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.
Published: July, 2003
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.
