TransForm’s 2012 Ballot Initiative Endorsements

Election season approaches — and with it, an alphanumeric sea of local and state ballot measures.  TransForm’s Board of Directors has endorsed the following initiatives for the 2012 election and encourages you to vote on Tuesday, November 6.

YES on California Proposition 30

Governor Jerry Brown is leading the charge for Proposition 30, which would stop mid-year cuts of $7 billion to schools and health services across the State.  Prop 30 raises the state sales tax by one-quarter percent for four years.  It also adds three new income tax brackets for Californians earning $250,000, $300,000 and $500,000. 

TransForm strongly supports the proposition, which would raise an estimated $6.8 to $9 billion, money that is desperately needed for California’s already-underfunded schools and health services.  If it fails, the deeper cuts to the state budget are likely to put extreme stress on all state programs, including public transportation funding.

For more information, visit the Yes on 30 website.

NO on California Proposition 32

Don’t be fooled!  While Proposition 32 looks like a way to clean up money in politics, it allows corporations and billionaires the opportunity to continue funneling unlimited amounts of money into their pet projects via “Super PACs” and secretive front-group campaign expenditures.  At the same time it eliminates workers’ voices by dramatically restricting unions’ abilities to raise funds for political activities from its members.

A diverse alliance, from the Sierra Club to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, has come out in opposition to this proposition.  TransForm, too, has voiced its opposition to this measure, and we urge you to oppose it, too.

For more information, visit the No on 32 website.

YES on Alameda County Measure B1

Measure B1 would double the existing transportation sales tax in Alameda County, 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 supports Measure B1 because it would fund several vital improvements: restore cut bus service, start a new youth bus pass program, repair potholes, and make unprecedented investments for pedestrian and bicycle safety and infrastructure and for transit-oriented development.

While we have concerns about some projects in the plan, we are working to address those through other arenas, as explained in our  in-depth analysis of the ballot measure.

YES on San Francisco Housing Trust Fund (Prop. C)

Funding for affordable housing production has plummeted since the dissolution of redevelopment agencies in California earlier this year.  San Francisco, is taking the lead on recapturing funds with this vote on Prop C.  If approved, this proposal would create a San Francisco Housing Trust Fund.

It would take advantage of the loss of redevelopment to recapture a portion of the local property tax receipts and dedicate up to $50 million annually toward the construction of affordable housing.  It would also provide down payment assistance to moderate-income families and provide incentives to produce more housing overall in SF.  This is the first example of a local jurisdiction enacting a permanent solution to the loss of redevelopment funding in order to continue investing in housing for low and moderate income households, and is simpler in San Francisco since it is both a city and county.

For more information, visit this blog posting by SPUR.

Remember, Election Day 2012 is Tuesday, November 6 and you must register to vote by October 22 to cast a ballot this fall.

New High Speed Rail plan offers great benefits to Bay Area

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 conversations leading up to this new plan, and there are still some issues that need resolution, on the overall statewide approach and some specific geographic areas. TransForm will update our position on the entire Business Plan after it is released.

The new high speed rail plan’s Bay Area strategy offers great benefits to our region and deserves our strong support. On March 28, MTC will vote on a Memorandum of Understanding with the High Speed Rail Authority (“the Authority”), local cities and transit agencies (see MTC agenda, item 7.c.). The MOU is based on the new business plan’s “blended approach” strategy and only deals with projects in the Bay Area. The MOU includes a policy commitment and detailed funding proposal for $1.5 billion worth of projects, TransForm wanted to state a position now, in support of this MOU and the strategy within it.

Since 2000, TransForm has supported all of the major elements of this MOU; Electrification of the Caltrain Corridor, Advanced Signal Systems, and a connection to the Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco Together, the elements would provide cleaner, quieter, faster trains between San Francisco and Silicon Valley while also preparing the region for high-speed rail.

High Speed Rail’s New Business Plan

Led by their new Chair, Dan Richard, the Authority is developing a clear-eyed strategy to phase the development of high speed rail in California. The new Business Plan will ditch the $10+ billion, 220 MPH “test track” to nowhere. Instead it will focus on upgrading existing train systems to ensure there are major near-term benefits, even if future phases and the 220 MPH “bullet train” fail to materialize.

Specifically, the new plan combines the existing commitment to proceed with construction of the first rail segment in the Central Valley with a “bookend” strategy that simultaneously makes improvements in California’s most populous regions and economically vibrant regions, the Bay Area and Southern California.

All of these investments would be designed to allow trains using existing technology to use the tracks while also allowing future high speed trains to use the same tracks. This “blended approach” makes tremendous sense from a transportation perspective. It will bring benefits to millions of existing commuters within just a few years and eliminate the risk of having a massive “stranded asset” – in this case a useless, multi-billion dollar track with no funding source to complete the sections to Los Angeles or San Francisco  – stuck in the middle of the state.

By crafting a plan that will make near-term improvements to a (primarily) two-track system in the Bay Area and Southern California, the new Business Plan should gain the project much needed political support in the urban areas.

Additional Bay Area Considerations:

In the Bay Area, the most controversial part of the original Bay Area proposal was to turn the Caltrain corridor into a 4 track-system, significantly impacting the character of many of the downtowns along the line. This controversy has threatened to derail the entire project.

The new Business Plan provides an elegant solution. The project investments specified in the MOU will be “limited to infrastructure necessary to support a blended system, which will primarily be a two-track system shared by both Caltrain and high-speed rail.” Using two tracks for almost all the Caltrain corridor should avoid much of the opposition that faced the 4-track approach. Occasional passing tracks will allow high-speed trains to share tracks with Caltrain’s Baby Bullet and Local services. It is important that the environmental review cover only this primarily two-track system, to obviate concern that this MOU may be a cover for the Authority’s original proposal.

TransForm is grateful to all the leaders, such as Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, State Senator Joe Simitian, and Assemblymember Rich Gordon, who pushed on the Authority to develop a plan that is financially responsible and that will reduce community impact. We are thrilled that MTC and the other entities signing the MOU were able to work through the specific issues quickly.

The MOU lays out a funding plan that will electrify the Caltrain corridor and install Advanced Signal Systems. Both of these improvements will not only prepare the region for high speed rail, but will also reduce Caltrain’s operating costs and improve performance. The MOU also includes a commitment to build the connection to the Transbay Transit Center in downtown San Francisco. The downtown connection would dramatically improve Caltrain’s usefulness and, combined with electrification it would provide cleaner, quieter, faster trains between San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

MTC and the other agencies should pass this resolution and support the MOU now. The Authority is is in a race to get the project off the ground to meet impending deadlines; including legislative approval this spring and deadlines to spend the federal stimulus dollars.  Several transit agencies in Southern California are now supporting a blended approach for that region, including on MetroLink’s corridor connecting Palmdale to LA’s Union Station. 

It is also important to note that the MOU specifies that all the Bay Area projects will go through project-level environmental reviews (CEQA and NEPA) regulations. The Authority will not seek exemptions from environmental review at the project level. These reviews will allow additional community concerns and environmental impacts to be addressed.

Next Steps

California is going to grow. By 2050, we may have 60 million neighbors. We need to decide how we want to accommodate the growing travel demand. If we don’t provide access through effective transit, that demand will lead to wider highways and more airports.

The incremental approach of the new Business Plan makes sense. There are still statewide and geographic-specific issues TransForm is discussing with the Authority. These include the financing plan, mitigations for low-income communities in the Central Valley, strategies to improve land uses and connectivity (especially in the Central Valley), and loss of habitat. We will have a statement on the overall Business Plan soon after it is released.

Right now, the Authority, MTC, and other Bay Area agencies should move the Bay Area MOU forward.

Will the Metropolitan Transportation Commission rethink some of the largest transportation projects on the books?

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 projects on the books.  This “project performance assessment” dives deep into 80 of the largest projects that are being considered for inclusion in the 2013 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP).  The question is, how good is their assessment?

In the assessment, every project will receive 2 scores:

  • A benefit/cost ratio where, for example, a project scoring “5” is estimated to provide five times as much benefit as its total cost.
  • A goals assessment that qualitatively considers how well the project contributes towards MTC’s ten adopted targets – from greenhouse gas reduction to increase in physical activity.  A perfect project would get a score of 10, one point for each goal.  The lowest score can be negative, since MTC appropriately considered adverse impacts as well as positive ones.

While the assessment won’t definitively decide what projects are in or out of the RTP, we hope it will provide critical information as Commissioners grapple with how to take these $180 billion worth of projects and whittle it down to less than $70 billion of funding that is discretionary (i.e. available to fund these projects).

It seems likely that the takeaways from the assessment will be on “outliers,” i.e., projects that have a benefit/cost ratio of 10 may be seen as priorities for funding.  For projects that have a score under 1 (meaning they are projected to have less benefits than cost) or lead to greenhouse gas increases, it will – and should - bring on intense scrutiny.

So does the assessment — some incredibly complicated and cutting edge analysis – reflect reality and take a hard look at these potential projects?  Are the benefit/cost ratios realistic, and are the targets MTC is supposed to be working towards accurate? It is a mixed bag.  On October 31, along with other members of the technical committee, I got a preview of the draft analysis.

Here are my takeaways so far:

  • The qualitative assessments do a good job of connecting projects to the actual goals of the RTP/Sustainable Communities Strategies.  This is the case even though the answers by nature are somewhat subjective and reflect limitations in the travel model (as outlined below).  Projects based on efficiency measures, and most transit projects, do very well.
  • The congestion reduction benefits of highway and suburban transit projects are overstated.
    • The travel model doesn’t make any changes in “tour destinations” based on transportation improvements.  In reality, faster roads through expansion or efficiency will lead to longer trips – either as people move or decide on more distant schools or jobs.  As vehicle travel grows, this would reduce some of the congestion relief benefits of both road expansion or road efficiency projects. In some situations this could even lead to cost instead of a benefit, if increases in vehicle miles travelled (VMT) outweigh congestion reduction on that particular segment.  Many public transit projects, especially suburban expansions in high growth areas, would also show less congestion relief over time.
    • The land uses stay static.  Even though a capacity expansion project may lead to more growth in an area over time (and thus diminish or negate the congestion relief benefits) no change in growth is modeled.  Conversely, a transit project that serves the urban core doesn’t lead to more dense land use in the model, and thus is not given any of monetized benefits derived from such growth.

This doesn’t just skew the b/c ratio, but the qualitative assessment is greatly impacted as well.  An increase in VMT results in adverse impacts in at least five of the ten goals.  But the model understates that increase.

  • Travel time savings dwarf all other quantitative benefits. 

In total there were 15 benefits that were first quantified, and then multiplied by a dollar value or “monetized”. These benefits are broken into four categories in MTC’s spreadsheets: travel time; travel cost; air pollution reduction; and collisions, active transport, and noise reduction.

But for almost all of the projects analyzed, the benefits of travel time absolutely dwarf the others, often counting for 10x all the other benefits put together. If this in fact reflected reality that would alright, but there is a good chance it doesn’t and skews the results.

This is because both of the factors that create the travel time benefit are skewed upwards.  First, as discussed above, the travel model overestimates the long-term congestion relief of many projects.

Second, the monetary valuations are high if compared to what consumers are actually willing to pay. Travel time reductions are valued at $16 per hour for people in cars and $26 per hour per truck. Transit travelers waiting for their vehicles are valued at $35 per hour as they wait, since they are exposed to the elements and uncertainty.

There are really two main problems with this. The first is that travel time savings for vehicle passengers are not even one of MTC’s ten goals, though time savings for non-auto modes are. There is good reason for this, since faster vehicle travel leads to more vehicle travel which runs counter to so many of the other regional goals such as reducing asthma.  MTC’s goals are smart in that they reward access, health, prosperity and equity rather than simply “mobility” for the sake of mobility.

The other problem is that most people would not be willing to pay that very high price to forego that hour, so should the numbers be this high?  As Todd Litman recently wrote at his new report on www.vtpi.org, “Only a minority of total vehicles are typically engaged in high-value trips, even under urban-peak conditions.”

This was not an intentional bias towards expansion projects or roads, since these travel time benefits accrue to public transportation and other alternatives. Rather MTC staff are trying to follow and develop best practices. Still, if it shows skewed results, how can it be remedied?

One way is a “sensitivity analysis” that instead of pivoting off of average salaries is based on other factors. This could be estimates of consumer’s willingness to pay, after tax salary, or simply putting together an additional b/c ratio that leaves out travel time benefits altogether. This is a relatively easy adjustment.

More difficult is to vary the other time savings factor; the loss of congestion relief over time.  Ultimately, this issue of induced growth and loss of congestion benefit is more easily and meaningfully dealt with at the regional level.  Hopefully we can get some of that clarity when MTC’s regional scenarios, which include different land uses, are released soon.  But since that regional assessment won’t inform and change this project-level one, it still leaves this assessment as biased.  There could be ways to adjust for this, and they should be explored.

While there are dozens of other fine points that affect the assessment, the net result of the three main points raised here is that highway projects, on the whole, end up scoring much higher on the b/c ratio than most other projects.  The “bubble charts” that portray this all on one page, therefore, don’t look much different than they did four years ago.

Beyond these 80 large projects, there is also an assessment by category of all 700 of the potential RTP projects, including the smaller ones.

As mentioned above, this Project Assessment is not determinative but is just one component of this political process.  Staff will frame the results; Commissioners will ingest the staff positions; the public will comment and lobby… and ultimately, this winter, a draft RTP alternative will be formed. Of course, this information is also likely to be used by stakeholders in other venues – such as when a county is reauthorizing a transportation sales tax.

To help stakeholders understand how to interpret this data, TransForm commissioned Dr. Deb Niemeier, a Professor of Civil and Environmental engineering at UC Davis, to provide a critical evaluation of this project-level assessment. You can find that report here. Note that it is probably good to read the latest materials from MTC first, as it assumes some level of knowledge. You can also see the critique of the project assessment done for MTC’s Express Lane proposal.
MTC’s latest information can be found here in their packet for this Friday’s 10 a.m. Planning Committee. This assessment is the primary agenda item.

TransForm will continue to work with Dr. Niemeier to produce analyses to help understand strengths and weaknesses of this approach.  While far from perfect, the results of MTC’s Performance Analysis are a real attempt to connect the excellent targets that were adopted last year for a sustainable, equitable and healthy region to specific investments.

The precedent is incredibly important and may lead to smarter decision-making here in the Bay Area, and ultimately other regions.  The timing couldn’t be better as we face tremendous funding shortfalls and will need to invest transportation funds more strategically than ever.

Finally, I’d like to thank the Resources Legacy Fund and the Clarence E. Heller Foundation that made TransForm’s work on the assessments possible.  I also want to give MTC staff some very strong kudos on this process as they:

  • Set up a diverse technical group, had a truly open process and listened to many of our recommendations.
  • Included more benefits than four years ago, such as benefits of greater physical activity, reduced vehicle ownership costs and more.
  • Included adverse impacts, which more typically apply to highway expansion projects.
  • Make the information much more accessible, providing both significant detail as well as clear summary sheets.
  • Are much more forthcoming with crucial caveats including an explanation of where their model may not be accurate or complete.

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 projects will undergo performance analysis as part of Plan Bay Area (the long-range, 25-year transportation and land use plan for the nine county Bay Area that will be part of the Sustainable Communities Strategy). 

MTC will designate some projects as “committed projects” and thus exempt them from analysis or Commission discretion during the Plan Bay Area process.  On Friday, Commissioners on the Planning Committee will vote either to have MTC staff conduct performance analysis on a smaller (“Option 1”) or larger (“Option 2”) number of projects.  (Friday’s Planning Committee meeting packet and agenda available here.) 

We think performance analysis is a good thing.  Projects, especially very expensive long-term transportation investments, should be reevaluated regularly to make sure they remain wise choices.  This is why TransForm and many other are recommending Option 2 to the Commission’s Planning Committee members.

This slide from MTC’s forthcoming staff presentation outlines the differences in the two options:

Especially in this era of limited funds and difficult choices, we must take advantage of the RTP’s opportunity to develop the best possible investment scenario for the future of the Bay Area. If we are going to save our transportation system from decay and disinvestment, we need fewer “sacred cows” and all options on the table.

Things change. Projects change, costs go up. The staff report (see slide 6) shows that the average transit project’s cost increases by 50% after a project goes through environmental review. It is just common sense to review our investment strategy every four years.

That’s why TransForm urges the Commissioners on the Planning Committee to choose Option 2 on Friday. Let’s take advantage of this once every four-year moment and take a good, long, hard look at our investment strategy.  Are they the right projects? 

Let’s find out.