California Debates Targets for Landmark Anti-Sprawl Bill

Photo: Mark Strozier

As California’s big four metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)
run models to determine how much they can influence California’s growth
and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, significant questions remain. The
state’s Senate Bill 375, typically referred to as the Anti-Sprawl Bill,
requires that planners and policy makers develop meaningful solutions to
reduce sprawl, reduce vehicle miles traveled and promote growth in
areas that will have the least impact on the environment.

As Amanda Eaken from the Natural Resources Defense Council writes
on the Switchboard, the predictions are encouraging. By bringing
Californians closer to their jobs and providing better transportation
choices, by 2050 SB 375 could:

• Help Californians drive 3.7 trillion fewer miles
• Help Californians save $6,400 per year on transportation and other
  household costs
• Save the state $194 billion in infrastructure costs with smarter
  planning
• Save 140 billion gallons of gasoline
• Save more open space than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware
  combined

But the models won’t mean much, she argues, if policy makers don’t
invest money in projects that can bring about the needed change. Without
programming funds away from destructive development and transportation
projects, you will only have plans.

Eakan writes:

In every case there are certain ambitious policies and there are
certain areas where we know the MPOs can do more. For example, in every
case, we fail to see a shift of transportation funding to support the
improved land use patterns every MPO is calling for. This is the thrust
of SB 375 – to align regional investments to support a more sustainable
land use pattern. The MPOs make assumptions – in certain cases very
ambitious and laudable assumptions about the increase in walkable,
transit oriented development, but then fail to shift their
transportation investments to make sure we realize these better futures.

The challenge for advocates like the NRDC lies in pressuring MPOs to
revise their long-term transportation plans to better reflect the
targets set by SB 375. Adding capacity to freeways or permitting
greenfield development now will only make the laudable targets more
difficult to realize in the future.

Elsewhere on the Network, sprawl apologist Wendell
Cox argues on New Geography that the chorus of pundits and thinkers
talking about the end of suburbia isn’t looking at certain data, and in
fact the population in suburbs hasn’t decreased. Richard Florida analyzes
a new report on attracting the “creative class” to rural areas. And
finally The Dirt has a good
post describing some of the finalists in the Build a Better Burb
design competition.