You Can’t Have Any More Toys Until You Take Care of the Ones You Already Own

Alignment of proposed Rainier Connector

Consistent with their goal of promoting stronger, more financially resilient communities, StrongTowns has launched an initiative targeted toward transportation planning.   It’s a topic with which I have long familiarity.

A decade or more ago, my since-departed father noted to me that, for the first time in the better part of a century since highways and freeways were first conceived, Caltrans had no new freeway routes on their drawing boards.  There were improvements to existing routes in design, but any new routes remained in advance planning, years from design and construction, if they ever progressed that far.

Although he’d spent his career in freeway bridge design and construction, I don’t think my father was unhappy with the new status, but he was perplexed by it.  As a post-war hire at Caltrans, he’d been inculcated in the vision that there would always be new freeways to build, making Californian lives ever more convenient and freedom-filled.

His belief in that vision had perhaps begun to weaken, but it was still a change in perspective to realize that no new California freeways would likely open during the remaining years of his life.

I can appreciate his disorientation.  This past summer, I chatted with a high school classmate about our shared hometown, a car-oriented suburb of Sacramento.  We shared recollections of extensive freeway projects that were planned to slice and dice our community during our school years, although none of the projects ever came into being.  For those who aren’t of a certain age, and my high school days were 45 years ago, it’s hard to grasp the certainty we once had that freeway expansion was inevitable and would continue forever.

Given what we now know about the difficulties of funding the long-term maintenance of freeways, it’s a good that that the freeway romance cooled when it did.  But, like many ill-fated romances, it went on too long and left behind too many hard-to-break habits.

For one, even if we’re no longer envisioning four controlled-access lanes from Santa Rosa to Sonoma or from Novato to West Marin, we still spend too many of our transportation dollars on freeway widening and interchange projects, adding to the maintenance burden for the future by providing new improvements to be maintained and by not directing the now available dollars to current maintenance needs.

The problem is we justify these improvements based on the new traffic that was induced by the initial freeway construction and will soon find the new capacity similarly consumed by induced traffic, leaving us no better off.

As an example, I recently wrote of nearly $200 million in freeway improvements currently underway near Petaluma, even as the transportation system within the town continues to unravel.

As another ill-advised habit, even when we don’t look to freeways for urban and suburban traffic solutions, we still build wide arterials expecting them to solve traffic problems, only to again be stymied by induced traffic while digging deeper maintenance holes.

Recognizing the fatal popularity of ever more and ever wider roads, and concerned about the ever deepening maintenance burden being created, StrongTowns is kicking off a NoNewRoads program, highlighting the need to develop reasonable and fundable plans to maintain the roads we already have before adding more roads, lanes, or interchanges.

It won’t be an easy battle to win, as exemplified by a local chapter of the American Planning Association, folks who really should know better, giving an urban design award to a freeway interchange which isn’t urban and doesn’t make much accommodation for either pedestrians or bicyclists.  A list from Eric Jaffe from CityLab of the twelve worst freeway projects now under consideration across the country further emphasizes the extent to which we’re enamored with freeways.

As if on cue, Governor Jerry Brown, in his State of California message, noted the need for extensive freeway maintenance work.  His staff estimated that there is $77 billion of work to be done in his state alone.  (For those reaching for calculators, that would be about $2,000 for every one of the 38.8 million Californians, or about $5,000 for an average household.  It’s not an impossible burden, but still a significant chunk and doesn’t include other infrastructure elements such as water, sewer, and storm drainage.)

Consistent with his laudable goal to build a rainy day fund to tide California through the next economic challenge, Brown refused to make any of the current budget surplus available to tackle the deferred maintenance, instead calling for new fees.  (As someone who came of age during Brown’s first two terms as California Governor, with the signature of the man then known as Governor Moonbeam on both of my university diplomas, it’s odd to see Brown as the most mature adult in the room.)

At the other end of the spectrum, a Petaluma Councilmember wrote an editorial in the local paper (link not yet available) exulting that the funds had been assembled to proceed with the construction of the Rainier Connector, an arterial project that will someday be a logical connection within the city’s transportation system, especially given its proximity to the Petaluma Transit bus yard, but seems woefully premature given the state of the city’s streets.

Celebrating funding for the Rainier Connector is akin to bragging about bringing home a new car to a frontyard filled with aging cars disabled for the lack of new tires and fuel water pumps.

I applaud StrongTowns for their NoNewRoads efforts and will support them with enthusiasm.  But I’ll also note that success, at least in the near term, seems unlikely.  Perhaps we’re no longer looking at building new freeways through every city and town, but the remnants of that attitude are still deeply entrenched.

Next time, I’ll switch to pedestrian advocacy, writing about an upcoming hearing in Santa Rosa that casts a light on how we view alternative pedestrian risks and how we should facilitate more pedestrian activity.

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

Rainier Connector: What Can Urbanism Offer in the Short-Term?

Like a persistent dog, today I’ll give one more good chew to the bone that is Petaluma’s Rainier Connector and then bury it for awhile.  I’ll surely return to the bone again in the future.  After all, the public notices on the Rainier Connector, a proposed arterial in the northwest quadrant of town, have been a fifty-year skein of birth announcements and obituary notices; I don’t see that pattern changing any time soon.  But after today, I’ll let the bone age for awhile.

This will be the fourth in the current series of posts on the Rainier Connector.   I began by bemoaning the yes/no question recently posed to the City Council on the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for the Connector.  I argued that the binary decision failed to capture the nuances of either the process or the project alternatives.  Next, I presented the urbanist argument why Rainier might be a good project for the future of Petaluma, but not yet.  Then, I suggested an idea for what urbanism could instead offer  for the $90 million cost of the roadway project.

Today, I’ll button up with a look at what urbanism can offer in the shorter-term.  Too much of Petaluma is configured in the drivable suburban mold for extensive urbanism to have a place anytime soon.  But perhaps there are urbanist strategies that can be implemented to alleviate some the pains of drivable suburbia.

As an example, I’ll resurrect a topic on which I’ve written before, a new sports complex on the east side of Petaluma.  (The complex, unnamed when I last wrote about it, is now the Petaluma Community Sports Fields.)

When I last wrote about the sports fields, I was castigating myself, as a member of the Petaluma Park and Rec Commission, for failing to more quickly call out the drivable suburban mindset behind siting a six-field athletic complex where many users would reach the site by passing through the busiest intersection in Petaluma.

I acknowledged that I had as much chance of changing the siting decision as of stopping a locomotive with a flyswatter, but still thought I should have been quicker to note the looming traffic issues.  I even predicted that some would soon call for a traffic fix to alleviate the difficulties in reaching the sports fields.

Sure enough, one of the pro-Rainier arguments tossed about during the run-up to the City Council hearing on the FEIR was the need to provide better access to the sports fields.  Never mind that building a $90 million roadway to improve access to a $6 million sports complex is roughly akin to buying a $500 carpet shampooer to remove a stain from a $30 rug or to buying a $10 grabber to retrieve a quarter from under a car seat, induced traffic would have undermined the traffic relief anyway.

Grandparents who had previously skipped sporting events because of the expected congestion enroute to the sports fields would begin making the trip, soon returning congestion to its former level.  Perhaps the new constraint on driving could have been parking at the sports complex.  During a recent visit, I noted that there are already signs posted directing drivers to overflow parking on the far side of the fronting arterial, an arterial without crosswalks.  But I expect that ideas for more parking would soon have begun floating, perhaps suggesting elimination of one of the future fields in favor of a parking lot.

That path is obviously going in an unacceptable direction, so let’s look to urbanism for different ideas.  The possible urbanist strategies fall into two categories, facilities located closer to users and encouragement of non-automobile access options.

In a chat with a fellow Park and Rec Commissioner, I noted that the community might have been served, from a traffic congestion perspective, by building fields at multiple locations rather than clustering them.  He responded, reasonably enough, that the multi-field complex allows weekend tournaments for out-of-towners, which benefits the local economy.

I’m happy to have others enjoy Petaluma, although I wonder how many years of sales and transient occupancy taxes will be required to pay for the sports fields.  Or for the Rainier Connector.  Unless that number is reasonable, the argument is only another example of using public dollars to create private revenue.

But I’m willing to stipulate that having a multi-field sports complex is a good thing for a community as long as that stipulation doesn’t preclude parallel provision for fields that require less driving.  And there is some hope on that front.

All three Petaluma high schools have or will soon have turf fields and have expressed a tentative willingness to allow community use of those fields when not in conflict with school activities.  Having no current involvement in youth sports, I don’t know to what extent youth leagues can be jiggered to have more play at fields to which non-automotive access, or at least shorter drives, is possible, but these are topics which I’ll push in my role on the Park and Rec Commission.

But there is another sports field where an opportunity was missed.  The River Front project will be in a central location, readily accessible to much of the community by transit.  The proposed development will have a sports field, but the developer’s plan calls for grass, not the turf that would better support intensive use for community sports.

The community interest in a turf field became evident during the entitlement process when there was an effort to make the turf a further, and in my opinion unreasonable, exaction from the developer.  The debate became mired in the question of how much a developer should fund in order to receive entitlements and a pro-developer perspective on the City Council quickly quashed the idea of turf.  My belief that the community should have funded the incremental cost between the grass and turf field wasn’t raised.  It was a missed opportunity.  

And that brings us to the question of non-automobile access to the Petaluma Community Sports Fields.  There’s also some good news on that front, with a bicycle/pedestrian path currently under construction.  However, the path won’t be ready for use until about six months after play began on the sports fields, six months during which access habits, such as relying on parental transport, were formed.

I know there were easement issues to be resolved before the path construction could be commenced and that staff made a good faith effort to resolve those issues quickly.  But let me ask a pair of questions.  Does anyone know of a park that opened with the route of car access still pending?  Or is a bicycle/pedestrian path somehow considered less worthy of a timely solution?

The question of transit to the site is also interesting.  There is currently little use of transit to access any sports fields in Petaluma.  However, Petaluma Transit and the Transit Advisory Committee, on which I sit, are trying to increase that use.

Accordingly, the Committee reviewed the construction plans for the Petaluma Community Sports Fields, identified a possible transit turnaround and suggested a change that would allow the turnaround at a later date.  To be clear, we weren’t asking for the turnaround, which would have been premature, but only for a change to accommodate the turnaround at a future date.  And the change would have actually reduced the sports fields construction cost.

The suggested change was conveyed to the team managing the construction, which readily agreed to the revision.  And then forgot to implement it.

I don’t think there was any ill will in the forgetfulness.  I expect the change was simply overlooked in the fog of construction.  Plus, as someone recently noted to me, we’re still dealing with a generation of engineers who have been forced to think about bicycle and pedestrian issues, but for whom transit is still not automatic to them.

Plus, the oversight may have been partially the result of the Transit Committee still not having, despite well over two years of requesting, the official power to comment on land use matters.  (I’ve recently been advised that this issue may again be moving ahead.)

The turnaround remains a future possibility, but demolition of recently installed improvements may be necessary to accommodate it, which would be unfortunate for all.

The overall report card on the efforts to incorporate urbanist strategies to improve access to the Petaluma Community Sports Fields, without spending $90 million on the Rainier Connector, is a mixed but mostly disappointing bag.  If I squint really hard, I can see giving a C to the bicycle/pedestrian path.  But otherwise I see only Ds and Incompletes.  As always, urbanism is whispering good solutions in our ears and we’re not listening.

And now, it’s truly time to move along and to bury the Rainier Connector bone for awhile.  There’s nothing further to be seen here.

A recent vacation took me to a part of the country that was largely new to me.  As I crossed into each new state, I crossed out another line on my mental tally of states still unvisited.  In this record keeping, I suspect I was like many travelers.  But then it dawned on me that maintaining a log of states visited was a silly task for an urbanist.  I’ll explain why in my next post.

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

Rainier Connector: What are the Urbanist Alternatives?

My last two posts have been about the Rainier Connector, a long-planned but still controversial arterial in the northwest quadrant of Petaluma.  Although the Connector is specific to Petaluma, it offers insights that have universal application.

I’d truly planned for today to be my last post, at least for awhile, on the Rainier Connector.  But, as is often the case, I found too many angles of the story that fascinated me, grew verbose, and still have one more aspect of the situation to explore.  I’ll touch upon that final perspective in my next post and then truly let this subject rest for awhile.

In my last two posts, I’ve written about the upcoming hearing in front of the Petaluma City Council on the Final Environment Impact Report (FEIR) for the Connector, grumbling that a yes/no decision didn’t capture the complexities of either the environmental review process or the roadway alternatives.  And then I wrote about why, although I think the Rainier Connector has a place in Petaluma’s future, I don’t believe that the time for its construction has yet come.

While I’ve been chewing on the roadway project, the City Council certified the FEIR on a vote of 5-2.  Of the five in the majority, all noted the traffic relief benefits.  One of those on the other side acknowledged the traffic relief, but argued that the benefits failed to outweigh the costs.  The other argued that the extent of the traffic benefits would be uncertain until Caltrans makes a decision about whether to build a new interchange to serve the Connector and that he couldn’t support the project with that uncertainty hanging over it.

Not one Councilmember noted that the traffic relief, if that term is understood to mean reduced traffic congestion, would be fleeting and soon consumed by induced traffic.  The omission was particularly notable because updated standards based on that point have been approved by the State Legislature and are currently in the rule-making process.  Nor did any Councilmember note the greenhouse gas emission impacts of new roads, which will also be incorporated in the new state standards.

I could have been disheartened that the entire Council of my town is lagging behind the State Legislature in understanding the new realities of traffic.  But I don’t think that would have been fair.  I suspect that some of the Councilmembers have an inkling of the evolving understanding of traffic, but judged that this wasn’t the time to take a stand.  And I believe that the others are bright, intelligent people for whom the penny will soon drop.  So, I’ll maintain a positive attitude and keep plugging away.

For today, that means looking at what urbanism can offer in place of new arterials.

There was an interesting moment during the hearing when the mayor asked what other traffic relief options could have instead been pursued with the $90 million estimated project cost.  Planning staff was quick to respond, correctly so, that their charge had been the Rainier Connector, not the broader range of options to which the mayor alluded.  But the question still opened a door to insightful ruminations.

I suspect the mayor was thinking of alternative road projects, but I’ll open the field of consideration even further.

A few years back, I was involved in a pair of North Bay urban mixed-use projects.  The projects would have brought 300 residential units downtown.  But the city required construction of a broad boulevard as an element of the projects.  While the boulevard would have served the projects, it would also have met larger city goals of beautification and function.  And those larger goals, which carried a price tag of perhaps $4 million, were crushing the projects, both of which eventually failed.

At the time, one of the developers at the time argued that a city contribution of $2 million toward the boulevard costs would have been sufficient to get the projects underway.  But to be conservative, let’s assume that the city would have needed to carry the full cost of $4 million for the projects to proceed.  Doing the division, that would have been a cost of approximately $13,000 per unit for new residential units to be built downtown rather than in drivable settings.

Using that same unit cost for the entire $90 million cost of the Rainier Connector would bring downtown the next 6,750 residential units to be built in Petaluma.  If we make the assumption that average daily trips per home in a richly urbanized downtown is reduced from ten trips per day, the typical value used for estimating traffic, to six trips per day, which is achievable, the total of daily trips that would be removed from city streets would have been 27,000.  That’s a significant number.

Barring a lot more study, I don’t know whether removing 27,000 trips from Petaluma streets would have the same traffic impacts as building the Rainier Connector.  But as the reduced trips are permanent, and not subject to being consumed by induced traffic, I suspect that the 27,000 would have a greater impact on improving traffic.  And that’s before considering the reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, this quick analysis doesn’t consider a number of other factors, including whether there are places for 6,750 downtown residences in Petaluma and whether funding $13,000 of infrastructure per unit is sufficient to incentivize a private investment of perhaps $200,000 per unit.  But as a simple overview, it points toward areas of further study.

Some many even argue that cities shouldn’t be spending public funds to incentivize private developers, but after 70 years of subsidizing the cost of gasoline and roads to facilitate drivable suburbia, it’s a rather baseless argument.

Of course, all of this speculation is about a long-term vision of what urbanism can offer.  It’s the perspective that should be most important in formulating our cities, but I understand that many will ask for more immediate benefits.  I also have some thoughts on that subject, which I’ll offer in my next post.  After which I promise to leave the Rainier Connector alone for awhile.

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

Rainier Connector: Why Not Now?

In my last post, I wrote about a topic that was to come before the Petaluma City Council on the evening of August 3.  The Council will decide whether the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for the Rainier Connector, a proposed arterial that would augment the traffic grid in the northwestern quadrant of town, meets the standards for environmental studies under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

In the post, I explained that I was frustrated by two aspects of the decision.  First, I was disappointed that the traffic section of the FEIR relied on older standards that will soon be replaced by legislatively-mandated regulations that will better reflect current thinking on traffic generation and climate change.  While I understood the need to complete the FEIR on the current schedule, it was still frustrating to see Petaluma disregard the best available approach, particularly on climate change.

Second, I thought that the Connector wasn’t yet ripe for construction.  While there is an argument for soon building a small segment of the Connector, the underpass beneath Highway 101 that can be constructed more efficiently if done simultaneously with upcoming freeway widening, my urbanist thinking says that the remainder of the road isn’t needed for years.  However, the inclusion of the entire Connector in the FEIR, and the process that requires the Council to vote the entire FEIR either up or down, precluded that level of nuance in the decision.

I remain comfortable with both of my conclusions.  And yet I judged that, despite my reservations, I would probably vote for the FEIR if I were on the Council, primarily to keep the underpass moving ahead.

However, from comments received, I also understand that I could have also dug deeper into the subject.  It’s a problem which I often encountered in writing this blog.  To my eyes, urbanism is a glorious multi-dimensional quilt with the various elements connecting in weird and wonderful ways, many of which I’m still working to fully grasp.

In a blog post, I focus on a tiny patch of the quilt, trying to explain the pattern to the readers while also sometimes adding a stitch or two of my own.  But at the same time I need to explain how the patch fits into the nearby areas and into the entire pattern.  And I need to do so without consuming the entire length of the post or exhausting the attention span of readers.

It’s a challenge for which my writing skills are often inadequate.  Hence, the occasional need to go back and fill in more detail to what I’ve already written.   This post, and the next one, will be in that mode.

Today, I’ll tackle the question of why building the Connector now would be premature.  It’s a subject on which I’ve written in the past, but I understand that many readers aren’t interested in returning to long ago posts, so I’ll provide an update here.

There are two principal reasons why building the Rainier Connector now would be a mistake.  One is induced traffic.  The other is maintenance.

The theory of induced traffic argues that roads create trips.  I know this seems absurd at first blush, but it really does appear to be true.  Let me ask a pair of questions.  Have you ever thought that you’d like to travel to the other side of your town, but didn’t want to drive in traffic, so deferred your trip until later?  If there was less congestion, perhaps because a new route had just opened, might you change your mind and take the trip now?  I expect that most of us would answer yes to both questions.  Congratulations, that makes all of us participants in induced traffic.

Research has shown that up to half of all new traffic capacity is consumed on the day the ribbon is cut.  And that much of the remaining capacity of consumed over the next decade, even in the absence of new development.

The implication is that congestion relief won’t happen.  Instead congestion will return to current levels over the next decade.  More people may travel between the east and west sides of town before congestion occurs, but that is about the only real benefit for the $90 million project cost.  If the primary motivation for building the Rainier Connector is congestion relief, then it shouldn’t be built.

Furthermore, as congestion reasserts itself, there would be opposition to new development on the grounds of traffic congestion, even though that new development is projected to help pay the debt from the Rainier construction.  It would become a Gordian knot.

And really, the story is even worse than that.  Let me use Friedman’s as an example.  (For those not in the North Bay, Friedman’s is a regional chain analogous to Home Depot or Lowe’s, but better.)

I love the fact that Friedman’s has returned to Petaluma.  Indeed, of the two recently opened Petaluma shopping centers, Friedman’s is the only business that I truly welcomed.

But I also love Rex Hardware in downtown Petaluma, relatively convenient to my home.  Rex is a cozy 90-year-old business that still sells individual screws, my personal measure of a good hardware store.  For most purchases, especially the smaller ones, I go to Rex.  (I’ve already visited there once today.)  Yes, I pay a little more, but I save time and travel costs.  I also have access to folks who give great advice.

 But imagine if the Rainier Connector was built, creating a few years in which congestion might be less.  More folks would likely trek across town to Friedman’s, looking to save a few dollars compared to Rex.  Seeing the business loss, Rex might decide to finally close their doors, leaving as the only option a drive across town to Friedman’s, creating yet more traffic as congestion reasserts itself.

And Friedman’s/Rex is only the hardware element of local retail.  Consider all the other retail segments that make up a community and imagine all the additional car trips that would created as the retail options lessen.

Managing congestion means encouraging neighborhood businesses that require few or no driving miles, not building streets that allow people to more easily bypass those businesses.

 The maintenance issue relies on a more intuitive argument.  From the day roads are built, they need maintenance.  Upkeep is essential is get good service over the life of the road.  I don’t have a good estimate of the maintenance costs for the Rainier Connector, but at least $100,000 per year seems a reasonable low-end guess.  Petaluma doesn’t have the funds to maintain its current roads.  How does adding $100,000 to a failed bottom line make sense?

I still believe that someday Petaluma will need the Rainier Connector.  The coherency of the traffic grid requires it.  But that someday should be when the town has many more people and the Connector is needed to give those folks logical routes of travel.  Someday isn’t today.

In my next post, I’ll write about what urbanism offers as an alternative to building new arterials.  I’ll offer both a view of the big urbanist picture that applies everywhere and a series of thoughts that apply specifically to the Rainier Connector.

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

Rainier Connector: When Neither Yes nor No Meets the Need

If memory serves, I was nine years old when my father introduced me to the possibility of questions having implicit but flawed propositions.  The example he used was “Have you stopped beating your wife?”  Because our brains perceive a simple yes/no answer as acceptance of the proposition, questions like this put the responder in a quandary, unsure how to disavow the incorrect premise.

(As a necessary digression, I’ve reported my father’s example question solely as a matter of historical accuracy.  It truly was the example he used.  But I’ll acknowledge that the question clanks on 21st century ears.  I don’t know what has changed since 1962, whether it’s our sense of humor, our sense of irony, or our acceptance of violence, but I still find it odd that my quiet, reserved father, who saved his ire almost exclusively for home improvement projects gone awry, used that particular example.  I can only assume that he was tone-deaf when he heard someone else use the example.

I’ll also note that other questions can illustrate the point equally well.  “Have you quit beating your husband?”, “Have you quit teasing the family dog?”, “Have you quit fudging your workout log?”, and “Have you quit cheating on your taxes?” are all examples.  In recognition of one element of the ongoing financial crisis in Greece, I’ll use the last for the remainder of this post.)

I mention this peculiar intersection between grammatical form and human cognition because a question with elements of “Have you quit cheating on your taxes?” will soon come before the Petaluma City Council.

I’ve written before about the Rainier Connector, a proposed Petaluma arterial that, although short in length, would be long in cost.  In its length of under a mile, it would pass beneath Highway 101 and over both the Petaluma River and the railroad mainline, all of which adds greatly to its estimated bottom line.  The estimated cost varies depending on assumptions about design and cost sharing, but $90 million is a commonly used number. 

Although a funding source for the Rainier Connector remains unknown, with voters having recently rejected two separate sales tax measures that would have provided at least partial funding for the project, the Petaluma Planning Department has been proceeding with the environmental impact process.  This work has been undertaken because of a need to align with an upcoming freeway design effort.

With the public vetting of the environmental studies now nearly complete, the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) is scheduled for consideration by the City Council on Monday, August 3.  The question that is implicit in the consideration is whether the FEIR adequately addresses the environmental impacts of the roadway project consistent with the provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

This is the question that I find has much in common with “Have you quit cheating on your taxes?”  Neither yes nor no seems to meet the need because the question contains implicit propositions that I desperately want to disavow.

In my comments, I’ll write solely about the traffic impacts of the Connector.  It’s the aspect of the project with which I’m most familiar and about which I’ve often written, including here, here, and here, when I offered an urbanist perspective on the traffic issues around the project.

I know there are other important environmental issues, such as the impact of the river crossing on potential flooding, the effects on flora and fauna within the floodplain, the potential for erosion, construction noise, and many others.  All of those issues undoubtedly will be considered by the Council, but traffic is where I’ll focus today.

The traffic analysis in the FEIR shows traffic improvement at most intersections, with the only exceptions being the intersections approaching the Rainier Connector.  The improvements are more minor than many may have expected, but that’s largely the result of baseline traffic being expected to continue increasing between now and 2020, when the new roadway might be completed.

So far, so good.  But here’s the problem.  The traffic analysis was done using intersection level-of-service, an approach that has been used for decades, but is now increasingly perceived as being more about moving cars across town than people and is being steadily replaced in environmental studies by vehicle miles traveled, an approach that incorporates both greenhouse gas emissions and induced traffic.

Among the agencies that have adopted the new approach is the State of California, which sets the CEQA standards.  However, at last report, the state was still working on the rules to implement the new traffic study method.  Until that task is complete, cities such as Petaluma may continue using the soon-to-be-supplanted level-of-service standard.

Other California cities, notably Pasadena, eager to embrace the new model and to begin managing traffic growth with an eye toward climate change, have adopted their own rules in advance of the state.  But Petaluma chose not to follow that path, clinging to the old rules and publicly expressing skepticism about the new rules.

And so this is where we start entering the anomalous world of “Have you quit cheating on your taxes?”  Is the FEIR consistent with CEQA?  Probably, at least with regards to traffic.  But the CEQA rules are outdated and soon to be replaced.  And it’s hard to feel good about being consistent with obsolete rules, especially when the impact of following the old rules is increased risk of climate change.

Indeed, it’s likely that the roadway would fail the new vehicle miles traveled standard because the Rainier Connector will increase the number of vehicle miles traveled.  But the yes/no dichotomy being presented to the City Council doesn’t allow for exploring that possibility.

(Time for another digression.  Petaluma holds an anomalous role in the world of urbanist planning.  Among the first places, along with the State of Oregon, to adopt Urban Growth Boundaries as a planning tool and the very first to implement the cutting-edge SmartCode to direct urban development, Petaluma is sometimes perceived as a progressive planning community.

But that perspective ignores the rest of the history.  The single-family housing sprawl that continued even after the first Urban Growth Boundary was adopted.  The flawed drafting of several key provisions of the SmartCode that hamstrung urban developers, missteps that have only recently been corrected.

Petaluma’s planning history is known by many for its bold steps into the future and by others for its bumbling follow-up to those steps.

Planning for a $90 million roadway using traffic criteria that have already been disowned by much of the world, including the State of California, seems to align with the bumbling side of the Petaluma equation.)

Further complicating the yes/no calculus is the reason that the FEIR is coming forth at this time, far in advance of construction funding.  Without an approved FEIR, Caltrans can’t accommodate the Rainier underpass in the design of the widening Highway 101 that could perhaps occur in the next few years.

And, in my opinion, Petaluma truly does need the Rainier Connector.  It doesn’t need the new road today, but I suspect that the Rainier Connector may well be an essential element of the local transportation grid someday, perhaps in 2075 when the local population is 125,000.  By then, the roadway could be a vital path to provide efficient routes for city buses, to strengthen the bicycle network, and to connect people living in homes that haven’t yet been built to businesses that don’t yet exist.

But in 2075, it may be prohibitively expensive to build an underpass beneath an existing freeway.  So it’s reasonable to build the underpass today, making it available for the future time when it’s truly needed.

Pushed to make my own decision, and with my only choices being yes and no, I’d probably vote in favor of approving the FEIR.  But the vote would come with a strong caveat that I’d have no interest in building the Rainier Connector at this time, except for the freeway underpass.

I suspect that an alternative FEIR, one that addresses the question of building the underpass in the next decade, but not building the remainder of the road until a date that may be a half-century away, would meet even the coming CEQA traffic standards.  And I would expect it to be a FEIR that I could support whole-heartedly.  But that’s not the question before the City Council.

Nor am I alone in finding myself conflicted by the decision as now presented.  When the FEIR was reviewed by the Petaluma Planning Commission, it failed to win approval on a 3-3 tie vote.  Since that evening, I’ve had the opportunity to chat with a couple of the Commissioners who voted against approval after long and difficult consideration.  I’m proud to have fellow community members who worked so hard on the issue and voted the way that their heads and their hearts told them was right.

Does it make sense to laud Planning Commissioners who reached a different decision that I suspect I would have?  Not really.  But that’s what happens when we pose yes/no questions with flawed propositions.

I expect an interesting City Council meeting on the 3rd.

Meanwhile, yes, I’ve quit cheating on my taxes.  … I mean no, I haven’t quit cheating on my taxes.  …  No, no, no, what I mean is … Well, nuts.

In my next post, I’ll add one last detail to my thoughts on the Rainier Connector, an example of how flawed decision-making inevitably builds upon itself.

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

The Futile Search for “Achievable Alternatives”: What Urbanism Offers Instead

In my last two posts, I’ve tried to respond to a question from a correspondent.  His query was about a vexing traffic problem in Petaluma, the town we both call home, but the response applies to traffic issues in many towns across the U.S.

His question pertained to congestion on E. Washington Street and the traffic relief that the Rainier Connector was purported to offer.  (As a further bit of background, funding of the Rainier Connector was a key element in a tax measure on which Petalumans voted, and soundly defeated, last week.)

In my first post on the subject, I noted the reasons why arterials often become congested.  In the second, I explained why new road capacity is often sucked up by “induced demand”, so that new road construction often provides less traffic relief than hoped.  I offered a campground analogy in an effort to explain the induced traffic phenomenon, which many find non-intuitive.

The reader’s initial question had been about “achievable alternatives” to the Rainier Connector.  Having established, to my satisfaction and hopefully to his, that there no achievable alternatives and also that even the Rainier Connector wouldn’t have provided the promised benefits, I’ll close by noting the insights that urbanism provides on the subject.

The urbanism thinking falls into three categories: acceptance, alleviation, and avoidance.

Acceptance: Urbanism argues that traffic congestion, while perhaps unpleasant, is a sign of economic vitality and should be tolerated as such.  The only communities that solved traffic problems were those that managed to tank their economies.  (I haven’t visited either extensively, but have encountered few traffic problems in either Detroit or Stockton.)

The quote often put forth by urbanists regarding traffic congestion is “If you have an economically vital district with a traffic problem and manage to solve the traffic problem, you’ve probably killed the economic life.”

Alleviation: But even if traffic congestion can’t be solved, it can still be better managed.

In my last post, I offered a hypothetical example of a free campground on the valley floor of Yosemite.  It was my way to explain induced traffic.  The campground can now offer further insights.

If we decide that the campground is worth continuing, but wish to reduce the overcrowding without instituting a reservation or lottery system, what would be the best tool to reduce the number of campers?  Pricing.  Bump up the cost of an overnight stay until the demand drops to the desired level. 

Similarly, pricing is the obvious tool for managing road usage.  However, we don’t use pricing at all.  Urban streets are generally built with property tax revenues, so local residents pay the same amount whether they use Main Street through downtown once a month or five times a day.

There are three mechanisms generally available as pay-per-use models, vehicle mileage tax (VMT), congestion fees, and gasoline taxes.  All have worth, but all also have downsides.

VMT is a flat rate per mile traveled.  Car owners might report odometer readings once per  month, with the resulting mileage charge then assessed.  It’s a simple system to manage, but charges the same for a mile driven on a county road at 5am as for a mile in a congested downtown core at 3pm.  (Oregon has implemented a pilot VMT program.)

Congestion fees are daily fees for entering into districts with established traffic problems.  A fee of perhaps $10 is charged to all cars entering the district during business hours.  Charges are assessed from license plates collected by automated readers.  The logic behind congestion fees is valid, but the cost of administration generally matches the revenue generated, so there is little net revenue to address traffic improvements.  (I believe the City of London has implemented congestion pricing and several American urban cores, such as lower Manhattan and the financial district in San Francisco have begun considering it.)

Which brings us to the most significant tool available, gasoline taxes.  I’ve long advocated significantly higher gasoline taxes so the costs related to the use of gasoline, such as the geopolitical and environmental costs, can be covered by gasoline taxes rather than general fund dollars.  But higher gasoline taxes would also reduce driving and thereby reduce congestion.  Plus, higher gasoline taxes would encourage behavioral changes such as downtown living and transit use, which would also reduce congestion.

Like VMT, a higher gasoline tax wouldn’t be able to differentiate between miles driven on empty country roads and miles driven in downtown setting, but overall justification for higher gasoline taxes is sufficiently strong that this objection seems relatively minor.

Others have presented reasonable arguments that the “correct” cost of gasoline should be at least $10 per gallon, which would mean taxes in the range of $6 to $7 per gallon.  Admittedly, imposing a tax of that amount would cause significant economic dislocations, but a gradually increasing tax, perhaps at the rate of 25 cents per year, would allow a period of adjustment.

A higher gasoline tax is an idea that has come.  Indeed, its time came ten years ago but we’ve managed to ignore it thus far.  But we should ignore it no longer.

Avoidance: This is the point when urbanism truly shines.  Don’t like spending a good part of your day stuck in traffic?  Live in a walkable urban setting where much of your daily life can be accomplished on foot or on bike and where transit is readily available for longer outings.  Living in an urban setting doesn’t necessarily mean living without a car, but it might mean putting one’s car in a garage and not thinking about it for a week or more.

Admittedly, there are still too few urban residences where this kind of life can be lived.  And the ones that do exist are often expensive.  But following the alleviation steps above can begin to remedy those deficiencies.  Indeed, that’s the central thrust of urbanism.

Okay, this subject has been well and fully covered.  Next up, I’ll return to the topic of incrementalism versus vision, offering a few illustrative examples.  And then I’ll summarize the successful Urban Chat meeting on the re-use of the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds.

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

The Futile Search for “Achievable Alternatives”: Why the Apparent Solution Fails

In my last post, I introduced a question from a correspondent about “achievable alternatives” for traffic congestion relief.  The particular question pertained to the congested E. Washington Street in Petaluma and the proposed Rainier Connector that many believe would provide relief, but the question could apply to overloaded arterials everywhere.

In the earlier post, I explained how E. Washington Street became congested.   I also presented the Rainier Connector as the apparent solution in the minds of many.  Today, I’ll try to offer an explanation on why that conventional wisdom is wrong.  In my next post, I’ll offer the alternative ways of thinking about traffic that are provided by urbanism.

The Problem with the Proposed Solution:  The reason that the Rainier Connector likely won’t provide significant traffic relief is induced traffic.  It’s a concept that I’ve noted before, but today I’ll try to provide a deeper and more complete explanation.

Economists have a well-evolved vocabulary for many of the concepts I’ll try to explain below.  But I’m not an economist and would likely trip over my word choices if I pretended to be one.  So I’ll write in my own lay words.  And if the economists among the readers want to recast my arguments into the economist dictionary, please do so.

The root of traffic congestion, and the resulting problem of induced traffic, is related to how public agencies set, or don’t set, prices on scarce resources.

In the private world, the free market system with its rules of supply and demand usually governs.  Given tee times to fill at a top-rated golf course, the green fees are set high.  If surplus demand still remains, the green fees are bumped even higher until the demand for tee times eventually matches the number of tee times available.  Given rooms to fill at a nice hotel, the same rules apply.  Diamonds to sell?  Same rules.  Adjust the price until supply and demand meet.

The supply and demand system is marvelously elegant and intuitive.  And for the most part, it works well.  Some may not like the answers that pop out, but the market usually tends toward logical and rational.

But we, as represented by our various levels of government, typically have an aversion to the applying the same market rules to public resources.  We don’t want the best camping places going to millionaires driving tricked out recreational vehicles.  And we don’t want to dole out hunting permits only to the well-heeled.

So instead, we devise a range of non-price systems to allocate scarce resources.  Have a campground that’s usually full all summer?  Institute a policy that requires advance reservations on a first-come, first-served basis.  Managing a trail that has excess demand?  Devise a lottery for hiking permits.  Afraid that unfettered fishing will exhaust a stream?  Implement rules like catch-and-release, closed seasons, and catch limits to reduce pressure on the fishery.

But there are also public resources to which we don’t choose to apply significant impediments.  At the top of that list is street capacity.  Given that most people already have cars and drivers licenses, the only barriers to driving extra miles, whether on open country roads or congested downtown streets, is the incremental vehicle wear-and-tear and the cost of gasoline, neither of which is a significant barrier.

To understand the implications of this absence of obstacles to driving, let’s try a thought experiment.

Presumably all are familiar with the scenic wonders of Yosemite National Park.  Access to Yosemite is well-regulated by entrance fees, high cost hotel rooms, advance registration campgrounds, and hiking trail lotteries.

But imagine if Yosemite management decided that the barriers to park use were too high.  To allow more folks to partake of the park, they clear a meadow on the valley floor, throw a fence around it, and open it to unlimited camping use.  No reservations, no fees, no designated camp sites.  Just an open gate.  People could pitch tents wherever they wished, with no standards about how far they needed to be from other tents.  (To be clear, I’m not suggesting this idea.  I’m only offering it for thought purposes.)

What would happen?  Obviously, the campground would fill quickly and campers would soon be stepping on each other’s toes.  Some campers would give up and go home, deciding that a vista of Half Dome wasn’t worth being unable to warm one’s hands at one’s campfire without burning one’s backside on a neighbor’s campfire.  But plenty of campers with a high tolerance for crowding would remain.

Now let’s say that Yosemite management, looking at the “success” of the new campground, decided that the concept was valid, but that the overcrowding had become too burdensome.  To allow more spacing between tents, they decide to open a second campground with the same set of rules, arguing that the density of campsites will thereby be halved.

But that’s not what would happen.  Remember the campers who went away, turned off by the lack of space between tents?  They’d come back, happy to camp with even a little more space.  The congestion in the second campground would quickly rise to nearly the same level as the first campground.

Obviously, there would some number of campgrounds that would satisfy the demand for cheap, no-frills Yosemite experiences, but the entire valley floor might be consumed before that point is reached.

And that’s exactly what happens with congested city arterials.  Some may argue that traffic congestion would disappear with new road capacity, but the reality is that campers, I mean drivers, who had previously deferred trips would return to congest the new roadway.

Nor is this a hypothetical supposition.  Study after study shows that a large chunk of new roadway capacity is consumed on the day it opens, with the remainder consumed in next few years, even in the absence of new development.

This finding is why the State of California is implementing new rules to judge environmental impacts based on traffic generation, not congestion.  Unwilling to await the new state rules, the City of Pasadena implemented their own rules to the same end.

(Side note: When the Petaluma Planning Commission reviewed the Draft Environment Impact Report for the Rainier Connector, some Commissioners noted the surprisingly small congestion relief benefits projected as a result of the new road.  But under the pending revised California rules, which measure traffic generation in place of congestion relief, the balance would make the outlook even worse.  Instead of a minor benefit, the traffic impacts of Rainier Connector would be judged a negative.)

So when the correspondent asked about “achievable alternatives”, his underlying supposition was flawed.  Not only are there no achievable alternatives, but even the preferred solution of the Rainier Connector wouldn’t provide the promised benefits.  Induced traffic undermines any attempt to reduce traffic congestion by building new roads.

Urbanism can’t solve the problem of induced capacity, but it can offer a different land-use paradigm and set of tools that would make traffic congestion less of a daily problem.  The paradigm and those tools will be covered in my next post.

Schedule Reminder

The meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat to take a renewed look at the Sonoma Marin Fairgrounds is rapidly approaching.  It’ll be Tuesday, November 11.  To accommodate the anticipated larger than normal attendance, the meeting has been moved to Taps at 54 E. Washington Street in the River Plaza shopping center.  We’ll convene at 5:30 and likely conclude shortly after 7:00.  Please be on time because the evening is expected to be full.

Some have asked about a recap of earlier meetings.  The topic of the fairgrounds was originally broached back in July.  As the early meetings progressed, two updates were provided here and here, and then a couple of points required clarification.  The coming meeting won’t necessarily build on the earlier meetings, but familiarity with the previous conversations may be useful.

I look forward to a successful meeting and to chatting with many of you.

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

The Futile Search for “Achievable Alternatives”: Defining the Problem

I recently attended a meeting of North Bay writers talking about the business of writing.  Among folks with filmed screenplays and published novels, I felt presumptuous calling myself a writer based on this modest blog, but hoped that, if I can kept my ears open, I might learn something.

I was correct.  Among other insights from the evening, a novelist suggested that I should remain continually aware of barriers to new readers.  Readers who don’t have a grasp on the rudiments of urbanism might not glean as much from a blog post, so might be less likely to become regular readers.

Her comment was appreciated.  Within the constraints of relatively short blog posts, I think I do reasonably well at staying in touch with the fundamentals of urbanism, but it would be impossible to begin each blog post with a complete recap of urbanist principles.  Therefore, I’ll begin 2015 with a series of posts laying out the urbanist philosophy as perceived and expounded by me.  My hope will be to attract new readers whose New Year’s Resolutions included greater community involvement.

Meanwhile, the exercise will also be good for me because my grasp of urbanism has deepened, broadened, and evolved since I began this blog.  It’ll be helpful for me to recheck and to solidify the fundamentals of my own understanding.

So if you have friends who have been interested in this blog, but have been unsure where to start, tell them to mark January 5th on their calendars.  On that day, I’ll begin a recap that will hopefully provide benefits to all.

But even while acknowledging that some potential readers might need a remedial symposium on the fundamentals of urbanism, I felt comfortable that my current readers had a good grasp on the principles and the logic of urbanism.

It’s possible I was wrong.

In an email exchange about Measure Q and the proposed Rainier Connector in Petaluma, a reader advised me that traffic congestion was a continuing concern to him and that he was likely to support the Rainier Connector “in the absence of a good achievable alternative”. 

The reader was someone with whom I’ve chatted many times, both electronically and face-to-face, so his position surprised me.  And to the extent it reflected a misunderstanding of the nature of traffic congestion, it was a rebuke to me and my apparent inability to correctly convey the pertinent information.

Accordingly, I’ll use the Rainier Connector as an example to present urbanist thought on traffic congestion.  It’s a bigger topic than I want to cover in a single day, so today I’ll define the problem as created by town planning and as generally understood by the public and then identify the generally perceived “solution”.  In my next post, I’ll explain why the solution doesn’t work and what urbanism offers instead.

The Problem: Like most cities that grew in the years after World War II, the street system of Petaluma is largely organized in a hierarchical form, with arterials at the top and local streets and alley at the bottom.  The expectation is that drivers will use local streets to access collectors and then arterials which they’ll use to reach their general destination, at which point they’ll return to local streets for the final distance.

(In comparison, consider older cities such as San Francisco or New York.  A street hierarchy still exists, but the extent of the differentiation is reduced.  Market Street is still a major arterial, but Mission, Folsom, and Howard offer alternative routes that more hierarchical towns don’t.)

When a town such as Petaluma is divided by a river or another geographical feature, traffic is further concentrated on arterials.  The costs of bridges or tunnels allow fewer crossings, forcing all traffic to the limited crossings available.  That concentration becomes troublesome as population growth, increased affluence, and land use decisions result in increased traffic.

Which brings us back to Petaluma.  Many destinations are clustered in two areas, the downtown and the development around the freeway.  E. Washington Street, which crosses over the Petaluma River, is the most direct route between the two, so is the logically preferred route for many.

There are three alternatives to E. Washington Street that also cross the river.  However, Corona Street is too far north for many drivers, Lakeville Street is oddly skewed across the city grid and doesn’t meet the needs of many drivers, and D Street is well located, but heads into a limited capacity residential neighborhood east of the river.

So, E. Washington Street remains the preferred route for many.  And, as traffic grew over the years, many became convinced that the street was impossibly congested.

(To be fair, the congestion can be a matter of perspective.  The traffic consultant on the Petaluma Station Area study, having heard horror stories about E. Washington, spent time studying it.  He reported back that he found the congestion far less than reported.  Instead, he noted that the development pattern along the street is ugly and that drivers are more frustrated by congestion when their surroundings are unappealing, so over-report congestion.  He thought that E Washington was an aesthetic problem as much as a traffic problem.  I suspect there is at least some truth in his comments, although I doubt that public perception was swayed by his argument.)

So that brings us to today.  E. Washington Street is perceived as congested and the existing alternatives don’t provide much relief.

The Solution: The most generally understood solution is the Rainier Connector, a new street that would cross the Petaluma River between E. Washington and Corona and connect into the existing street grid on both ends.  (The Caulfield Extension and Bridge might actually be more effective than Rainier, but hasn’t grabbed the public attention.)

The Rainier vision is appealing, but the likely practical effect is less promising.  The reasons for the shortfall are complex, but I’ve already taken too much of your attention today.  I’ll defer the discussion to my next post.

And be sure to remember January 5.

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