CEQA VMT reform has a fatal flaw

Dan Allison3 Comments

If you are not otherwise occupied on Thursday afternoon, you may want to attend the California Natural Resources Agency hearing on CEQA reform. The hearing is Thursday, March 15, 1:30 to 4:30, at California Energy Commission, Rosenfeld Hearing Room, 1516 9th St, Sacramento, CA 95814. One of the great things about living in Sacramento is the opportunity to influence state policy and legislation in a way that people in other parts of the state cannot. We can be their proxies.

As a result of a multi-year planning process, the Office of Planning and Research (OPR) developed recommendations to improve CEQA to address some shortcomings, particularly that it has been used to stop good development, infill and mixed use, while encouraging greenfield development. The recommendations are now being passed along to the California Natural Resources Agency for adoption, since that is the agency that administers CEQA.

While there are great improvements contained in the proposal, there is what I consider to be a fatal flaw. From the OPR document (15064.3, Subdivision (b)(2): Transportation Projects): “Subdivision (b)(2) clarifies that projects that reduce VMT, such as pedestrian, bicycle and transit projects, should be presumed to have a less than significant impact. This subdivision further provides that lead agencies have discretion in which measure to use to evaluate roadway, including highway, capacity projects, provided that any such analysis is consistent with the requirements of CEQA and any other applicable requirements (e.g., local planning rules). Importantly, this provision does not prohibit capacity expansion.”

What this means is that transportation agencies can continue to use outmoded and harmful Level of Service (LOS) instead of using Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). To my mind, the main point of CEQA reform was to eliminate LOS, the insidious concept that has led to our unsustainable transportation system. It does so for land use, but does not do so for transportation projects. This is a fatal flaw.

A coalition of environmental and transportation advocacy organizations developed a letter to Resources that addresses the flaw, but seems to give up any hope of making it right, instead hoping that Caltrans will adopt VMT. They might, but I can assure you that many agencies never will unless forced to. Sacramento County, for one, lives in a 1970s mindset that congestion is the great evil that can be met only through roadway expansion, now and forever. [“Apply a VMT-based approach to all projects, including road capacity projects. We are sorely disappointed that the proposed Section 15064.3(b) exempts roadway capacity projects from using a VMT-based measure of transportation-related environmental impacts. With the proposed rulemaking, the State has determined that the best approach to measuring transportationn-related environment impacts is vehicle miles traveled; yet, at the same time, the State has exempted projects with arguably the greatest impact on the environment from using that metric. To close this loophole that threatens California’s environment and public health, we will be recommending that Caltrans commit to applying the VMT metric when they are the responsible agency.”]

If this exemption of transportation projects is not deleted, the exercise will be one of futility because transportation projects have such a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions, both directly from vehicle emissions, and secondarily by encouraging sprawl which itself has a huge impact on emissions.

To be honest, it took me a while and help from several people to find this flaw, and there may be others I’ve missed, but I do still think that the remainder of the proposal is good.

OPR Current CEQA Guidelines Update page: http://opr.ca.gov/ceqa/updates/guidelines/

NRA CEQA page: http://resources.ca.gov/ceqa/

NRDC: California Gets It Right on Transportation—Almost

Streetsblog California: Update: Last Chance to Comment on Statewide Changes to CEQA

Don’t use the ‘A’ word

Dan Allison2 Comments

I attended the community meeting hosted last evening by Jay Schenirer, Steve Hansen, and the school district, called as the result of the recent fatality and severe life-threatening injury on Freeport Blvd. I’ll write more soon about the meeting itself, but for today, a comment about use of the ‘A’ word, accident. Every public official that evening, with the exception of Jennifer Donlon Wyant, used the word accident. Some of them repeatedly, with Ryan Moore, the Interim City Traffic Engineer, being the worst offender. Many of these uses were made while standing in front of the Vision Zero slide that states “Vision Zero ~ a traffic safety philosophy that rejects the notion that traffic crashes are simply “accidents,” but are preventable incidents that can and must be systematically addressed.” Oh, the irony.

Not the time to go into a detailed explanation of the harm that using this word causes, but you can check out http://droptheaword.blogspot.com, or #CrashNotAccident on Twitter. Basically, the common understanding of the word in traffic violence conversations is to excuse motor vehicle drivers (and engineers) of responsibility for their actions, implying that nothing could have been done, when in fact many things could have been done.

So, a modest proposal. Every time a public official uses the ‘A’ word, they make a contribution of $20 to a local transportation advocacy organization. Eventually, people will cure themselves of using the word, but in the meanwhile it will be an important source of income for nonprofits working to overcome the bias inherent in use of the word, and the underlying windshield perspective that accepts traffic violence as inevitable.

Would it be easier to speed-limit vehicles?

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

In my previous post, Yes, and lower speed limits, and many others, I’ve written about speed and and need to reduce vehicle speeds. This can be done in a number of ways, most effectively by redesigning streets. But street redesign is a multi-billion dollar undertaking just in our region, and that is a conservative estimate.

Thinking outside the box, what if we speed-limited vehicles instead? What if all vehicles were limited to the posted speed limit? Many newer vehicles already have most of the technology needed: cruise control and location awareness through GPS. They would need some modification to use the cruise control to limit the speed, not to what the driver sets it at, but what the speed limit is. Shouldn’t cost much money for the conversion. Old vehicles, of course, don’t have this technology, and would need a fairly expensive update. How expensive, I don’t know. I’m not a technology person, and can only express surprise that either researchers are not researching this, or that if they are, it isn’t making it into the media.

During the transition period, I can see two actions that would encourage conversion. One is similar to emission inspections, where once your car becomes unable to pass inspection, and it would cost more to fix it that it’s value, it is retired. Of course in California, that means the car is shipped to another state to keep polluting, and that is not a good solution. The other is that there would be a penalty for not installing the conversion. The penalty would gradually increase over time. There are very obvious equity issues about this proposal. Maybe a cash-for-speeders program to buy and retire vehicles without speed-limiters. And it is not as though our current system is without equity implications. People of color and low income are much more likely to be the victims of crashes as are others, and we certainly know that speed enforcement can and is used to oppress people of color and low income.

Speed-limited vehicles would be a huge investment, for the updates required of newer vehicles, and the addition of the technology to older vehicles. I strongly suspect that it would be much less than the investment of fixing all our streets. Of course, we eventually still want to fix our streets in locations that are not triaged out, to make them livable and economically vibrant places, but with speed-limiting, we would have more time to work on that.

I would exempt two-lane rural roads from speed-limiting. Though a lot of crashes do occur on these roads, the valid need to be able to pass slow moving vehicles remains, and the scheme would just not work here. All other roads, yes. It might even be possible to increase speeds on freeways, where variability in speed is as much of a problem as speed itself.

Of course cars-first people would scream that this attacks their god-given and constitutionally-guaranteed right to drive as fast as they can. But these are the car nuts, just like gun nuts, that claim a right to do what they want to do without any consideration of the effect on others. It is time we grow up and recognize that vehicles are deadly weapons that must be limited to reduce mayhem.

Will autonomous vehicles solve this problem? Perhaps. These vehicles will certainly have full awareness of the posted speed limits on every street (part of the reason they are bandwidth intensive). I suspect that most autonomous vehicles will be part of commercial fleets (buses, delivery vehicles, ride hailing). Given the legal liability of allowing these vehicles to exceed the speed limit, I don’t think companies will. Of course there will be private owners who hack their autonomous vehicles to exceed the speed limit, but in a world of speed-limited vehicles these will stand out and be dealt with. The real issue, though, is that there will be a very long period of transition in which most vehicles on the road are not autonomous.

I welcome comments from anyone more technologically savvy than I, who can help me better understand the technological issues and solutions.

and crossing prohibitions

Dan Allison2 Comments

To complete the story about crosswalks, the locations where crossing is prohibited must also largely be removed. These locations are marked with the ‘no crossing’ sign at right (MUTCD R9-3a). Some of these locations probably never had crosswalks, some had them but were removed when the street was ‘upgraded’. A few of these locations cannot be made safe without complete reconstruction of the street. Freeway on-ramps and off-ramps, of which Sacramento has too many because it has too many freeways and too many freeways designed around commuting instead of interstate commerce, are particularly problematic. However, most locations indicate a clear intent by traffic engineers to prioritize the movement and speed of motor vehicles over all other considerations, including safety. This bias must be ended.

Here are the solutions:

  1. The city should be required to perform a complete traffic study on each and every location with a prohibited crossing. The traffic studies should be completed within two years.
  2. If the traffic study indicates that the prohibition is necessary for safety, then the prohibition can remain, but a new traffic study must be completed every five years. If the traffic study indicates that the prohibition was not made for safety reasons and is not needed for safety reasons, the prohibition must be removed and a marked crosswalk installed.
  3. City staff will analyze each prohibited location that remains to determine what redesign would make the prohibition unnecessary, and bring to the city council a proposal to expend funds to fix the location.
  4. At all prohibited locations, the city would be required to post informational signing with distances to the nearest safe crossing, in both directions.

Though I am picking on the City of Sacramento here, these prohibited crossings are found in every city in the region, and in abundance in unincorporated areas. All should receive the same treatment.

removal of crosswalks

Dan Allison2 Comments

In today’s SacBee, an article on the City of Sacramento’s removal of crosswalks (Why Sacramento erased 23 crosswalks, including one where a grandmother died after removal), which has contributed to at least one fatality, had the following information from Ryan Moore, the City Traffic Engineer.

“To send the message via crosswalk that this is a good place to cross the road is a false message,” Moore said of the Oregon Drive intersection. “Our standards dictated that we remove the crosswalk or build safety enhancements.” The city would have kept the crosswalk marking in place, he said, if it would have been able to install a traffic light there. But the money – in the $500,00 plus range wasn’t available. Instead, traffic engineers hope that by removing some crosswalks, pedestrians will instinctively choose to cross at a safer, nearby intersection, Moore said.

This is definitely the engineer perspective that says lives don’t matter as long as policy was being followed, and the windshield perspective that it is OK to make pedestrians walk out of their way so long as drivers are not inconvenienced.

Freeport-Oregon.pngAs you can see to the right, at the intersection of Freeport and Oregon, there are residences to the west and businesses to the right. There are signalized crosswalks about 700 feet to the north and about 700 feet to the south, but walking to either of these adds a one-quarter mile walk. Is this reasonable or not? It could be argued either way, but to discount it as Mr. Moore did demonstrates bias against pedestrians. The Google Map photo is from before the removal of the crosswalk.

The suggestion that nearby intersections are safer is also questionable. At the intersections of arterial roads, which Freeport and Fruitridge to the south are, drivers routinely fail to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk on right turns. That is in fact why many walkers prefer to cross away from major intersections.

Common estimates of the expense of a HAWK signal (High-intensity Activated crossWalK) are $100,000, not $500,000. $500,000 is the cost of a fully signalized intersection. So Mr. Moore’s $500,000 number is a straw man meant to deflect criticism by saying the solution is more expensive than it really is.

There are solutions to this particular problem, and to the removal of crosswalks in general:

  1. The city should be required to perform a complete traffic study before removing any crosswalk. The city is always saying that they have to do traffic studies before anything can be done to change traffic flow, so I would presume that doing a traffic study in this situation would be a no-brainer.
  2. If the traffic study indicates that the crosswalk is unsafe, then the next step is to design a solution or options, with a funding estimate, and then go to city council with a request for the funding.
  3. The city council would have to hold a hearing, either as part of the regular city council meeting or as a separate meeting, to gather public input on the removal. If the city council then makes a decision not to expend the funds to create a safe crossing, the crosswalk can be removed.
  4. If a crosswalk is removed, the city would be required to post informational signing at that location with distances to the nearest safe crossing in both directions, so that pedestrians can make informed decisions. The signing would have to stay in place for at least two years.

Anything short of these actions makes the city engineers both morally and legally responsible for any fatalities or severe injuries that occur at the site of a removed crosswalk.

 

Yes, and lower speed limits

Dan Allison1 Comment

I believe that stroads should be turned back into Streets, and roads preserved for their transportation function. I’m a Strong Towns member, and fully support the argument that the best solution to stroads is to reconstruct them into streets. #SlowTheCars is the right approach. Key to that approach is that changing speed limits doesn’t do much to slow cars, and that ticketing people for going the design speed instead of the posted speed is often just a pretext for profiling and oppression.

BUT. It will be a long while and trillions of dollars to accomplish that. Undoing the damage of the past is not easy, because the money it would take to fix everything has long since gone into the pockets of those who profited from unsustainable (socially, economically, environmentally) development. We will have to triage, changing the most dangerous places first, and those places with the best chance of becoming walkable, livable, and vibrant second. We may never, and perhaps should never, get to those places that are the model of the suburban experiment. Many suburban places will fail and go back to agriculture. Others will not. But spending a lot of money to fix a suburban stroad, adding sidewalks and bike lanes and street furniture, will be good money after bad because these places won’t ever be dense enough or successful enough to pay back the investment.

Back to speed. It will be a long while before we can lower the design speed of stroads and streets back to the correct speed. In most cases, that design speed should be 20 mph. Occasionally higher or lower, but mostly 20. In the interim, I think that we should reduce the speed of all urban streets, that are not arterials and collectors, to 20 mph. I am not suggested that this limit be tightly enforced, as the point is not enforcement but education and commitment. A community willing to lower the speed limit to 20 is a community willing to think about safety and livability, and to accept that the way we have done thing in the past is absolutely not what we need in the present or future. Setting speed limits to 20 is a message to pay attention and think about consequences. Portland and Seattle have recently reduced some speed limits to 20.

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bike share racks controversy

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

I attended the SACOG Transportation Committee meeting yesterday. Item 7 on the agenda, JUMP Bikeshare Contract Amendment, generated the most heat and most discussion of any item. The item would increase the amount allocated to the program by $48K. It was not the amount so much as the implications for bike racks that was controversial. The increase was to cover the difference between the cost of a shift from mostly corral racks, which had previously been specified, to JUMP “wave racks” (this is not the traditional meaning of wave rack) that were now being envisioned. Some of the exist Tower Bridge Bike Share Preview bike racks are of the corral type. The Santa Monica Breeze bike share racks are of the wave rack type. I can’t remember what the other SoBi systems have. Photos of each type are below, corral rack first and wave rack second.

Though the JUMP bike share system bikes will be owned by JUMP and operations are completely private, the rack capacity needed to make the system work are the responsibility of the three cities and the SACOG-led consortium. This is particularly so since Sacramento asked for a dock-optional system rather than the dockless system that JUMP is operating in San Francisco and Washington DC.

The City of Sacramento wants more of the wave racks to ensure that the bike share racks are not taken up by private bikes, making it impossible to park the JUMP bikes at the hubs. This is a reasonable concern in that Sacramento has far too few bike racks in most areas, and the bike share program will not install enough to overcome that deficit. However, many people on the committee questioned why an investment should be made in propriety racks when more racks are needed for everyone. The motion to recommend to the board was not passed, but a recommendation for the SACOG board to consider this issue was agreed to.

There was additional controversy about the JUMP bikes being assist-limited to 15 mph, though they are designed as legal class 1 electric bikes that can assist up to 20 mph. The other two cities apparently do not agree with this limitation.

There was also quite a bit of discussion of how alternative systems being implemented by Rancho Cordova and Folsom, and possibly other cities in the region, the dockless LimeBike, will affect or be affected by the JUMP systems and their bike racks. West Sacramento is permitting LimeBike Lime-E, an electric razor scooter type. I did not catch when that will go live.

Bike share open house

Dan Allison2 Comments

I attended the bike share open house hosted by the City of Sacramento last night. There were as many people representing partners and consultants as members of the public, and I did not see any low income or people of color. SACOG staff were present, as SACOG is the sponsoring agency for the bike share program, staff from Toole Design Group which is managing planning and selection of bike rack locations, and staff from JUMP, the selected bike share vendor.

Some things to report:

  • Rollout date is between the middle of May and the end of June.
  • There will be 900 bikes total, about 600 in the City of Sacramento and the remainder in West Sacramento and Davis.
  • The bikes will be limited to 15 mph, even though they are designed to operate at up to 20 mph. Under state law, Class 1 bikes can operate with pedal assist up to 20 mph, but a decision was made to limit them based on (probably misplaced) safety concerns.
  • The service area is considerably larger than the pilot Tower Bridge Bike Share, a very positive sign. You can see the boundary at http://wikimapping.net/wikimap/SACOG_Bikeshare.html, and add suggestions while you are there. Scroll to the left to see the Davis section. The open house had a large paper map for the same purpose.
  • There will be some sort of discount for low income people using the system, probably the JUMP Boost program, which is a $5 membership the first year, and $5/month thereafter, for 60 minutes of ride per day. In Sacramento, the eligibility might be based on SMUD status. At least initially, the only other option will be the standard $2 for the first 30 minutes and $2/hour after that, prorated. Other types of membership or charge may be implemented later.
  • Nearly the entire service area in Sacramento is moderate and high income, with just a small area in neighborhoods south of Broadway and around Power Inn being included. The city doesn’t have a plan yet for how to reach out to these potential users, and others not included in the boundary.
  • Bike racks will be provided in a quantity of at least two per bike in the system, so 1800 rack spaces. The use of these racks will be discouraged for other bicycles, in order to keep the spaces open for the bike share bikes. Bikes will be required to be parked at these hubs or stations at the termination of the ride, though they can be put on hold (with the meter running) at any other location. Leaving a bike away from a hub incurs a fee of $2, the same as the current SoBi system. Popular and busy locations will have multiple racks, while other have fewer, or one. Many or most of the locations, particularly outside the central city, do not have bike racks yet, so these will be added by JUMP before rollout. The user agreement requires that bikes be locked to a bike rack, not to other objects or left free-standing. It is not a dockless system.
  • JUMP has designed charging racks where a parked bike will charge. Larger locations will have some of these charging racks, though it is not clear if they will be installed at rollout.

There are two additional open houses scheduled, both in Davis. Friday, March 2, 11 to 1 at UC Davis bus terminal, and Saturday, March 3, 9:30 to 1 at the Davis Farmers Market. These will be less formal, and will offer the opportunity to ride the JUMP electric bike.