The following article first appeared in Streetsblog California.
For our 10th anniversary celebration, Streetsblog California put together a short program celebrating our achievements. We still have some programs available – let us know if you want us to mail you one. It was interesting to put it together, and we thought it would be interesting for our readers too.
Since our founding in 2014, there have been a lot of changes in sustainability and transportation policy at the state level, including the development of brand new ways of approaching planning, climate change work, and deploying funding to make the state a more livable place.
There is of course still plenty of work to do – sometimes it feels like two steps forward and a step back, and sometimes there’s a stumble – but it’s fascinating to look back at the stories we’ve covered and trace those transformations.
This was going to be a quickie summary of some of those topics, but… it got kind of long. So, here is the first in a series of Streetsblog Tenth Anniversary Celebration Stories.
Removing “Congestion” as an Environmental Impact: The Alphabet Soup of LOS, CEQA, VMT, and OPR
It seems weird to think about now, but for years the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) treated “increased traffic congestion” as a serious environmental impact that developments needed to prevent or fix. Since they had to account for how much they might slow down cars, the “fixes” included adding lanes and signals so that more cars could move through the area faster.
As a result, everywhere there has been new development over the last fifty years, the roads have gotten wider, the intersections have gotten more complicated, and the distances between places have grown, as have the dangers of moving between them without a car. The rule has also made it easier and cheaper to build big developments out on the edges of cities, where existing congestion was lighter and any increase created by new development would be less noticeable. That has led to even more driving, and more traffic, and ever more dangerous and less pedestrian-friendly streets.
It isn’t a rational choice today in many places to choose to walk anywhere, and riding a bike can seem way to risky.
Around the time Streetsblog California was coming into being, S.B. 743, which was about allowing a CEQA exemption for the downtown Sacramento basketball arena, included a provision calling on the Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to look at changing CEQA to fix this. It was passed by the legislature and signed by Governor Brown because of the politics around the arena, not so much because people noticed the other half of it.
There followed years of discussion, debate, public comment-seeking, and rulemaking. It also meant a lot of explaining, which was difficult or uninteresting to most of the mainstream press, so Streetsblog California did its level best. That’s why there are so many articles addressing this alphabet soup of acronyms on our site, attempting to explain why this issue is important, how it affects every community, and especially what it does to transportation infrastructure.
OPR finally settled on a new approach to measure the environmental impact of traffic. Instead of traffic delay (Level of Service, or LOS), when developments undertake their Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs) under CEQA, they would now measure how much new travel was induced by a project (Vehicle Miles Traveled, or VMT). This would allow developments in denser areas to mitigate their environmental impacts by supporting transit lines or adding safe bike or walk routes.
The new rules are a game changer, although so far most of their impact is being felt at the planning level. For transportation projects, traffic engineers prefer to call any new travel “latent demand” and deny that it is induced by the new roads they build. Caltrans and others argued for a long time about whether the new VMT measure should apply to transportation projects. Eventually they decided that yes, it should. And they even explain all the reasons why in a cute and effective video on their website. But they also frequently find ways around complying with those rules.
Ten years into this process, the change is happening both fast and slow. Some cities had already been using the new measure, encouraging infill development and more rational approach to streets. But highway builders seem to forget, or ignore, that their roads induce more traffic. Legislators are still trying to find ways to exempt their own suburban and rural districts – those places where using LOS gave them a free ride, but accounting for VMT requires that they actually change the form of development.
The argument over how to measure traffic as an environmental impact is not over.
Note: This is part one in a series about Streetsblog California’s coverage over the last ten years. Support us being able to continue doing this work by clicking here.
