Streetsblog San Francisco

In a historic and unanimous vote yesterday, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 2035, a move that will compel the state’s metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to better integrate land use and transportation planning.

“These targets are ambitious, achievable and very good news for California communities. Improved planning means cleaner air in our cities, less time stuck in your car, and healthier, more sustainable communities,” said Mary Nichols, the CARB Chair. “Cities that choose to develop sustainable communities plans that meet these targets have an advantage when it comes to attracting the kinds of vibrant, healthy development that people want.”

Although a number of representatives from powerful construction, development and oil industry interests lined up to oppose the targets, arguing passage would lead to fewer jobs and hurt the economy, sustainable transportation advocates said CARB was able to see through the rhetoric. They felt the vote was a watershed moment, a signal that business-as-usual transportation and land use models will no longer work.

“A growing body of research and our own data shows that smart growth is not just an aesthetic issue, it’s a real public health concern,” said Jane Warner, the president and CEO of the American Lung Association in California. “By moving to more sustainable growth patterns that offer healthier transportation options, CARB’s vote can help California avoid $1.66 billion in public health costs, more than 100,000 asthma attacks and other respiratory symptoms and 140 premature deaths each year.”

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The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), in a historic vote Wednesday that will help guide the future for more sustainable land use and transportation planning in the Bay Area, recommended a 15 percent per capita target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 2035, the most aggressive goal to date among California's metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).

"Bay Area residents should be really excited about the 15 percent target. That's because it's high enough to trigger the transportation and land use changes we need to make the region more livable and affordable, especially as our population grows significantly by 2035," said Marta Lindsey, the communications and development director at TransForm.

Lindsey sent out an alert last week urging people to write emails to the MTC, fearing the commission would adopt a lower target of 10 percent, which its planning committee recommended at a meeting earlier this month.

"It's a realistic target given MTC's modeling and the kinds of investments and policies we already know really move the needle in terms of how much people drive their cars," said Lindsey.

Under the groundbreaking anti-sprawl bill, SB 375, most of the state's 18 MPOs are required to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions for passenger vehicles and light trucks by 2020 and 2035. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently adopted a set of draft targets (PDF) for the four largest MPOs (the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego), which represent 80 percent of the state's population. Each MPO will then be required to development a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) to show how it will meet its target. CARB is expected to adopt final targets in September.

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While municipal planning organizations around California try to develop the metrics and models required to meet the goals of SB 375, a law mandating smarter growth, a local voter initiative in Contra Costa County is being held up as a bellwether of the public's support for strategic and sustainable development.

Brentwood voters rejected Measure F on Tuesday, June 8th, an initiative which would have increased the city's growth boundary by 740 acres to allow 1300 new homes to be built on open land, some of which is used for farming.

Despite proponents outspending opponents 35-1 and flooding voters' mailboxes with brochures extolling the economic benefits of development, the vote wasn't very close (57 percent - 43 percent ).

"It's very exciting that in Brentwood, a place where the battle over sprawl has been fought recently, the voters stood up and said we need to respect growth boundaries," said Greenbelt Alliance Executive Director Jeremy Madsen, a Measure F opponent.

"I'm very hopeful that the results we got out of Brentwood will send a very clear message to the [sprawl] proponents," he added.

Madsen described the proponents' campaign, led by Contra Costa County political mover-and-shaker Tom Koch on behalf of developers in the area, as a high-spending, glossy affair, "an ad campaign," whereas opponents "stood out in front of grocery markets, went door to door and put up a Facebook page."

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With financial reform nearly complete, the Senate Banking Committee
turned its attention today to one of Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) next
priorities, the Livable
Communities Act. Local government came out strong for the
initiative to promote sustainable and integrated regional planning, with
representatives of the nation’s cities, towns, counties, and regional
planning organizations testifying in favor. Among committee members,
concerns persisted about whether
the bill would disadvantage rural areas. 

The Livable Communities Act would
provide
about $4 billion in competitive grants to coordinate housing,
transportation, and economic development policy with an eye toward
promoting sustainable development. About $400 million would be slated
for planning with the remainder funding implementation. The bill would
also create a new office within the Department of Housing and Urban
Development to guide and administer the programs. If passed, it would
strengthen the Obama administration’s multi-agency Sustainable
Communities effort. 

At today’s committee hearing representatives of the National League
of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the National
Association of Development Organizations, and the National Association
of Regional Councils each strongly endorsed the goals of the bill. 

Witnesses drew on professional experience — from trying to
revitalize barren neighborhoods in Indianapolis to managing the growth
of a rural Maryland county — to explain how federal policy could spur
better development where they live. The Hartford region, for example, is
investing in a new bus rapid transit line, said Lyle Wray, the
executive director for the region’s Council of Governments, but they
haven’t been able to tie the transit project to broader goals. "Linking
that opportunity to affordable housing, jobs, and sustainability is what
the Livable Communities Act would allow us to do," he said.

Describing the bill today, Dodd stressed that integrated
transportation and land use planning can help address a host of
challenges: high foreclosure rates, climate change and oil dependency,
deteriorating infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the loss of
farmland. Those problems, Dodd argued, aren’t urban or rural. "One
community can use the grants to develop brownfields in a post-industrial
area," he said, and "another might create a livable town center or main
street." 

Even so, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), expressed doubt about whether
his rural state would benefit under Dodd’s legislation.

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Even as our freeways and bridges in the Bay Area are choked with traffic for hours every day, the population in the region is projected to grow from over 7 million now to over 9 million by 2025. Deciding where to build housing to accommodate the growth will be one of the most significant regional decisions and one that must account not only for issues like infrastructure capacity, but climate change, open space management, job growth and health impacts.

That's the message the Greenbelt Alliance has delivered with its series of public workshops to promote "Grow Smart Bay Area," a regional plan for infill development near transit coupled with the protection of open space and agricultural land. As a blueprint for walkable, dense development, Grow Smart Bay Area is an optimistic projection of how planners can accommodate growth within existing towns and cities without giving into the temptation to sprawl further from job centers.

Greenbelt Alliance gathered a panel of experts last week at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek to discuss the challenges of promoting these development patterns and to debate how to make the Bay Area, to borrow Greenbelt Executive Director Jeremy Madsen's phrase, "a sustainable global metropolis."

"Grow Smart is not merely about accommodating the Bay Area's next generation of growth. It's about using growth as a catalyst," said Madsen. "We can use growth as a tool to make our neighborhoods more sustainable, more equitable."

To identify priority development locations, Greenbelt used the California Infill Parcel Locator database and the Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint Project, both developed at UC Berkeley. Those were then cross-referenced with growth projections from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) Transportation 2035: Change in Motion report.

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As I climbed the steps out of the Lake Merritt BART station this morning I heard loud chanting. "Wow," I thought, "those bicyclists have really pulled out the troops!" But the demonstrators that greeted me across 8th Street in Oakland were pile drivers, iron workers, carpenters and other trades workers, chanting "Jobs for Oakland Now!" Not far from their boisterous demonstration in front of the main doors of the Joseph Brot Metro Center were a few cyclists showing their signs to passersby, "Bridge the Gap Now" "All the Way Across the Bay" and "Safety Path!" Across the street, Transform and Urban Habitat were also making their presence felt, opposing the Oakland Airport Connector that the building trades unionists were clamoring for.

Democracy in action, I suppose. Long-time bicycle advocates from the East Bay and San Francisco converged on this meeting, hoping to convince the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) to support using some of the new tolls ($5 on all bridges as of July 1, with $6 congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge during rush hour, and for the first time, a half-price toll for carpoolers) to fund a new west-span bicycle/pedestrian/maintenance/safety lane to make the bridge safer, and to finish the transbay route for bicyclists and pedestrians too, not just motorized vehicles. But that effort was bureaucratically sidetracked before this meeting even started.

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Among the many strategies to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and attendant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from private vehicles, Bay Area smart growth advocate TransForm has developed a new certification called GreenTRIP to encourage architects, developers, and municipal officials to build transit-oriented development and implement transportation demand management (TDM) solutions for future tenants [PDF].

"What we strive to do with GreenTRIP is create something that is very easily implementable so that it can be done early in the development process," said Jeffrey Tumlin, Principal of Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates and a member of GreenTRIP's advisory board. "We want to focus on the key things that developers and municipalities can do to have a positive impact on greenhouse gases."

Tumlin added, "GreenTRIP tries to change the regulatory process."

Developed explicitly to complement areas where the LEED Neighorhood Development (LEED ND) green building certification falls short of being prescriptive, GreenTRIP rewards projects that reduce traffic and make a strong connection between sustainable development and pollution from the transportation sector, which accounts for more than 40 percent of California's GHG emissions. Funding for the new certification comes from grants from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

Using the URBEMIS emissions model developed by the California Air Resources Board, GreenTRIP gives developers credits for reducing overall driving relative to the average regional VMT. GreenTRIP attempts to impact developments at the beginning phases of design, encouraging developers to situate near transit and take steps to reduce driving [PDF].

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At
a panel discussion yesterday at the Copenhagen climate summit, American
policymakers and transit experts delivered a clear message: Walkable
urban development must be part of any effective plan to reduce global
greenhouse gas emissions. Thanks to the magic of live webcasts, I can
relay a few highlights for Streetsblog readers.

Without
directing future development toward walkable urbanism, the climate
impacts of sprawl will overwhelm other efforts to curb greenhouse gas
emissions, said Robert Cervero, a professor specializing in
transportation and land use policy at UC Berkeley. "Urban development
patterns have a significant role to play in carbon reduction," Cervero
told the audience. "Otherwise we’ll just get knocked back by land-use
patterns. Sustainable urbanism has to be part of the equation."

The
benefits of walkable development extend far beyond the efficiencies of
trains, buses, and bikes compared to cars. As journalist (and befuddling congestion pricing critic) David Owen has documented superbly, city dwellers use far less energy to, for instance, heat homes than suburbanites.

Cervero
attached some rough numbers to these "embedded energy savings." While
transit investment alone can achieve a 10 to 20 percent reduction in
America’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions, he said, factoring in
the embedded energy savings of walkable development boosts that figure
to 30 percent. That’s 30 percent compared to present-day emissions
levels. The reduction could reach as high as 60 percent, Cervero added,
compared to the level of per-capita emissions that would result from
continuing business-as-usual sprawl-inducing policies.

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California residents living in sprawling suburban developments could save billions of dollars every year if they lived in denser, urban zones and along transit corridors, according to a study released today by smart growth and transit advocates TransForm. Analyzing four metropolitan areas--Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Sacramento--Windfall for All found that shifting populations in those regions to denser development along transit corridors would save save $31 billion per year, or $3,850 on average per household [Report Summary PDF].

In the Bay Area, where annual car ownership costs on average over $8,000 per person, individuals spend roughly $34 billion every year on personal transportation costs, compared to only $4.6 billion spent by public agencies on transit and roads combined. Households with poor access to public transit not only spend double the amount per year on transportation when compared to those with good access to transit, they produce more than double the amount of CO2, a greenhouse gas.

"The most astounding thing is that agencies pinch their pennies on transit and cut back and we feel like we can't afford not to save that service," said Stuart Cohen, Executive Director of TransForm. "We're already spending more than seven times as much as our agencies spend on public transit and roads just on buying and operating our vehicles."

What's more, the report points out that fuel costs represent a small minority of the cost of owning a car, so the craze for electric and other low-emission vehicles will not dramatically reduce the transportation costs for those living far from their jobs and far from transit. The best solution to combating climate change, the report notes, is to build walkable, vibrant communities where residences are situated close to job centers. 

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I had the chance to listen in yesterday to top staffers from USDOT explain their collaboration with HUD and the EPA -- the "Partnership for Livable Communities" that was first unveiled in March and touted again by President Obama in July. Three officials, including one of Ray LaHood's top deputies, Beth Osborne, outlined their plans via conference call to several hundred people from all parts of the country.

The details didn't go very deep, but now we know that DOT has $100 million to spend on planning grants next year to foster more sustainable development. They've received 1,400 applications for so-called TIGER grants, a $1.5 billion pool of stimulus money set aside for "innovative" transportation projects. (For a full recap that gives you a flavor for the Obama DOT's priorities, read this blog post by Gary Toth of Project for Public Spaces, which organized the event.)

So the language is encouraging and there are some new pots of money being put to good use. We have quite recent evidence from the stimulus saga, however, that once federal highway funding goes out the door to state DOTs, sprawl projects will follow. So I want to focus on one key moment yesterday, when a participant asked how the feds plan to get state DOTs on board with a livability agenda. Here's how Osborne answered:

The DOTs are wide-varied. Some states are well ahead of the federal government, and some states are not sure that these are the priorities they want to set for themselves. The program we have now is not self-funding anymore. In addressing it at the federal level, there is an expectation within the administration that money that is spent from the federal government is going to have to be spent in a way that allows us to be accountable to our taxpayers. That’s going to realign the program to some extent. The more people learn about livability and sustainability priorities, they see it aligns with their priorities more than they realized (economic growth, development, housing affordability). When you show people the choice between the priorities we have laid out and what they have laid out, it's amazing the headway you can make. We have some training to do, we have some challenges to meet, but we feel confident we can meet them.

Deciphering an answer this cryptic is a bit like reading tea leaves.

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