May 2012
2 posts
Transportation Choices Summit Gets Statewide...
Advocates from Across California Visit Every Legislative Office!
View all the photos from the Summit.
A Powerful Movement is Born
Across California regions are adopting Sustainable Communities Strategies to combat climate change and create healthy walkable communities. But these amazing plans won’t ever become real without state funding and policies that support public transit and affordable...
April 2012
1 post
Recommendations on the Draft Transportation...
We have finally hit the point in the Sustainable Communities Strategy process where MTC has developed a comprehensive Transportation Investment Strategy. We have just sent MTC a letter with six recommendations, one for each of the ‘investment strategies’ in staff’s presentation of the overall funding package.
The recommendations are:
Fund the Climate Innovative Grants program,...
March 2012
2 posts
7 tags
New High Speed Rail plan offers great benefits to...
TransForm encourages the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bay Area agencies, and the High Speed Rail Authority to move forward with the Bay Area strategy that will offer great benefits to the region.
The California High Speed Rail Authority will soon release a new Business Plan to completely revamp this massive infrastructure project. TransForm has been participating in extensive...
Analysis of Proposed reauthorization of Alameda...
Alameda County faces a big decision in November. Transportation officials plan to ask voters to double the existing transportation sales tax (often known as “Measure B”), extend it in perpetuity, and approve a $7.8 billion plan for the next 30 years of spending. This would be the largest transportation funding measure ever in northern California.
TransForm has completed a 16-page analysis of the...
February 2012
3 posts
MTC respects Performance instead of Politics
On February 22, a majority of MTC commissioners honored their prior decisions and rejected an attempt to prioritize politics over performance.
As described in a previous post, MTC was considering how to use the “Project Performance Assessment” (PPA) of 80 of the biggest projects in the region to inform the selection of specific transportation projects for the preferred transportation investment...
2 tags
BART Protects Existing System while Moving to...
The BART Board did a good thing on Thursday, February 9th. While passing a motion to start an alternatives analysis for the Livermore project, they also took several steps to protect the overall system and to ensure the Livermore analysis considers a wide range of alternatives. This was a big step in the right direction and may contribute to making it less likely that a Livermore project does...
Good Projects, Bad Projects: Results of the...
We’re getting close to decision time: which projects to include in or exclude from Plan Bay Area (the Regional Transportation Plan & Sustainable Communities Strategy).
That’s why TransForm just sent MTC a letter to draw Commissioners’ attention to three projects we recommend should be excluded from the RTP plus a host of “slam dunk” projects we feel should...
November 2011
1 post
3 tags
Will the Metropolitan Transportation Commission...
Groundbreaking analysis by MTC looks at which projects will get the Bay Area towards social and environmental goals, but overstates the benefits of “congestion relief”
By Stuart Cohen, TransForm Executive Director
This Friday, November 4, staff at the Metropolitan Transportation Committee will release a groundbreaking analysis that could call into question some of the biggest transportation...
October 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Let the marathon begin: San Diego adopts...
By Autumn Bernstein, Stuart Cohen, and Eliot Rose
Many SB 375 watchers have opined that the law’s success will require a “marathon, not a sprint” since the inertia of existing transportation and land use plans is so powerful. But as others have pointed out, the challenges faced by our communities and our planet are so great we simply cannot wait that long.
Today’s approval of the first-ever...
7 tags
MTC Express Lanes: Flawed Plan, Needs Public...
On September 28, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission approved submitting an application to the California Transportation Commission for authority to build a network of Express Lanes. The proposed 270-mile network, which will allow solo-drivers to pay their way into HOV lanes, would cost $6.4 billion to build, yet MTC held no public planning meetings on the project.
At the meeting, TransForm...
September 2011
2 posts
4 tags
The Bay Area deserves a better Express Lane plan
LATE-BREAKING NEWS! Just-released independent analysis is a powerful critique of MTC Express lane application: “we find MTC’s evaluation to be an overly optimistic portrayal of project benefits that ignores climate and equity impacts.” See the analysis by Professor Deb Niemeier, from the UC Davis Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Do you ever sit alone in traffic,...
6 tags
MTC Misses Huge Opportunity in Rushing Flawed...
On Friday, Sept 9, the MTC Planning Committee will be asked to approve a multi-billion-dollar express lane network that fails to reach its potential to increase the quality of life for all Bay Area residents.
The Bay Area could have a regional roadway network with transit and high-occupancy vehicle lanes seamlessly connecting the region’s jobs centers, providing convenient and swift transit...
July 2011
1 post
Rewarding cities that do the right thing
Transportation funds should reward cities that do the most to plan and deliver sustainable and equitable development near transit. The “Strategic Investments for a Better Bay Area” platform, which TransForm developed along with dozens of other groups to set recommendations for the Sustainable Communities Strategy, suggests that the region support focused growth by creating a block...
June 2011
2 posts
Waiting for Wednesday: MTC Commission/ABAG Meeting...
As we reported in our last blog post, advocates and advisory committee members came out in droves to the June 10th joint meeting of the MTC Planning Committee and ABAG Administrative Committee to request a long list of improvements to MTC staff’s proposed Alternative Scenarios. Elected officials responded by asking that staff respond with changes.
Unfortunately, staff’s response was...
The Devil is in the Details
This morning the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Planning Committee heard a report on five “Alternative Scenarios” that staff from MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) are proposing to model over the next few months in an attempt to discern the most effective ways to move the needle on greenhouse gas reduction over the next 25 years.
Each of the 5 Alternative Scenarios...
May 2011
2 posts
Introducing... Strategic Investments for a Better...
Every four years our nine county Bay Area goes through a planning exercise where county transportation agencies, regional planning agencies and a Commission of elected officials prioritize how to spend our transportation dollars. (This time we think we’re talking around $200 billion.) The exercise looks forward 25 years, and plans for a Bay Area we want to have.
And every four years, Bay Area...
Project Performance Analysis 101
As the Bay Area’s regional agencies gets rolling on its first-ever Sustainable Communities Strategy, there was incredible enthusiasm for their ten adopted targets. Sure, SB 375 required two of the targets (a 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 and planning for enough homes, at all income levels) to accommodate the growth in workers.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, with...
April 2011
4 posts
Politics over Performance: Option 1 Wins at MTC...
Anyone who thinks American public process is dead should have come out for today’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission meeting.
The Commission today voted on the Planning Committee’s recommendation for the Committed Projects Policy for the transportation component of Plan Bay Area (the once every-four-years $200+ billion planning and budgeting exercise for the nine-county Bay Area, also known...
Choose Your Version of Bay Area 2040
Try to imagine the Bay Area with 2 million more people living here. Where will we all live, work, and recreate? How will we get around? A Bay Area-wide series of public workshops about this kind of region-wide, far-thinking planning will kick off this week on Thursday on April 21st in Santa Clara County. Other You Choose/One Bay Area workshops will follow in each of the other eight Bay Area...
MTC Planning Committee Makes the Right Choice:...
Well, that was an exciting meeting!
This past Friday’s MTC Planning Committee meeting wrapped up with a choice for Option 2 in the “committed projects” policy debate.
“Committed projects” are those transportation projects in the regional funding and construction pipeline that MTC designates exempt from analysis or Commission discretion during the...
8 tags
Why Option Two is the Choice on Friday
What better time to inaugurate a blog on progressive transportation choices than when there’s a crucial debate at hand like the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Committed Projects policy - a decision about which projects to exempt from analysis and discretion.
This Friday, April 8th, the Metropolitan Transportation Committee (MTC) will revisit a discussion about how many...