Saturday July 03, 1999

PUSHING last week for regional "smart growth," the Bay Area Transportation and Land Use Coalition has set itself up as a lightning rod that will attract opposition, which it is sure to get.

But its call to plan regionally for growth is right on the money.

With growing public frustration over transportation and growth, a divisive energy is loose. Left to gather strength, it could be destructive.

The coalition's entry into the planning debate is timely and welcome. It represents a broad range of groups from environmentalists to Gray Panthers, and quite rightly says it's time to grow smarter in the region.

There's no doubt that our most pressing problems are regional. They need regional solutions. They include transportation, air quality, land use, social equity, affordable housing and the housing-jobs imbalance.

If dealt with by individual, island-mentality communities, without thought for what, literally, goes down the road, the Bay Area's beauty, its quality of life, its dynamic economy will be seriously threatened.

Opponents who question what the coalition stands for question the very notion that urban sprawl is a bad thing. There is plenty of land, they say, because farms are no longer needed. They argue that supporters of big government want to define what is a livable city and through government impose it on others. They say that urban sprawl has become an ideological battleground.

Ideological battleground or not, anyone who's been caught up in traffic congestion in the Bay Area -- and who hasn't? -- is probably unaware of any cultural war beyond being stuck one more time on the way to work or on the way home. It's not land availability that's the issue, it's the use of it in the wrong places that's the problem.

It's not hard to see why. With nearly a million new jobs projected for the Bay Area in the next 20 years, more than half are expected to locate in areas with infrequent transit service. If this happens, many more Bay Area residents will experience frustration of daily traffic congestion, as car commuting continues to shift from a matter of choice to an inescapable aspect of life.

But the commute-to-work trips are not the big problem everyone makes them out to be. In fact, they represent less than a third of all trips, according to forecasts made by transportation planners. Shopping, school and social trips just 1 to 3 miles from home generate, in total, almost half the trips.

Clearly, we need to encourage walking and bicycling, and yet our transportation system and community design in many new areas is simply unsafe or unacceptable for walking. As a result, planners forecast that walking and bicycling will decrease in the future.

We agree with the coalition that the current development patterns and projections for the future are not set in concrete, and that we can -- together, as a region, grow smarter. But growing smarter in just a few cities and counties will not have the desired effect. Smart growth means that when the residents or their representatives reject an infill development, they should also consider the impact on the region's housing-jobs imbalance.

The coalition wants the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area's nine-county transportation planning and funding agency, to take a lead in charting the new course.

This makes sense, since transportation crosses boundaries and stitches the whole thing together. It is hard to imagine an area that government is better suited to than providing a means for recording regional considerations about the way the Bay Area ought to grow.

For example, if a projected development will strain the Bay Area's road system, the coalition argues that the community so involved should not be rewarded with infusions of regional transportation dollars.

The coalition will work, it says, to ensure that scarce public funds are targeted toward communities that have proven they will grow in ways that support a range of travel choices. This also makes sense.