MTC Courts
Public in Quest to Solve Transportation Planning Mysteries
Like death and taxes — or a
splendid view from the deck of a ferry — you can always count on
transportation to rank at or near the top of Bay Area residents’
lists of concerns. Just as certain is that transportation
bureaucrats have no monopoly on good ideas for solving our mobility
problems.
To pick the brains of the general
public, in June the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)
kicked off an 18-month, community-wide dialogue on a new plan known
as Transportation 2030 that will guide investment in the Bay Area’s
streets, roads, highways, bridges, ferry systems, sidewalks, bike
paths, railways, and bus lines from 2005 to 2030. "Public input
is crucial to crafting the best possible plan," commented MTC
Chair and Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey following the
regional Transportation Summit held June 14 in San Francisco, where
members of the public got their first chance to weigh in on the new
plan. "So we’re committed to making the process open and
inclusive—and our partners at the county congestion management
agencies are, too."
The combination of a rising Bay
Area population and the unprecedented state budget crisis—plus the
Bush Administration’s proposal for a new transportation program
that essentially would hold federal support at current levels for
the next six years—means much of the discussion will center on how
to make the best of limited financial resources.
"Money is always an
issue," noted Randy Rentschler, MTC’s Legislation and Public
Affairs Manager. "Some might say it’s THE issue. But as grim
as the situation is right now, the cupboard isn’t completely bare
when you look ahead 25 years. We expect about $100 billion of local,
state, and federal transportation funds to flow into the Bay Area
between now and 2030. That’s a lot of money, though it’s not
nearly enough to solve all our transportation problems. So we’re
going to have to make some hard choices."
To build consensus for the hard
choices that ultimately will be made, MTC initially is asking the
public to concentrate on three broad questions:
) What’s the right balance
between new projects and taking care of the roads and transit
systems we already have?
) What goals should the new plan
have, and what policies and projects should we pursue to reach them?
) What’s the best way to link
transportation investments with land- use decisions?
To register your opinions, go to
the MTC web site and use the interactive system to cast your vote on
these and other related questions. There will be plenty of
opportunities to participate in person as well. MTC will host a
series of public workshops this fall, and congestion management
agencies in San Francisco, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo
counties this summer will be soliciting public input on
project-specific plans for spending new or continued transportation
sales taxes revenues. In addition, eight Bay Area counties are now
holding open meetings as they update their countywide transportation
plans.
MTC’s interactive web voting
features the same questions posed to the 400-plus attendees at last
month’s Transportation 2030: Getting From Here to There summit
at the historic Palace Hotel. Though conference participants did not
provide a representative sample of the Bay Area population, the
electronic voting and breakout sessions devoted to each of the three
broad policy questions nonetheless produced some intriguing results.
"It looks like everyone is in
the mood for change," observed Kinsey, as the giant screens
that displayed e-voting results showed 65 percent agreement to a
question of whether the Bay Area should critically reexamine all its
transportation policies, programs, and projects. "Yet, 86
percent disagree that we should reduce money for operations and
maintenance. So there’s a dichotomy."
A huge majority of the e-voters
favored modifying the goals of the existing 2001 Regional
Transportation Plan, but no clear vision emerged of specific
goals for the Transportation 2030 Plan. Indeed, while 54
percent of attendees agreed that the 2001 goals are basically good
and simply need to be fine-tuned, over three-quarters of all
e-voters either strongly or somewhat agreed that the new plan needs
tough standards that are more specific and measurable than those now
in place.
Breakout sessions on
transportation and land-use issues attracted the largest number of
participants. Summit attendees overwhelmingly agreed that MTC should
use incentives and rewards to push local communities to build
transit-friendly developments. But participants clearly want some
limits on these incentives. "In excess of 90 percent (of
e-voters) think MTC should be out there, using incentives to push
local communities to do better land use," said Kinsey.
"Yet nearly two-thirds think local governments — not MTC —
should continue to control local land use, and two-thirds agreed
that government should not force people to live in smaller housing
units in dense urban centers."
On the conundrum of how to
integrate land use and transportation when one is the province of
local agencies and the other is the province of regional agencies,
MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger acknowledged that infill
development can equate to more local congestion, and asked the
audience to consider ways to grow smarter in greenfield areas, a
prospect he referred to as "smart sprawl."
Three-quarters of the summit
attendees support adjusting the current plan’s balance between new
investments (10 percent) and committed funding (90 percent), a
category that includes maintenance and rehabilitation, projects near
construction and fully funded, voter-approved projects. Sounding an
empathetic note, Heminger commented "Saying 90 percent of
funding is off the table is frustrating. It’s frustrating for us
as the Commission, and it’s frustrating for you."
When asked whether prior
commitments should be dropped, however, fewer than half the
attendees answered yes. Instead, nearly 78 percent supported finding
new revenue sources to pay for new transportation investments.
"There’s not a lot of interest in pitting one project against
another," remarked Kinsey.
Broad support for existing
commitments, however, will not solve the state budget crisis or
reverse the decline in sales tax revenues—which are combining to
shrink the transportation funding pie and almost certainly will
force some reprioritizing among various projects. With too little
money to fund every commitment on its original schedule, even
projects approved by voters through transportation sales tax
measures could end up polarizing various transportation interests.
"These voter-approved measures are often beauty contests,"
said Stuart Cohen, executive director of the Transportation and Land
Use Coalition, who was one of the morning panelists at the
Transportation 2030 Summit.
While projects such as the planned
BART extension to San Jose and Santa Clara undoubtedly will spark
considerable discussion in the months to come, a cooperative and
collegial tone was evident among the summit participants. "We
should capitalize on the good feelings in this room to commit
ourselves to working better together," declared Martin Wachs,
director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley, who moderated the final panel
discussion at the Transportation 2030 Summit.