California's rethinking process for transportation impact assessments under SB 743 is still waiting for a formal proposal from state officials. The July 1, 2014 deadline for publication of a new draft standard from Governor Brown's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) came and went without the expected new document.
Siddharth Nag, OPR's legislative coordinator and legal counsel, wrote in response to an inquiry: "The draft is not quite ready for release, but we hope it will be in coming weeks." He confirmed it would be possible to sign up for immediate notification of the draft's release by joining a listserv linked from OPR's SB 743 Web site at http://www.opr.ca.gov/s_sb743.php.
The American Planning Association San Diego had scheduled a presentation on the revision process, but circulated an email about possible rescheduling that said, "We have been informed by OPR that the revised transportation metric guidelines will not be available in time for our event scheduled for July 11, 2014 (The legally required release date was July 1, 2014.)" A SPUR San Jose event on the issue was still scheduled for July 17 as of this writing. (See http://www.spur.org/events/2014-07-17/what-auto-los-reform-means-san-jose.)
To date, the main public OPR statement on the subject is a "preliminary evaluation" of possible new metrics that the office issued last December at http://www.opr.ca.gov/docs/PreliminaryEvaluationTransportationMetrics.pdf. In that text, OPR staff said they were posting the document early to invite preliminary comment though no proposal was required until July. Almost a hundred public comment responses are posted at http://www.opr.ca.gov/docs/SB743_PublicComments_INDEX.pdf.
Last year's SB 743 legislation required the Office of Planning and Research (OPR) to post an initial draft by July 1, 2014 of an alternative standard to measure transportation impacts under CEQA. The new standard must depart from the Level of Service (LOS) approach, which has been criticized as outdated, crude and even harmful because it focuses on avoiding auto traffic congestion. In its posted materials about the mandate, OPR begins by arguing a case against the LOS standard, saying LOS-based project reviews and mitigation designs work to the detriment of other transportation goals such as improving access by foot, bicycle or bus or reducing overall travel distances.
Per the law's text (at http://bit.ly/1lM4qY8), OPR's July 1 deadline was to propose "criteria for determining the significance of transportation impacts of projects within transit priority areas. Those criteria shall promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the development of multimodal transportation networks, and a diversity of land uses. In developing the criteria, the office shall recommend potential metrics to measure transportation impacts that may include, but are not limited to, vehicle miles traveled, vehicle miles traveled per capita, automobile trip generation rates, or automobile trips generated. The office may also establish criteria for models used to analyze transportation impacts to ensure the models are accurate, reliable, and consistent with the intent of this section."
The December "preliminary evaluation" prominently considered switching over to the "Vehicle Miles Traveled" (VMT) standard, saying travel distances were easier to predict than congestion levels and that mitigation approaches focused on reducing VMT would do more to promote bicycle, foot and mass transit methods of travel.
The VMT choice is thought to be the most likely, but the December document also invited discussion of other standards: Automobile Trips Generated, Multi-Modal Level of Service (including LOS ratings for transit, walking and biking), Fuel Use, and Motor Vehicle Hours Traveled. Further, it suggested some areas could be placed categorically under a "presumption of less than significant transportation impact" category to allow new development in central areas already well served by transit.
A June 26 explanatory article by the SPUR organization, posted at http://www.spur.org/blog/2014-06-26/can-new-law-free-cities-car-oriented-development, says some cities including San Francisco and San Jose are already moving away from the LOS standard. It suggests smaller and more rural cities may however seek to retain LOS because it suits more rural areas better and replacement approaches may be expensive to adopt.
The SPUR article and OPR's SB 743 Web page identify the CEQA Guidelines Listserv as the place to subscribe for notification of the new standard. The sign-in form is available in the OPR listserv menu at http://www.opr.ca.gov/s_e-lists.php. The same list allows subscription to an additional listserv for SB 743, described as providing "information about Alternatives to LOS," but it's not clear how the two lists may overlap.
