Induced Traffic Induces More Support

Induced traffic has been a regular topic of this blog, most recently three months ago when I wrote about peak spreading, a first cousin to induced traffic.

But induced traffic, the well-founded theory that road capacity creates car trips regardless of population changes, bears regular revisiting because its implications are a key motivating force behind walkable urbanism and because it’s non-intuitive to many (including me at one time), requiring repetition for its lessons to be assimilated.

And when better to revisit induced traffic than when there’s good news to report?

We’ll start in Houston, Texas, where, as reported in CityLab, the mayor came out strongly with the argument that more traffic capacity doesn’t solve congestion and may make it worse.

In words I’ve taken from the CityLab article, he opposed a possible freeway widening by saying, “This example, and many others in Houston and around the state, have clearly demonstrated that the traditional strategy of adding capacity, especially single occupant vehicle capacity on the periphery of our urban areas, exacerbates urban congestion problems.  These types of projects are not creating the kind of vibrant, economically strong cities that we all desire.

Even better, the mayor won his office with a platform that included support for all modes of transportation other than single-occupancy vehicles, showing that Texas voters are willing to grasp the flaws of conventional traffic planning.

But the mayor’s continued endorsement of the theory of induced traffic doesn’t mean that the battle is won in Texas.  On the same day as he stated his opposition, the Texas DOT expressed their intention to reduce congestion by continuing to add lanes, including a widening of the freeway to which the mayor was referring, a freeway that is already 26 lanes wide.

Moving to California, Caltrans has released a policy paper acknowledging the validity of induced traffic and the reality that more roads often don’t ease congestion.  Not surprisingly, the consensus of the planners hasn’t yet filtered down to the rank-and-file, with those who rely on continued freeway projects for salaries and eventual pensions continuing to doubt the induced traffic phenomenon. 

Coming closer to the North Bay, a Silicon Valley mobility guru, acknowledging that we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion, convened a group of transportation experts to rate other methods of addressing congestion.  The top three were higher gas taxes, charges for single-occupancy vehicle commuting, and vehicle mileage taxes.  I’ve previously written about the first and last, while also supporting the discouragement of single-occupancy commuting.

Lastly, California recently issued long-anticipated draft rules requiring that environmental impacts of car travel be measured by incremental vehicle miles traveled rather than intersection level of service, a paradigm shift that implicitly acknowledges the reality of induced traffic and is a more reasonable measure of environmental impact in an era when climate change is the governing concern.

Despite the explicit direction of the legislature to make the change, the rules haven’t progressed quickly, with the entrenched road-building constituency pushing back.  Nor are they likely to proceed quickly from here, but issuance of the draft rules is still a milestone to be marked.

I won’t argue that we’ve reached a tipping point on induced traffic, but we’re moving in the right direction on fronts in Texas, Sacramento, and the Bay Area, all of which should be considered good news.

In my next post, I’ll return to a point that I made in passing a few posts back, about weighing the credibility of widespread municipal corruption versus a systemic shortcoming in the U.S. land-use model.  I’ll invoke a 14th century logician and Sherlock Holmes to make my point.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Making Good Urbanist Decisions with Less Kerfuffle

Typical pedestrian rail crossing

Coming up in days is a public hearing in Santa Rosa on a proposed Jennings Avenue pedestrian crossing of the railroad tracks.  The hearing is worth the attention of those who support walkable urbanism.  But urbanists should also be concerned about the extended process that led to the hearing, a process conducted under rules that result in tortuous advances and a too frequent reliance on the automobile as the default solution.

I’ll write first about the automobile dependence.

Among the many problems that the drivable suburban paradigm has bestowed upon us, such as climate change and municipal financial dysfunction, is a decision-making process in which proposed solutions are too often reliant on the automobile.

Concerned about the noise of a manufacturing plant interfering with the quiet of residential neighborhoods?  Put the industrial zoning at the urban fringe, buffered from homes, with the unavoidable result that employees will all drive there.

Unsure about making repairs to aging and overcrowded schools?  Combine several schools into a new supersized campus at the outskirts of town, with provision for the drop-off for the children who now must be delivered by car.

Unhappy with the occasional traffic jam in the downtown core?  Add traffic lanes even if the additional pavement saps the pedestrian vitality of the district.

Three perceived problems.  Three heavy-handed automobile-oriented solutions, none of which are urbanist and all of which promulgate the drivable suburban paradigm.

Even worse, these solutions, as ill-conceived as they are, are usually the result of an increasingly burdensome and lengthy process that is designed to spit out the least objectionable answer rather than the best solution.  I usually point to CEQA as the prime villain in the process, but the state and local approval processes that run parallel to the CEQA process are scarcely better.

To be clear, I don’t object to the increased environmental and public participation elements of the CEQA and parallel processes.  But I’m deeply concerned with the time they require and the often unsatisfactory and auto-oriented results.

Today’s case in point, that illustrates both the automobile reliance and the slow process, is the proposed Jennings Avenue pedestrian crossing in Santa Rosa, near the coming Guerneville Road SMART station.  The crossing is currently enmeshed in the CEQA and approval processes.

The automobile connectivity of Jennings has long been severed by the railroad tracks.  But for many years the opportunity to clamber over the tracks and to save a detour of more than a half-mile was irresistible for pedestrians and bicyclists heading to the nearby junior college, elementary school, or regional mall.  Daily counts of more than a hundred crossings were noted.

As long as the tracks were unused, the casual trespassing wasn’t an issue.  But with freight use of the tracks now reestablished and with SMART revenue service beginning later this year, the Jennings Avenue crossing moved into the spotlight, with one of the first steps being fences that blocked the access and forced many to rely on cars for trips that had previously been completed on foot.

Walkable urbanists responded to the closure and quickly noted the need for a pedestrian crossing, designed like the one shown in the photo.  But the rules of the California Public Utility Commission weren’t ready to accommodate that solution.

The CPUC interpreted their precedent as a no net gain standard, requiring closure of another approved crossing before allowing an approved crossing at Jennings.  When the crossing to be closed was identified in another neighborhood, the residents and business owners in that neighborhood quickly objected, some even retaining attorneys to argue their side.

A pedestrian overcrossing at Jennings was suggested as a workaround.  But the estimated cost was $8.2 million, with the likelihood that the city would lack the funds for maintenance  and the probability that many pedestrians and bicyclists would object to the long climb and descent, instead cutting the fence and continuing to cross the tracks at grade.  Perhaps luckily, the construction funds never became available.

Eventually, a CEQA EIR was initiated, with its hundreds of pages of project descriptions, comments, and responses, adults arguing as children continued to be blocked by fences denying them the freedom of crossing the tracks and expanding their world.

Both within the EIR process and outside of it, the neighbors voiced comments in support of the pedestrian crossing.

“My friend and I live on opposite sides of the tracks, and we like to visit each other’s homes often.  We are climbing over the fence because we don’t want to walk a half-mile to see one another.”

“The new fence requires cyclists from west Jennings to ride on Dutton, which is a very busy street, to reach Coddingtown; the bike/pedestrian pathway along the SMART Tracks no longer works for them.”

“For years we have walked across the tracks to get from our home to the Coddingtown shops.  It’s safer to cross the tracks at Jennings than walking along Dutton to Guerneville Rd.  The sidewalks along Dutton expose us to a lot of turning traffic, and drivers seem unaware of pedestrians.”

Despite the strong neighborhood support for the crossing, the process still moved forward at a stultifying pace.  But a milestone has been reached.  After years of preamble, the CPUC will hold a public hearing on Monday, February 1 at the Helen Lehman School, 1700 Jennings Avenue, Santa Rosa.  The hearing will begin at 7:00pm.

I intend to be there.  Whether or not I speak, I’ll be there in support of the pedestrian crossing.  But my bigger issue will continue to be the time it took us to get this far.  And the extent to which car travel became the default solution during the process.

It’s often said of the criminal justice system that “Justice delayed is justice denied.”  And it’s true.  Someone who lives under a cloud of pending prosecution for three years before being exonerated has still lost three years during which the full vitality of life has been denied.

The same can be said of land-use actions.  A good solution three years hence is worth less than a good solution today.  Imagine a sixth-grader, beginning to spread her wings and to experience the world beyond parental oversight.  Perhaps the wing-spreading includes walking to school by herself, including a careful crossing of the railroad tracks.

Now imagine that the crossing is denied to her for several years as adult battle under their arcane rules, during which time her parents continue to give her rides to school.  By the time the issue is decided, she has lost that first breath of walkable independence and instead remained car-dependent.  Personal growth has been lost and may never be reclaimed.  A potential urbanist has been stunted.

If the Jennings Avenue crossing matters to you, please attend on Monday.  But even more importantly, if you’re troubled by the process to which this matter has been subjected, continue to work toward changing the rules to allow more expedient solutions and to default less often to the automobile as a band aid.

In my next post, I’ll write about the “last mile” problem, the Achilles heel of transit systems.  People may have an interest in using transit for daily activities, but can be deterred if there is a difficult final link between the transit stop and their destination.  There are many solutions to the last mile problem, from transit-oriented development to improved walkability to allowing bikes on transit.  The staff at Petaluma Transit has been working to address the problem with well-targeted bus routing.  Their ideas will soon be rolled out for public comment.  I’ll give details when I next write.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Correctly Targeting Blame toward CEQA

I spent the first decade of my career working in hydroelectric development.  Not the big stuff, like Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee Dam, but the little stuff, often the retrofitting of turbines onto existing dams to take advantage of the increasing value of electricity.  (I had a small role in securing approvals for the turbine now at the base of Coyote Dam, which impounds Lake Mendocino and stores much of the water consumed in Sonoma County.)

I mention this history because it led me to a meeting in a small Oregon town meeting where the local citizenry had gathered to protest the great number of hydroelectric projects proposed for their region.

To be fair, many of the projects were bad ideas, proposed by out-of-state investors who understood that their projects were likely infeasible but were indiscriminately submitting applications on falling water everywhere in hopes of stumbling into a good project or two, while also arguing that the federal environmental standards were too strict.  My meeting attendance wasn’t intended to support the bulk of the projects, but to defend the handful of financially and environmentally viable projects from the possible lynch mob.

Knowledgeable observers understood that most of the projects were fated to fade away when the environmental review processes began.  But a local politician chose to burnish his environmental credentials by playing to those who didn’t understand the reality of the licensing process.  His rabble-rousing speech began with “Only one percent of all hydroelectric applications are rejected by the federal government.”  One could almost feel the collective gasp in the room as the audience pondered that 99 percent of the projects would get built.

The funny thing is that the “one percent” statement was probably accurate.  But its accuracy, as is true with many accurate statistics, was filtered through our flawed perceptions to yield an incorrect understanding.

It was probably true that only one percent of hydropower applications were rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  It was also true that only one percent of the applications were approved by FERC.  The missing 98 percent?  They were withdrawn by the applicant, or allowed to languish in the back files at FERC, when it became obvious that the electricity they could generate wouldn’t be worth either the construction costs or the costs of the environmental studies to secure approvals.

So, despite the ranting and effective distortion of the populist politician, the licensing system was working as it should.  Only the most economically feasible and environmentally benign projects were getting through the process.  The only difference from expectations was the bad projects, rather than being killed by FERC as many expected, were instead being drowned in FERC paperwork.  The net outcome was the same.

(I should note that I believe the effective rate of FERC approvals in that era was too low, that many projects that would have added cost-effective carbon-free energy to the electrical grid had bottom lines too marginal to survive the FERC paperwork blizzard.  But, at most, I think the approval rate should have been two percent, with the great majority of projects still going to a justified oblivion.  So my quibbling over the approval rate is fairly minor.)

I offer this preamble as a way of suggesting that there are many parallels between my observations of the FERC process of 35 years ago and the popular perceptions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) today.

A recent housing summit in Petaluma, highlighting the need for more housing in the region, had many pointing at CEQA as the villain, claiming that the CEQA was impeding new housing projects and creating the housing shortage.  Those with the pointing fingers were aligned with the investors who had submitted the great number of applications that troubled the Oregon town 35 years ago.

Playing the role filled 35 years earlier by the posturing politician, a letter writer to the local paper a week later demanded that CEQA opponents identify projects that had been denied under CEQA.  The point she misunderstood was the projects rarely get denied under CEQA.  Instead, poor projects, and a handful of good projects that are unfortunately positioned for approval under CEQA, succumb not to a negative decision by a public body, but to an overwhelming blizzard of environmental demands.

I can personally attest to the last point, having been involved in several worthy urban projects from which the resources and momentum were stripped by CEQA.  Following extended struggles through the CEQA process, the projects emerged with approvals but into a marketplace that had changed significantly in the long years since the projects were initiated and with the resources needed to move into construction already expended on CEQA compliance.

So yes, projects do fail because of CEQA, particularly urbanist projects.

And that ultimately becomes the key point on which criticisms of CEQA should be focused.  The most important flaw in CEQA isn’t that it denies too many projects, but that it effectively deters particular types of project, the urbanist projects that good environmental policy should encourage.

While attending the Congress for the New Urbanism in Dallas earlier this year, I spent an afternoon walking through a transit-oriented neighborhood (pictured above) with the assistant planning director for a large California city.  As we walked, he opined that suburban projects, even when supported by mediocre CEQA studies, tend to get approved by suburban city councils eager for the construction activity and the impact fees.  Those projects also lack neighbors who might go to court to slow the projects.

In contrast, urban projects, even when extensively studied and well-documented under CEQA, tend to get a higher level of scrutiny from politicians who are continually testing the political winds.  Also, urban projects are more likely to have neighbors willing to go to court, using CEQA arguments as a screen for NIMBYism.

Nor is the planner the only person expressing that position.  Writer Leigha Beckman, reporting on an extensive report prepared by a law firm with CEQA experience, describes how the projects most frequently undermined by CEQA tend to be the urbanist projects that objective observers would describe as the more environmentally desirable.  The Beckman article is a long read, but one that I recommend for those who care about the subject, which should include all urbanists.

(As a note on Beckman article, the link seems not to work, but an internet search on “lesson in California politics” will find the article just fine.)

So, 35 years after I found myself in a room filled with angry people talking past each other and willing to offer distorted views of reality instead of looking more deeply into the issues, I find myself deeply involved in an issue filled with angry people talking past each other and willing to offer distorted views of reality in place of looking more deeply into the issues.  And very few either time were truly grasping the problems, the timely approval of that handful benign hydropower projects 35 years ago and the unreasonable obstruction of urbanist project today.

I can only sigh and continue working toward something better.

In my next post, I’ll provide an extended response to a reader who recently argued that he can’t justify being an urbanist because the financial realities of his life require him to be a suburban commuter.  I sympathize with his concerns, but suggest that he look at his conundrum from a different perspective.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Teamwork: Bad Example #1

Two months ago, I wrote about the need for good teamwork as a requirement for effective urbanism.  Further cogitation led me to realize that I had good examples from my own career of the point I was trying to make.  Or perhaps I should say bad examples as the teamwork element was notably missing in the examples I’ll begin offering today.

In my examples, I’ll obscure the city, the project, and the individuals involved.  There are several reasons for this editorial decision, but the primary one is that I believe the individuals were fundamentally good people responding to a flawed collective mindset.  And my goal is to improve the mindset, not to castigate individuals who were seduced by it.

My first example was a moderate-sized mixed-use urban project.

I’ve often written about my concerns with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act).  While I’m happy with the environmental improvements that have occurred under CEQA and hope that we can continue along the path set by CEQA, I have discomfort with several aspects of the CEQA process.

Foremost among those is the “completeness” process.  So that a city can have all necessary data in hand to prepare the environmental documents within CEQA timelines, the city can deem a land-use application incomplete until all required data has been submitted.

The process makes complete sense when the missing information is a traffic study or a hazardous material remediation plan.  But it veers into absurdity when the incompleteness item is a question about whether the pilasters are orangeish-pink or pinkish-orange.

Of course, there is a huge amount of grey area between those extremes, which often usually leads to lengthy lists of incompleteness items, developer irritation, and extended negotiation sessions.

This particular project included a pair of intersections.  One was a modification of an existing intersection along a major arterial.  The other, down a slight hill, was a new intersection where much of use was to be pedestrian and transit.  Any car traffic would be strictly local, enroute to nearby parking structures.

Accordingly, I directed that the conceptual design of the downhill intersection lean toward pedestrian safety, with tighter curb radii, sidewalk bulbs, and decorative crosswalks.  For the uphill intersection, I omitted some of those details, recognizing that the automobile would be the primary user.

I would have preferred if both intersections could have been pedestrian-friendly, but believed that my compromise accurately reflected the contemporary development zeitgeist.

Almost everyone in city hall concurred.  But one planner saw it differently and got his concern added to the incompleteness letter.  He thought that the downhill intersection, where most of the users would be pedestrians, should be designed to facilitate cars and that the uphill intersection, where most of the users would be cars, should be designed to facilitate pedestrians.

The intersection item was my biggest issue with the incompleteness letter, but there were a number of other items that irritated the developer.  So we found ourselves in a meeting room with the planner and city engineer reviewing the list.

Several times during the meeting, I returned to the intersection question, finding different ways to phrase the question to the planner, “So you want us to design the pedestrian intersection for cars and the car intersection for pedestrians?”

I had no expectation that the planner would change his mind, but I was hopeful that the city engineer would intervene, saying something like “If this project reaches construction design, I’ll require the original concept, not this revision, so let’s not waste the developer’s time and money.”  But the city engineer only pursed his lips and looked about the room, avoiding eye contact and apparently willing to waste the developer’s time and money to avoid internal conflict.

Some may ask why I tried so hard to save making a small change on the conceptual plans.  But the change wasn’t small.  Even at the initial approval, there must be a comprehensive infrastructure conceptual plan, including water, sewer, storm drainage, other utilities, and landscaping.  Making the requested intersection changes would have touched all of those.

Years removed from the situation, I don’t have good records on the costs that were incurred.  But $2,000 is a good guess.  Most developers would happily spend another $2,000 during the entitlement phase if the result was a better project.  But to spend $2,000 on a flawed concept that would be discarded at the next step?  That was ridiculous.  Nonetheless, that’s what we were forced to do.

When a project fails, the development team often points toward a single cause, such as city intransigence or lack of investors.  It’s a basic human need for a coherent narrative.  But the reality is that most projects die of hundreds of nicks and cuts.  Some of the wounds may be deeper than others, but it’s still a cumulative mortality, not a single fatal blow.

And that was the case with this project.  Bad timing in the marketplace, investors waffling on their commitments, a land ownership dispute.  They all combined to end the project, with the unnecessary intersection redesign only one among many nicks and cuts.  But it was a nick that still rankles years later.  And the reason that it rankles is that the project would have made the city a better and more financially resilient place to live.

I had a second example that I’d planned to share today, but I’ve written long.  My next post will return to the topic of neighborhood block parties that I raised several weeks ago.  After that, I’ll offer my second example of bad teamwork.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)