounds CO2 due to the 405 closure, and why it should have been closer to 16 million pounds, you can learn more below.

In an ideal world, we'd know how long the average weekend trip that traveled the closed stretch of the 405 was, and we'd have some guesses about how people would react to the closure: what portion of them would stay home, what portion would make a trip by transit, what portion would drive an alternate route, etc.  But either Caltrans and the other transportation agencies hadn't done their homework, or they weren't willing to share.  So instead I looked for an example of a similar situation--a weekend closure of an important stretch of freeway in a large metro area--and found one close to home: the closure of the Bay Bridge over Labor Day weekend of 2009.  It's not a perfect analogy, because the Bay Area has different land use patterns, higher transit ridership and better transit service along the closed corridor, and because a lot of people leave town on a holiday weekend anyway.  Nonetheless, as my high school physics teacher used to say, it's "good enough for government work," especially since the governments involved weren't sharing their work.

I remembered reading in a report by Lauren Michele of Policy in Motion that when the Bay Bridge, which represents 1.2% of the freeway lane miles in the nine-county Bay Area, closed, vehicle miles of travel (VMT) dropped by 3.7%.  So this means that for every one percent decrease in lane miles, short-term VMT decreases by roughly three percent (this 3:1 ratio between the percent of change in two variables is called an elasticity).  Based on data from the Texas Transportation Institute, I estimated that the closed stretch of 405 represents about 0.1% of the total "freeway equivalent" lane miles in Greater LA--and that's where I made my rookie mistake.  I arrived at this figure by dividing the 9.9 miles of closed freeway by the total lane miles in the LA metro area (roughly 9400), but most of the closed stretch 405 has 10 lanes, so it's actually around 99 lane miles that were closed, which is around 1.05% of the total lane.  This error then propagated its way through the rest of my work.  Using the elasticity from the Bay Bridge closure, I originally estimated a 0.32% reduction in VMT, but it actually should have been 10 times that, 3.2%... and so on.

Based on a Brookings Institute report on annual per capita VMT in major metros, I estimated the average weekend VMT in LA at around 520 million, and 3.2 percent of that is almost 17 million.  If you divide this by the average mileage of the U.S. passenger vehicle fleet (20.4) and multiply by the amount of CO2 in a gallon of gasoline, you get a 16 million lb. reduction in CO2.  This doesn't account for the extra CO2 generated by the additional bus service that LA Metro ran over the weekend or JetBlue's bargain-basement flights from Burbank to Long Beach, and as my colleague Bill Eisenstein discussed in the article, all sorts of other caveats apply to this analysis.  But the freeway closure does seem to have had some effect on driving, at least according to LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who doesn't say where he got his numbers from. 

The biggest challenge with an analysis like this is that climate change is a systematic, global, and long-term issue, but a one-time event like Carmageddon only produces short-term changes in behavior, so it's difficult to come to any meaningful conclusions about whether it combats or contributes to climate change.  That's why CREC focuses on sustainable planning and community design: because urban environments last a long time.  Changing the way that we plan our cities has the potential to yield serious long-term GHG reductions.  By all accounts, Carmageddon seems to have been almost a non-event; people stayed home with their families, enjoyed their neighborhoods, watched the new Harry Potter movie.  But if, during future decisions about how to spend transportation funds, LA residents think back on the past weekend and remember that not driving was actually kind of fun, we may see some long-term benefits to Carmageddon.

SANDAG: Does smart growth reduce GHG emissions?

I’ve been looking through The San Diego Association of Governments’ (SANDAG) draft environmental impact report (EIR) for their regional transportation plan (RTP). For more information on why this is an important document, see our previous posts on SANDAG’s work, as well as our report on SB 375.  Both the RTP and the Draft EIR are currently open for comment.

In the draft EIR, SANDAG looks at the impact of several alternative scenarios.  It took a little digging, so I put together a table comparing the GHG emissions under each.  Here it is:

It’s worth noting that the table shows all GHG emissions, not just those due to transportation, but since transportation accounts for almost 50% of GHG emissions in San Diego County and since the RTP focuses on transportation, I’m assuming that transportation GHG emissions account for the differences between the scenarios. 

This table highlights two issues that I find troubling:

1. SB 375 is supposed to reduce GHG emissions below business as usual, but the “no project” alternative, which only includes the six highway projects and five transit projects that are already under construction in San Diego County, achieves the most GHG reductions of any scenario in 2050.  From an SB 375 standpoint, if the RTP doesn’t reduce GHG emissions compared to building nothing, why spend all this money—particularly on the many highway projects contained in the RTP.
2. Concentrating growth in existing downtowns and in mixed-use areas that are walkable and well-served by transit is a key strategy in reducing GHG emissions—in fact, this is one of the rationales for SB 375.  However, under SANDAG’s analysis, scenarios that assume a land use pattern that concentrates more housing and jobs in regional centers does not achieve additional reductions when using the same transportation network (compare Scenarios 2b and 2a, 3b and 3a, and 4 and 1).  According to SANDAG, fast-tracking transit also does not reduce emissions (compare Scenarios 3a and 1).

I can think of three possible explanations for these issues:

1. The tools that SANDAG uses to analyze these plans do not adequately account for smart growth land use strategies or for transit service, and instead focus overwhelmingly on moving vehicles, so they underestimate the potential of transit and land-use focused scenarios to reduce GHG emissions while overestimating the impact of the highway projects in the RTP. We’ve written previously on other aspects of the RTP that suggest that this is the case, and the Cleveland National Forest Foundation has concluded that SANDAG’s travel model does not adequately account for the potential for high-quality transit service to lure people away from driving, particularly for high income riders.
2. SANDAG’s current policies to improve transit and encourage smart growth are ineffective in reducing GHG emissions.  It could be that the RTP’s transit projects and the Smart Growth Concept Map focus more on achieving political goals by distributing transit services and growth equitably across the region instead of concentrating them in the areas where they make the most difference in order to reduce emissions and curb driving. 
3. The San Diego region is so sprawling and auto-dependent that even the most aggressive feasible transit improvements and land use changes only make a marginal difference in GHG emissions.

My guess is that all of the above play a role in the real explanation for why even the most ambitious smart growth scenarios perform so poorly, and why the no project alternative performs so well relative to the RTP. 

But that’s the problem: it’s just a guess, because there’s so much inconsistency and so little transparency with how we analyze GHG impacts.  The standards for reporting GHG emissions in RTPs and EIRs are different, so SANDAG’s RTP reports transportation GHG emissions in lbs. CO2/day, while the EIR focuses on overall GHG emissions in MMT CO2/year, so it’s difficult to compare the results.  And even though SANDAG’s EIR acknowledges that Scenario 5, the “slow growth” scenario, just outsources San Diego County’s transportation emissions to neighboring sprawl areas in Riverside County, the EIR still recognizes Scenario 5 as the environmentally preferable scenario, because it reduces environmental impacts--at least, in San Diego County--by exporting growth.  Clearly there’s a lot more work to be done in reconciling the EIR process with the state’s planning priorities.  The regional agencies that write RTPs often don’t help the situation by masking the real impact of these plans with aspirational language and specious performance measures.  For example, SANDAG’s RTP uses the percentage of growth located within its Urban Area Transit Strategy Study Area, which basically includes all of the urbanized area in the region, as an indicator of transportation-land use coordination, rather than, say, the percentage of new growth located within a half-mile of a high-frequency transit stop, which SB 375 uses as the definition for a transit priority project.

The resounding defeat of Proposition 23 during the last election confirmed Californians’ commitment to avoiding catastrophic climate change.  Though planning sustainable communities is crucial to meeting the state’s GHG reduction goals, a lot of people still don’t get the connection between how our cities are planned and how hot the world gets.  MPOs need to clearly and honestly communicate how RTPs progress toward GHG reduction targets.  The Air Resources Board and the other state agencies need to create consistent, effective standards for modeling and reporting GHG emissions, and for bringing the EIR process in line with these changes.  Only then will we get the kind of public awareness and support that lead to the federal transportation reforms that are ultimately necessary to spur a widespread shift to sustainable community planning.

New report on SB 375

I'm pleased to announce that we've released a new report on how California's regions can create more sustainable communities through Senate Bill 375, California's new law that aligns regional land use and transportation planning toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  The report, Leveraging a New Law: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions under Senate Bill 375, describes the key factors that will determine whether SB 375 ultimately results in more efficiently planned communities that enable Californians to drive less or merely in another well-meaning but toothless planning exercise.

As Ezra Rapport, the Executive Director of ABAG, said in a talk at the Commonwealth Club earlier today, successful regional planning in a home-rule state like California is ultimately an act of political will--it's not something that can be legislated.  SB 375 creates several opportunities for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to foster alternatives to driving and encourage development in vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods that are well-served by transit.  It's ultimately up to MPOs--and the local elected officials that make up their boards--to take advantage of these opportunities, but given the long-term, abstract nature of regional planning it can be hard to understand whether or not they're doing this.  In order to clarify the issues surrounding SB 375, we interviewed over 50 planners from across Calfiornia and conducted an in-depth financial analysis of current regional plans.  Our report offers recommendations to MPOs and the state on how to leverage SB 375 to reduce sprawl that smart growth advocates can use to evaluate the first round of regional growth and transportation plans subject to SB 375 that MPOs will be releasing over the next several years.

The biggest carrot that SB 375 offers to local governments in exchange for implementing regional land use plans is the promise that MPOs will allocate more transportation funding toward the areas that these plans target for growth.  One of our key findings is that MPOs only control 10 percent of statewide transportation funding, and 15 percent of funding for capital projects.  This share is unlikely to be sufficient to fund a large-scale shift in growth patterns, especially since MPOs consider much of their funding committed, either to projects funded by local sales taxes or to "fair-share" distributions among local governments.  In order for SB 375 to work, MPOs must create regional plans that outline clear goals for regional growth, and pass supplementary policies that prioritize funding to projects that meet these goals. 

In a previous post, I evaluated SANDAG's draft regional plan against the recommendations contained in our report.  I'll be keeping an eye on regional plans as they come out--check back for updates.

Five points on California's first draft RTP/SCS

As my colleague Eliot Rose notes in our previous post, the first draft Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) and Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) under SB 375 has been released by SANDAG, the San Diego-area metropolitan planning organization (MPO). SB 375 is California’s first effort to link regional transportation planning with land use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so many eyes are upon SANDAG’s new draft document as an important trendsetter for implementation of this landmark law.

A number of things leapt out at me on my first read of the document, mostly centering around a key table (Table 2.2 on pages 2-6 and 2-7) comparing performance measure outcomes for the RTP/SCS in 2050, a “no-plan” alternative for 2050, and the present day (defined as 2008 for modeling purposes). SANDAG included many performance measures in this table, but I focused mainly on the core issues of SB 375 and GHG reduction – namely, the CO2 levels per capita, VMT and mode shares. Five points of note:

1. VMT per capita (line 14) is essentially the same in the current-day and RTP/SCS 2050 scenarios, and are only about 5% higher in the no-plan 2050 scenario. This means that plan implementation would do essentially nothing over the next 40 years to reduce per capita driving in the region from today’s levels, and is only marginally better than doing no plan at all.

2. A clear implication of point (1) is that the RTP/SCS is not relying on VMT reductions to meet its regional GHG reduction targets under SB 375 for 2020 and 2035. It does indeed meet those targets, according to Table 3.1 on page 3-3. In fact, according to line 20 in Table 2.2, CO2 emissions per capita drop from 28.1 lbs/day today to 18.9 lbs/day in the RTP/SCS 2050 scenario. Strikingly, however, these emissions also drop to 19.9 in the 2050 no-plan scenario. That is a 29.2% drop in CO2 emissions by 2050 without the RTP/SCS, which is faster than the extrapolated pace of SB 375’s regional targets. (The RTP/SCS would result in a 32.7% decline). This suggests that SANDAG believes it would meet the SB 375 targets without even implementing the RTP/SCS.

3. One possible explanation for how the region will achieve these reductions without reducing VMT is that SANDAG is planning for substantial improvements in avoiding congestion and increasing vehicle speeds. Indeed, these are a major thrust of the RTP/SCS. However, as noted in point (2), most of the CO2 reductions are occurring even in the no-plan alternative, which has much greater congestion than the RTP/SCS scenario (see line 10 of Table 2.2 on page 2-6). It is not immediately apparent within the document how these outcomes square with one another.

4. A background memorandum dated May 14, 2010, and presented in Technical Appendix 9, partially explains how SANDAG developed its SCS/RTP scenario. As part of that process, SANDAG analyzed CO2 emissions for its current RTP, not only for today but for the years 2020 and 2035. That analysis showed that the current RTP will reduce CO2 emissions by 8.8% by 2020 but by only 5.4% by 2035. The memo explains:

Per capita emissions in 2020 are lower than the 2005 base case due to balanced transportation capital investments and balanced growth in jobs and housing throughout the region. However, per capita emissions increase from 2020 to 2035 due in part to a disparity in employment growth and housing growth that begins to emerge after 2020 as employment clusters in the South Bay and North County Inland areas grow more rapidly than housing.

This result shapes much of what appears in the draft RTP/SCS, including the fact that the RTP/SCS scenario achieves 14% reduction of CO2 per capita by 2020, but only 13% by 2035, and just 9% by 2050. This seems to be related to the issues in point (1) and (3) above, as well as the points in Eliot’s previous post. If the RTP/SCS were achieving CO2 reductions through fundamental improvements in the transportation system and regional land use, one would expect these improvements to accumulate over time. But congestion reduction and improved vehicle speed tend to be short-term improvements, which will diminish in effectiveness over time.

5. And that leads to the final point. As many have noted, SB 375 has no strong mechanism for re-shaping regional growth patterns. RTPs plan transportation systems that meet the needs of a given regional land use pattern – a pattern that is determined by disparate local municipalities acting independently of one another. This RTP is no different, even though it includes an SCS and must meet a CO2 reduction target. If local municipalities in the San Diego region continue to make land use decisions that perpetuate sprawl and automobile dependency, there is ultimately little that the RTPs or SCSs will be able to do to make sustained progress against climate change.