What Happened?
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority is considering a plan to construct a bus-rapid transit line through downtown San Francisco that will be a first of its kind. The high-priority bus service will demand a $126 million street upgrade and help increase the number of buses traveling through exclusive lanes with traffic-signal priority.
Goal
After voters approved the new bus-rapid transit line on a half-cent sales tax referendum in 2003, the bus service project was delayed until now, with officials currently projecting a launch date in 2018. The delay was due to the need for an extensive, 700-page environmental impact report, which once completed bumped the project’s total cost up an additional $7.6 million, CityLab reported. The report, as required under California’s Environmental Quality Act, evaluates a potential project’s impact on 18 areas of residential life:
- Air quality
- Water quality
- Noise
- Land use
- Traffic
Because a transit project will have a negative impact on traffic in the community that may not be able to be offset, officials had to compile a full environmental report. The California law looks at how much a project will cause traffic delays when determining its impact on “level of service”. Because this metric is car-centric, the state is amending the law to align its impact measurements with metrics focused on California’s mobility and efficiency goals, which hope to get cars off the road. This amendment will make it much easier for cities in California to approve transit-friendly development projects by changing the way officials analyze the impact of each initiative, CityLab reported.
How It Happened
California Senate Bill 743 passed in September 2013 setting the state for the building of a basketball arena in Sacramento. The bill also called for replacing the “level of service” metric with traffic analysis reports in “transit priority areas” where dense populations rely on public transit lines, CityLab reported. As a result, the state is now considering replacing “level of service” with “vehicle-miles driven” as the metric to determine the traffic impact of a project.
Using “vehicle-miles driven” will encourage projects to eliminate drivers on the road, rather than reduce delays. “Vehicle-miles driven” will push projects to create space for transit riders, pedestrians and cyclists, which might create less space for cars. “Level of service” on the other hand works against developments in population dense areas, where delays are inevitable. People want to live in areas where necessities and amenities are located nearby, or in low “vehicle-miles driven” neighborhoods. This metric will align transit projects with public interest, CityLab explains.
Demand Nationwide
The Arizona Public Interest Research Group recently compiled a report on mass transit use across Arizona, which revealed ridership is up and miles-driven dropped 10.5 percent statewide between 2005-2012. The findings included:
- Phoenix increased transit trips per capita by 16.1 percent and transit miles traveled per capita by 33.5 percent
- Tucson increased transit trips per capita by 24.6 percent and transit miles traveled per capita by 31 percent
- Yuma increased average transit trips per day by 300 percent
- Flagstaff reported 1.7 million transit trips in 2012 alone, compared to less than 200,000 transit trips in 2001
The researchers said the findings point to a need for local officials to align transportation plans with new trends in public transit usage.
Next Gen Transit
Gov1 has reported on a variety of high-efficiency public transit projects, as well as the idea for free public transportation.
Promo: A California amendment will simplify the approval of public transit projects.