Category: SACOG

big day of meetings!

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Once every few months, there are four transportation-related meetings on a single day, and that day is tomorrow, February 20, 2025. Except for retired folks with nothing better to do (me), no one could attend all four meetings. Three of the meetings are during the work day, which are scheduled then for two purposes: 1) because the members don’t want to do anything in the evening, and 2) to ensure that most of the public cannot participate. Nevertheless, I encourage readers to pick one meeting that seems of most interest, and attend in person or watch online. And comment! Though you may not have expertise on the topic being discussed, you have expertise and lived experience as a member of society.

Of the four meetings, one accepts comments online, the SacRT Mobility Advisory Council (MAC). The others do not. To comment, you must either attend in person, or submit comments online ahead of time. Comments submitted at the last moment will be included in the meeting record, but the board/commission/council/committee members will only see those comments submitted well ahead of time, usually three hours, though it varies with meeting. Meeting agendas, and select agenda items are below. I picked some agenda items of interest to me, but your interests may be different, so I suggest you take a look at the entire agenda and documents. You won’t find any presentations, because, well, that is the games agencies play with agenda presentations. Though, as a pleasant surprise, all the CARTA presentations are already available.

9:30 AM, SACOG Board of Directors, Meetings and Agendas page. Comments In-person: Public comment may be made in person at SACOG’s offices, or Written comments: May be submitted via email to the clerk at lespinoza@sacog.org.

12:00 noon, Capitol Area Tolling Authority, Board Meetings page. Comments In-person: Public comment may be made in person at the meeting location, or Written comments: May be submitted via email to the clerk at rtadevich@sacog.org.

2:30 PM, SacRT Mobility Advisory Council (MAC), MAC page. Comments In-person: Public comment may be made in person at the meeting location, or online via Zoom.

5:30 PM, Sacramento Active Transportation Commission (SacATC), Upcoming Meetings page. Comment In-person: Public comment may be made in person at the meeting location, or via eComment on the Upcoming Meetings page. eComment is open when the agenda is posted, and remains open until the beginning of public comment on an agenda item. Commissioners will not see eComments submitted during the meeting, but these will be part of the public record.

SACOG Board and voting

Dan Allison1 Comment

I have attended several SACOG board and committee meetings over the last two months, and seen the pushback that smaller cities and more rural areas are providing to the innovations of the 2025 Blueprint, in particular Scenario 3 which promotes infill rather than greenfield development. I will have more to say about this in the future, but for now, want to address the question of why these areas have such a strong voice in SACOG. It is the very structure of the Board of Directors, to give every member one vote, not matter the size of the population they represent. This is called one-member/one-vote.

The SACOG Mission and Governance page provide information about the structure and voting of the board. The table below (pdf, xlsx) shows the 31 voting members, the votes assigned to them, the population of the entity, and the votes that would be allocated if votes were population weighted, rather than one-member/one-vote. Caveats: I have not excluded the population of the Lake Tahoe basin in Placer and El Dorado counties, which are not in the SACOG region, because it is difficult to calculate, and not that significant. County supervisors represent all the citizens of a county, whether they are in unincorporated county or within a city. However, in looking a government bodies, I think it is useful to look at unincorporated population, and have used it in the table. County supervisors often seem to forget that they represent the entire county. All figures are from the 2020 census.

There are dozens of striking insights from this table, but I’ll focus on four.

  • In Sacramento County, the City of Isleton has 794 citizens, which is less than 0.1% of the county, and 0.1% of the region. That means the member representing Isleton has about 16 times the power of the member representing Elk Grove. Other counties have similar disparate representation.
  • In the region, Sacramento County has 61.5% of the population, yet only 35.5% of the vote, while Yuba County has 3.2% of the population, yet 9.7% of the vote. Sacramento County has 20 times the population of Yuba County, yet only 3-1/2 times the vote.
  • If Sacramento County were not assigned three voting members, and City of Sacramento two voting member, the disparity between population and voting would be even more prominent. This higher number of voting members is meant to compensate, in a minor way, for the egregious imbalance in representation that would otherwise result.
  • The town of Loomis, not a city, has one member, with a population of 6,836. In Sacramento County, the ‘towns’ (CDPs, census designated places) have far larger populations, yet no representation except through the county: Arden-Arcade 94,659, Carmichael 79,793, North Highlands 49,327, Orangevale 35,569, Fair Oaks 32,514, and several smaller CDPs. How did Loomis get this seat?

I am a believer in democracy. I realize that many people consider us a republic rather than a democracy, but other than the US Senate, we make the effort at all levels of government to approach as closely as possible the democratic ideal of one-person/one-vote. Yet we have entities such as SACOG (Sacramento Area Council of Governments) that, by using one-member/one-vote, are as far from representative of the people as can be.

So when you wonder, why do small cities and rural areas have such a large voice in transportation funding and sustainable communities strategies (the SCS part of the Blueprint), and why we continue to promote greenfield development in the region when we know that greenfield equals climate disaster, please refer back to this governance model.

SACOG Blueprint Workshop leans progressive

Dan Allison2 Comments

I attended the SACOG Blueprint Workshop on Friday, June 16, at the Folsom Community Center. So far as I am aware, this was the largest gathering that SACOG has ever hosted. There were electeds, city and county staff, citizens, and a lot of SACOG staff.

I attended because I was concerned that SACOG would be hearing mostly from electeds and staff, and not citizens. SACOG already hears from electeds and staff, too much. But there were enough citizens there to balance things out. The big surprise to me was that nearly everyone in the room came out of the side of the progressive solutions. Two contrasting scenarios for each of five issues (development pattern, types of housing, transportation expenditures, transit frequency vs coverage, and one I’m not remembering; unfortunately I lost track of the printed material provided, so can’t give you the details). In each case, the consensus of the people in the room was for the progressive idea: infill development, mixed use with multi-family prominent, transportation expenditures on maintenance (fix-it-first; fix the potholes) rather than expansion, investment in active transportation, and better transit frequency. When electeds vote on priorities and projects, they often favor the regressive (low productivity sprawl with a high and unrecoverable investment in transportation and other infrastructure), and many staff support this. But when removed from the direct view of the campaign donor class, it turns out most of them want the right thing. I am hopeful!

When a summary of the workshop becomes available, and/or I get a copy of the printed material, I’ll update this post.

SACOG bike share policy

Dan Allison1 Comment

The SACOG Regional Bike Share Policy Steering Committee met this week on Monday (agenda). This was the first meeting of the committee in quite some while, long enough that the staff member did not remember when the last one was. The committee is almost entirely new people since the last meeting. Members are: Alberto Ayala (Sac Metro Air Quality District), James Corless (SACOG), Dawnté Early (City of West Sacramento), Caity Maple (City of Sacramento council member D5), Katie Valenzuela (City of Sacramento council member D4), and Chair Josh Chapman (City of Davis).

There was a presentation by SACOG staff Nicole Zhi Ling Porter on the status of bike share/scooter share (or micromobility) in the region, as well as questions that the policy committee will help answer. The main question is the ownership and operations model, with three options”

  • privately owned and operated (the current model)
  • publicly owned and operated
  • publicly owned and privately operated (under contract)

These are not exclusive categories. Several existing bike share programs have detail models for operations, using some sort of public/private partnership.

The City of Davis and UC Davis are undertaking a study to determine the model they want to use and the operators. They did not rejoin the regional program after the pandemic shutdown. It has apparently not been decided that they will not rejoin the program, but they wanted to consider other options. There may be an announcement about this in the near future.

The current bike share fleet is about one-third the number of bikes that were available before the pandemic, which was about 900. Sacramento was in fact the most successful bike share system in the country, as measured by number of rides per bike per day. The system is now an also-ran.

Several committee members mentioned that rental costs were now much higher, and that was probably depressing use. I have to admit that I am a Lime Access member, meaning that I don’t pay for individual rides of up to 30 minutes, so I have not noticed the per-minute fees.

I was the only public person in attendance in the room. One person spoke on Zoom, but I have not way of knowing if there were more people observing on Zoom. Note that I am a user of the bike share, not of the scooter share, and don’t have much perspective on scooters, I expressed these concerns, which I hope committee will address:

  • Instability: The unannounced shutdown of the system at the beginning of the pandemic was not the desire of the public, which wanted to continue using the bikes. This type of issue, determined solely on the whims of the operator/owner, is not acceptable to the users, and any new policy must address this issue.
  • Maintenance: The bikes are not being maintained to an acceptable level of good repair. About 1/4 of the bikes I try to rent are unrideable for various reasons, about 1/4 are rideable but have significant issues, and about 1/2 are more of less OK.
  • Distribution: The agreement between the operator/owner requires that some bikes be distributed/rebalanced into low income neighborhoods within the service area (many are not in the service area, but some are). My observation, both from being on the streets and checking the app, indicate that this is not being done.
  • Transit integration: The JUMP bike share system was for a time somewhat integrated with transit. Bike charging stations were located at a number of light rail stations. But when Uber took over the system, these charging stations were removed. So there is no integration at this time. Bike share and transit can complement each other in critical ways, but the current system is operating without that insight. There are a few systems in the country where the transportation/transit agency also operates the bike share system, Los Angeles Metro for example. Though this system is not perfect, the integration is noticeable, and the rental rates are significantly below that of private systems.

the future of downtown

Dan Allison1 Comment

The Belote Lecture: “The Future of Downtowns: Developing a New Vision for America’s Urban Core” occurred on Tuesday at the Citizen Hotel, sponsored by McGeorge School of Law. Chris Morfas alerted me to the lecture by re-tweeting Greg Shill, who I’ve always wanted to meet.

Brian Schoenfisch of the City of San Diego talked about how they had activated public space downtown by closing streets, liberal implementation of temporary and permanent use for dining and recreation, and new parks. Almost all development in downtown is by-right, which was accomplished by removing regulations and doing a categorical CEQA approval for downtown infill.

Noah Arroyo of the SF Chronicle said that a lot of the homeless issue in SF was more perception that reality. He also said that the many, many layers of development review in SF make it nearly impossible to build affordable housing, or any housing.

Greg Shill of University of Iowa Law School said we need to change cities so people can walk/bike to destinations, that cities actually have a lot of control over what happens there, and that transit is going to be in crisis for at least ten years.

Cornelius Burke of California Building Industry Association said that we need housing of all types and for all income levels.

Questions from the audience largely focused on how we make up for past mistakes like urban renewal and redlining, and how citizens can ensure movement towards building cities people want. Everyone agreed that creating a more successful Downtown Sacramento requires housing, housing, housing, to replace and grow beyond that which the city and state removed during urban renewal.

I had interesting discussions with Greg Shill before and after, and with Brian Schoenfisch after. I think the real benefit of these presentations is the opportunity to bounce ideas and perspectives off of people who have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

As I was listening to the lecture and questions, I was also looking out over downtown from the 7th floor Metropolitan Terrace, I came back even more strongly to a key difference between successful midtown and struggling downtown. Almost all of the existing developments and opportunities downtown are quarter block, half blocks, and full blocks. The fine-grained parcels of midtown, which allow and encourage infill development, were erased by the city when they acquired the small parcels and aggregated them into large parcels. So now there are only opportunities for big developments, and big developments are even harder now than they were before. If the city really wanted to promote infill, they would break up the large parcels that are empty or hold surface parking lots into smaller parcels. Infill developers would be asking for these opportunities. Almost no one is asking for the large parcels.

Unlike many events I go to sponsored by the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, at this one I did not know anyone else. That is actually fun, meeting new people.

SACOG pathways

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SACOG is in the process of developing the 2024 MTP/SCS, now referred to as the Blueprint in acknowledgement of the innovative and leading 2004 Blueprint. As part of the process, they have defined three pathways or scenarios, shown below. Pathway one is the vision of more greenfield development, more roadways and expanded roadways, ineffective transit, and neglect of already developed areas. Pathway three is close to the vision of advocates for an effective and equitable transportation system. Pathway two is basically continuing what we are doing, some good things along with many bad things.

Where does the 2022 Measure A transportation sales tax measure, which will lock in a vision of transportation for 40 years while costing taxpayers $8.5 billion, is as close to pathway one as possible. It is a mistake for land use planning, for transportation, for equity, and for climate. Please vote against Measure A in November.

PATHWAY 1: OUTWARD EXPANSION
This pathway builds on the land use trends over the last two decades and expands the footprint of the region outwards through significant lower density growth in developing communities and rural residential areas. It will provide the most large lot single-family and rural residential housing and the least amount of infill growth. The Outward Expansion pathway will provide more emphasis on adding roadway capacity to meet mobility needs. Due to this pathway’s more dispersed land use pattern, transit services will focus on geographic coverage rather than frequency of service, and bicycle and pedestrian facilities will focus more on connecting developing communities to existing networks.

PATHWAY 2: COMPACT GROWTH AND PHASED EXPANSION
This pathway will use the key land use metrics from the 2020 MTP/SCS to create a land use forecast and will be updated with current conditions. In the 2020 MTP/SCS, roughly 65 percent of new housing and 85 percent of new jobs were in infill areas and roughly 73 percent of new homes were either small lot single-family or attached products. This pathway will maintain the transportation project list from the 2020 MTP/SCS but will include updates based on completed or modified projects in capital improvement programs or planning efforts. New roadways or transportation investments will be included where the growth pattern has shifted. Transit service in this pathway will focus on increasing vehicle service hours for bus and rail projects.

PATHWAY 3: INWARD EXPANSION
This pathway will explore a future in which most of the future growth occurs in infill areas such as centers and corridors and established communities. This pathway is intended to explore the performance implications of a future that significantly departs from today’s land use trends. This pathway provides the most new small lot and attached housing and growth in infill areas would consist of already approved projects, vacant lots, and significant redevelopment of underutilized commercial corridors oriented around the transportation investments. In this pathway investments in capacity projects will only be used to address extreme bottle necks and congestion. To meet the region’s mobility needs, this pathway will focus on transit service in corridors with sufficient density and mix of uses needed to generate sufficient ridership to justify higher frequency transit, and fully connect existing communities through an integrated bike and trail network to reach essential destinations within communities.