Tuesday, September 1, 1998

By STUART COHEN

OVER the next 20 years, the Bay Area plans to spend $89 billion on hundreds of transportation projects. But there'll be no dancing in the streets when they are all completed. There won't be any room.

The draft 1998 Regional Transportation Plan predicts that between 1990 and 2020, daily vehicle travel in the Bay Area will increase by 43 million miles. Traffic congestion, measured by hours of delay, will grow by 249 percent. If you encountered 20 minutes of delay on a trip in 1990, a generation later you could expect to lose an hour and 10 minutes. At the same time, we can expect a declining roll for public transit.

Why is the Bay Area experiencing this rapid deterioraton? It's simple. The Bay Area's current planning framework is broken. It creates a self-fullfilling prophecy of sprawl and gridlock. Here's how it works.

City and county plans for growth and development are compiled by the Association of Bay Area Govemments (ABAG) into a comprehensive growth projection for the Bay Area. Much of the anticipated job and population growth is expected to be sprawl development. That is, cities and counties are planning for such large distances between homes, jobs, shopping and other activities that people must rely on automobiles for any trip.

In turn, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, charged with developing the Regional Transportation Plan, uses ABAGs projections and tries to figure out how to "improve mobility" for the region. But they can't. Since this transportation "blueprint" assumes auto-dependent sprawl will take place, all of the alternative transportation plans show congestion skyrocketing and declining, as farmlands and open space are gobbled up.

It is time to break this cycle of sprawl and gridlock. The solutions to our transportation problems are clear: Design communities so that people have a choice in how they travel, fund cost-effective alternative transportation, and provide incentives to discourage driving alone. These strategies present the best hope we have for fighting congestion, bad air and sprawl. Collectively, these strategies are known as "smart growth," and success stories are popping up around the bay. For instance, San Jose set an urban growth boundary to protect its hillsides in 1994, and simultaneously zoned for townhouses and condos along the expanding light rail lines. Three years later, over half of the new San Jose housing permits were for this type of development, and units were selling like hotcakes.

Ten other Bay Area cities have followed suit with their own urban growth boundaries, and Milpitas may adopt one this November. And why not, since "smart growth" can save money. An economic study for San Jose showed that the urban growth boundary would save taxpayers over $2 billion per year because city services such as fire and police would be provided over a more compact area.

Good commmunity design must be complemented by the right incentives. For example, over 43,000 employees now receive free, unlimited travel on VTA bus and light-rail lines as benefits from their employers. This Eco Pass program, promoted heavily by the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group, has doubled transit ridership at participating companies.

There is one hitch: If done in just a few locales, "smart growth" will create some pleasant walkable communities but will never make a real dent in our deteriorating transportation system. The 1998 Regional Transportation Plan predictions should serve as a red flag to the public and local elected officials: Brace yourself for unimaginable congestion and poor alternatives, or embrace a regional process to plan for a better future.

Will our elected officials have the foresight to pursue long-term "smart growth" planning? The answer may be yes. Over the next two months officials at MTC and ABAG will have an opportunity to apply for millions of dollars of federal funds now available for "smart growth" planning. But these elected officials need support from their constituents.

Let your opinion be known. Review a copy of the draft Regional Transportation Plan (on the Web, go to http://www.mte.dst.ca.us) and attend the Sept 17 workshop in San Jose, from 7-9 p.m. in the City Council Chambers (801 N. First St). Don't wait until we are known as Los Angeles North and you pine for the good ol' 1990s - when there was so little traffic.

Stuart Cohen of Berkeley is director of the Bay Area Transportation Choices Forum (a project of TALC as of 2003).