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.

How sustainable is SANDAG's SCS?

I’ve been spending the last month wrapping up a report on the critical steps that metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) can take in order to implement Senate Bill 375. The report examines how MPOs can leverage the opportunities presented by SB 375 to effectively create more livable communities, reduce sprawl, provide better alternatives to driving, and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and we’ll be posting it on our website soon. Meanwhile, MPOs continue to work on their next regional transportation plans (RTPs), which are required to include a land use plan, the sustainable communities strategy (SCS), that works alongside the transportation improvements in the RTP to reduce GHG emissions by concentrating new housing in areas where people drive less. SANDAG, the MPO for the San Diego metro area, just released their draft RTP, which is the first plan subject to the requirements of SB 375. There’s a lot in SANDAG’s RTP to applaud, including its focus on transit and the fact that it meets ARB’s GHG reduction targets. However, in the process of creating this report we found that complying with SB 375 is a different thing than actually using the opportunities that the bill presents to produce substantive changes in the way our communities look and the way that we get around, and SANDAG’s RTP illustrates this gap. I took a look at the RTP to see how it performs with respect to two of the key recommendations in our report.

The draft RTP is open for public comment through mid-June if you wish to weigh in.

Recommendation #1: MPOs should include clear goals for future land use changes in their SCS.

According to Appendix D, page 33 of SANDAG’s RTP: “The 2050 Regional Growth Forecast is based primarily on local land use plans, many of which have been updated in the past four years, and also includes draft plan updates and more robust redevelopment assumptions within existing plans.” In effect, this is how MPOs have created local land use scenarios for the past several decades, and it’s the approach that gave us the sprawling metro areas that we have today. Local plans don’t adequately consider regional impacts such as congestion or air quality, and are often based more on economic aspirations—more big-box retail that brings big tax revenues and costs less to serve, less housing—than on regional realities. The California Transportation Commission allows that MPOs can deviate from local planning assumptions local plans in order to account for regional economic trends, prior regional “blueprint” land use plans, or for the gap in the time horizon between local plans, which cover 15 to 20 years, and the RTP/SCS, which in SANDAG’s case goes out to 2050.

SANDAG’s draft SCS does not seem to take advantage of many of these opportunities. Though the plan calls for areas that are well-served by current and planned transit, such as San Diego and Chula Vista, take on fair shares of the region’s housing growth between now and 2050—44 and 11 percent respectively—unincorporated areas of San Diego county, which are generally far from transit and low-density, still take on 10 percent of the region’s housing, even during the period between 2035 and 2050, when SANDAG is free to make more assumptions because this period is outside the horizon of the county’s updated general plan. And there are plenty of reasons, from shifting demographics to rising gas prices, to assume that this housing will not be as desirable in the future. Yet SANDAG’s SCS only houses 53 percent of the region’s growth in Smart Growth Opportunity Areas identified in its blueprint plan, while the remaining half goes to the suburbs, much of it in unincorporated areas.

Source: SANDAG, 2050 Draft RTP, page 3-3

According to SANDAG’s projections, the GHG reductions in its RTP start out substantial and then taper off. SANDAG’ explains that this is because “greenhouse gas emission reductions from compact land use, [sic] and alternative transportation modes will be outpaced by regional growth." This doesn’t have to be the case. If the SCS and RTP pursue a land-use strategy that houses most new residents in areas that have progressively better transit service and higher density and mix of uses, GHG reductions should compound over time. This is one of the assumptions upon which ARB’s GHG reduction targets, which get more stringent over time, were created, and an MPO can meet this assumption by creating an SCS that proactively addresses regional land use patterns. SANDAG doesn’t estimate the relative effectiveness of the GHG reduction measures in its RTP, but based on the numbers my guess is that the large initial reductions are due to congestion relief from the new freeway lanes, some of which are managed, that SANDAG is building over the short term, and then they taper off as new cars fill that capacity. If that’s the case, this is not the type of planning that’s going to create more sustainable communities over the long term—it’s greenwashing the status quo.

Recommendation #2: MPOs should review “committed” projects and fast-track those that reduce emissions.

The RTP process allows for a fair amount of flexibility: although an RTP includes a fixed list of projects, it often doesn’t specify the order in which projects will be completed. Same goes for transportation sales taxes such as the San Diego area’s TransNet, which is administered by SANDAG. This means that MPOs have an opportunity to reduce GHG emissions by prioritizing projects that support smart growth, while delaying others until they are amended or omitted in a subsequent version of the RTP or until a sales tax measure allows for amendments. However, many MPOs limit their own flexibility by considering a large number of projects, as well as many funding sources to be “committed,” and not subject to discretionary decisions during the RTP process. 

SANDAG points out that this RTP is much more focused on transit than the previous one, and indeed transit accounts for about 45 percent of the overall plan expenditures, compared to 32 percent for roads and highways. However, this does not present a clear picture of SANDAG’s priorities, because it accounts for dollars spent by local governments and Caltrans, and because many funding sources, particularly those that go toward transit operations, can only be used for one purpose, so they’re not really discretionary. SANDAG’s analysis of different investment scenarios for its RTP (see page 13 of Appendix D) included roughly $43 billion worth of transit and highway projects—the type of projects that SANDAG funds—and $32 million of those are included in TransNet or otherwise committed. Of those committed projects, 63 percent go to highways and 37 percent go to transit. Granted, SANDAG does not have the ability to remove sales tax projects from its expenditure plan, and SB 375 specifically exempts sales tax projects from consideration during the SCS process. However, $10 billion worth of SANDAG’s committed projects are not tax-funded, and even those that are draw in money from other discretionary sources that SANDAG allocates. There is no reason that the agency can’t elect to reconsider committed projects in light of SB 375, particularly those in its Early Action Program, which are the first in line for funding. MTC, the MPO for the Bay Area, just passed a policy narrowing its definition of committed projects and funds, which potentially frees up more money to apply toward meeting its GHG reduction targets. This type of policy can be an important step in taking early and aggressive action to reduce GHGs.

One verb away from regionalism?

In the age of SB 375, much attention in California is being focused on the Regional Transportation Plans that (among other things) program the use of federal transportation dollars within the planning areas of California's 18 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). Under SB 375, in California, these RTPs must now include a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) that, along with the RTP, demonstrably reduces the emission of greenhouse gases to meet defined targets by 2020 and 2035. Thus, to some extent at least, federal, state and regional transportation funds will, for the first time, be spent in the service of reducing regional climate impacts.

Less commented upon is the fact that the federal Code of Regulations has long contained standards for the preparation of RTPs that include some surprising provisions. Title 23, Section 450.316 outlines what the Federal Highway Administration expects of these RTPs, including analysis and consideration of:

* "Consistency of transportation planning with applicable federal, state and local energy conservation programs, goals, and objectives"

* "The likely effect of transportation policy decisions on land use and development..."

* "The effects of all transportation projects to be undertaken within the metropolitan planning area, without regard to the source of funding [including]...alternative investments in meeting transportation demand..."

* "The overall social, economic, energy and environmental effects of transportation decisions (including consideration of the effects and impacts of the plan on the human, natural and man-made environment...)"

So why do we continue to get sprawl-inducing freeway construction as the backbone of our regional transportation systems? Part of is, of course, is that the regulations merely require planners to "analyze" or "consider" these issues, which is far different than requiring that anything be done about them. So, could we simply strengthen this language to require that RTPs must identify and plan for the transportation solutions that actually fulfill these objectives, rather than merely considering them? Are we "one verb away" from substantive regionalism in the U.S.?

I suspect not. While strengthening this language would certainly help, and should be part of a reform agenda for federal transportation spending, it remains true that the regional transportation plans rely on local land use plans to determine what populations and land areas need to be served by transportation infrastructure. As long as those plans continue to program low-density, single-use development, the RTPs will follow with the only transportation system that can effectively serve that land use pattern -- freeways.

In the end, it is the fragmentation of land use authority, and the enormous profits to be made from greenfield land conversion, that are the primary drivers of sprawl. While stronger transportation planning regulations would help, it is not likely that they will overcome those forces on the own.

Thinking about job sprawl

The Public Policy Institute of California has recently released a new policy paper entitled Driving Change: Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled in California. The paper assesses the prospects for successful implementation of SB375, California's 2008 law that requires regions to achieve transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions reductions from land use planning measures.

A central argument of the paper is that SB375's emphasis on facilitating increases in residential density around transit as a means of reducing VMT may be misplaced. Instead, PPIC argues that it is job densities around transit stops that are most strongly associated with transit use, and hence reductions in VMT. One plausible reason for this relationship may be that it is "relatively easy for workers to drive or bike from home (where their cars or bikes are) to a transit stop or station, but not as easy to drive or bike from a transit station or stop to their workplace" at the destination end of the trip (p6).

If indeed this conclusion is valid (and PPIC cites three recent publications by prominent experts or research bodies supporting it), it has implications that go far beyond even those suggested here by PPIC. Within the planning world, the problem of sprawl has overwhelmingly been framed in terms of residential development patterns, while far less attention is devoted to the location of jobs. Numerous books and papers have examined the origins of residential sprawl in zoning policy, mortgage lending, cultural values and a host of other interlocking social forces. Many fewer have examined the forces driving the dispersion of jobs into suburban locations.

What might be gained by an increased focus on reversing job sprawl? Well, for one thing, it may be an easier task than reversing residential sprawl. Job location decisions are made by far fewer individuals than comprise regional housing markets, and those individuals are at least potentially easier to coordinate. Business leaders are often more civic-minded than many people assume, and there is a rising appreciation in the business world of the value-enhancing characteristics of dense urban professional networks.

Re-densifying jobs may also ameliorate the more subjective argument that sprawl fosters social fragmentation and alienation. In older American cities, people used to work (and shop) downtown. Arguably, much of the sense of publicness people apparently experienced in those times derived from people's repeated journeys to work and retail through bustling and diverse city streets. Even in small towns and older suburbs, despite low-density housing, there was a physical center dominated by shopping and workplaces that nearly everyone in the community visited routinely, often multiple times per week. Indeed, one could argue that, with the exception of industrial-era immigrant neighborhoods, Americans have never lived at dramatically greater density than they do now -- but often did work and shop in very much more public settings than they do today.

Higher-density urban living is growing in popularity in America because the nation is changing demographically to include more single young professionals, childless couples, and two-career families that prosper best in large job markets. Planners should continue to seek ways to provide these people the housing products they need and want -- but also should give more serious and sustained thought to where they and their compatriots work each day, and how they travel there.

Estimating cities’ share of GHG reductions in California

In preparation for implementing Senate Bill 375, California’s metropolitan areas recently proposed regional greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets that reflected how much they could feasibly reduce transportation emissions over the next few decades.  This was an important step in reconciling urban planning with climate action.  However, given that we face irreversible, catastrophic climate change if the world doesn’t reduce its emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that Governor Schwarzenegger committed California to with Executive Order S-3-05, the question to ask may not be how much can cities reduce emissions, but instead how much do they need to reduce emissions?

In the past, America has used technology to fight its environmental battles, and many expect that technology will also solve the climate challenge.  California has led the way in mandating cleaner technologies in order to meet its interim goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 with policies that reduce the carbon content of gasoline by 10 percent, require utilities to generate at least 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020, and institute new efficiency standards for passenger vehicles.  But even if technology continues to evolve at the pace set by these measures through 2050, cities will still need to reduce their emissions by almost 60 percent in order to meet California’s 2050 GHG reduction target.   

Even in the sector that has been the focus of policy makers and have seen the most progress in reducing emissions—passenger cars—cities will be responsible for reducing GHG emissions by an additional 20 percent.  

These reductions will likely come from planning and building communities that allow people to live more efficiently. 

Over 250 local governments have created or are in the process of creating climate action plans.  Unlike state and federal policies that focus on technological improvements, local climate plans generally focus on creating communities that allow residents to live more efficiently.   The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) recently created GHG emissions thresholds for land use projects by figuring out how much existing policies could reduce emissions, and then assuming that urban planning would be responsible for covering the gap between what existing policies could account for and the state's 2020 targets.  We simply assumed that the policy reductions calculated by BAAQMD would continue out to the year 2050, and compared them to the State's 2050 GHG reduction goals.  This is a simplistic method of creating projections, but it leads us to some pretty ambitious assumptions, including:

• Transportation fuel will contain 72 percent of the carbon that it does today.  This is roughly the equivalent of shifting from gasoline to ethanol derived from sugarcane, which is one of the most efficient ethanol fuel stocks.
• Passenger vehicles will consume 18 percent of the fuel that they do today, and the average car on the road will get 105 MPG.
• Electricity would have one-sixth the carbon content that it does today.  For Pacific Gas and Electric, which provides electricity for most of the Bay Area, this would mean supplying electricity generated from 91 percent renewable energy, with the remaining nine percent coming from natural gas.
• The average home would consume 46 percent less energy than it currently does; which would mean that all new homes get built to maximize energy efficiency, and all existing homes receive the maximum possible efficiency retrofit. 
• Over four million homes—roughly 30 percent of the state's projected number of single-family homes in 2050—will have rooftop solar arrays.

Even with a pretty astounding rate of technological improvement over the next 40 years, good community design will still need to reduce GHG emissions by over half.  Compare that to the 2035 targets that ARB recently set for California's largest and fastest-growing metro areas, which range from 10 to 16 percent.  Planners and policy makers at both the local and state levels will need to focus on achieving more aggressive land use changes if California is serious about fighting climate change.

We'll be posting the full report on our website soon--stay tuned. 

Why we walk

One of CREC's primary goals is to create tools that help planners assess the pedestrian environment and identify what changes to make in order to allow residents to walk instead of drive.  Fortunately, this is a hot topic these days, and there are a growing number of websites that provide information about how well-suited a given location is for walking.  Taking a spin through a few of these websites is a good way to investigate in more depth what a "walkable" neighborhood means.

Probably the most well-known web-based walkability tool is Walk Score.  According to Walk Score, we walk if there are places nearby to walk to.  The site rates a location on a scale from 0 to 100 based on its proximity to amenities across several different categories, including stores, entertainment districts, banks, schools, and libraries.  Below is a screen shot showing Walk Score's assessment of the area around CREC's headquarters in Berkeley:

Researchers often talk about the "four Ds" of land use--density, diversity of uses, pedestrian design, and access to destinations--that studies have shown to reduce driving, and implicitly, to increase walking.  Of the four Ds, Walk Score addresses access to destinations most directly, but also density and diversity of uses, since presumably more compact and mixed use neighborhoods will have shorter distances between homes and the amenities that Walk Score examines.  Of course, whether you actually visit the destinations that Walk Score looks at is another question--as a lunch spot, Adagia is out of our price range, and Urban Outfitters doesn't quite offer the professorial tweeds favored by researchers--but I generally find it to be a pretty accurate tool regardless, because of the way that amenities cluster together in commercial districts.

Another tool that Walk Score has recently unveiled focuses more narrowly on accessibility.  Its Transit Time Map shows you all the places that you can reach within 45 minutes of a given point by walking and taking transit.  According to this tool, you're more likely to walk if you can get farther without a car.  Since CREC headquarters is a pretty long walk from the Downtown Berkeley BART station, we can only make it a few BART stops in either direction, even if we head out during the evening rush hour, when trains are running most frequently:

Mapnificent is another tool that measures accessibility.  Unlike the Transit Time Map, Mapnificent uses average transit headways and travel times, rather than adjusting your range depending on when you take your journey.  But it makes up for this lack of precision by allowing you to adjust your travel time and other factors, including whether or not you have a bicycle, as well as including some nice rainbow color-coding.  Mapnificent confirms a hypothesis that I've come up with in the course of my commute, which is that I need a bike in order to get from my neighborhood in San Francisco to CREC's offices in under an hour.  Here's my 55-minute travel radius with a bike:

 

And here's the same radius without a bike:

The one D that these tools leave out is pedestrian design.  As far as the Mapnificent and Walk Score are concerned, it doesn't matter whether there's a wide pedestrian-only path or an interstate highway connecting you and the nearest coffee shop (fortunately in our case it's the former, which helps to prevent accidents on drowsy Monday mornings).  The Walk Score team readily acknowledges this shortcoming, and is working to overcome it, but critics of the tool claim that the lack of consideration for design is a fatal flaw--see the Conservative Planner's post on the topic for a number of examples where Walk Score gives high rankings to neighborhoods in which walking would be tantamount to suicide.  However, the designers of tools like Walk Score and Mapnificent are doing the best they can with the data that is readily available, and currently there's no database of sidewalk conditions or other pedestrian amenities out there--nor is there even a standardized way for cities to collect this data.  This is something that we're working to develop here at CREC.

In the meantime, Walk Score has caught on with real estate agents, who frequently use it to promote properties in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, and both the designers of the Transit Time Map and Mapnificent express hopes that their tools can help people locate neighborhoods in which they can live a car-free lifestyle.  More importantly, these tools continue to foster a lot of discussion about the benefits of compact, walkable neighborhoods, which is an important first step in reversing several decades of car-oriented planning.

Reaching 2050 Climate Goals II: The Critical Role of VMT

In my previous post, I described the magnitude of the challenge facing California (and all of industrialized society) in meeting the greenhouse gas emissions goals that science and state policy agree are necessary.

A key conclusion of this discussion is the fact that all sectors of the economy must achieve deep reductions, not just one or two. This certainly includes the transportation system, which in California is the largest single source of GHGs (38 percent of the total, according to the California Air Resources Board). Transportation-related emissions, in turn, are a product of three factors:

• The fuel efficiency of vehicles
• The carbon content of fuels
• Vehicle miles traveled (VMT)
  

Multiplying those three factors yields the total carbon emissions. Therefore, unless the fuel stock for vehicles can be totally decarbonized within 40 years (e.g. perhaps by conversion to an electric vehicles fleet powered entirely by carbon-free renewable energy), there will once again have to be substantial improvements in all three areas in order to bring the transportation sector as a whole into line with an 88 percent per capita emissions reduction relative to today's levels (see previous post for an explanation of how that number is derived).

What does this really mean in practice? Well, if we think of fuel efficiency and carbon content collectively as "carbon efficiency" (or carbon emission per mile), then we see that the carbon efficiency times the VMT must be reduced on the order of 88 percent per capita in forty years. If carbon efficiency were quintupled over that time period through a combination of fuel efficiency gains and decarbonization of fuel stocks, we would still need to reduce VMT by 40 percent per capita relative to today's levels. In other words, we would have to "make do" with 40 percent less personal driving, trucking, business travel and all other uses of motorized vehicles. If carbon efficiency is merely doubled, we would need to reduce the per capita VMT by 76 percent!

Are these changes feasible? Certainly. In fact, there are Americans right now who live well on 76 percent less VMT than their average compatriots. They're the Americans who live in dense urban centers such as New York and San Francisco. Bringing the transportation system into line with our 2050 climate goals means making sure (among other things) that vastly more Americans can live in those kinds of truly dense, mixed-use environments, rather than simply somewhat-more-dense suburban settings (which tend to achieve VMT reductions of only about 20-30 percent).

It can be done -- but modest changes to how we build urban regions won't get us there.