Want to raise the hackles of people on this site? Talk about parking. One of the rallying cries of the people opposing the ARC (Aggie Research Campus) is to point out the 4340 parking spots that are proposed for that site. Too much parking – thus too many cars.
On the other hand, you can also rile the base by not proposing enough parking. Davis Live Housing went small in terms of parking per unit, even as the project was approved for seven stories. The same is the case with the proposed Olive Drive Mixed Use Project and the University Commons Redevelopment Project.
Too much parking means too many cars on the street, but not enough parking seems to be worse. People believe that folks with cars with simply move in and find other places to park.
But as we showed, student driving, at least, is down. In travel surveys, less than one-third of all students who live in town use cars as their primary way to get to campus. Moreover, the travel survey shows that among undergraduate students about 45 percent have access to a car and 20 percent do not even have a driver’s license.
Next week marks the tenth anniversary of the launching of the Vanguard Court Watch project. We have between eight and 12 students each quarter including the summer. Which means, over the course of any given year, we have somewhere between 30 and 50 different students come through our program. As the main requirement of the internship is to go to the court in Woodland, we get a pretty good sense of driving habits.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, back in 2010, it was relatively rare for students not to have a vehicle. Now, more often than not, students do not have vehicles and either take the bus or carpool. It has become more and more frequent to see students without a driver’s license at all – not only do they not drive, they can’t drive. Contrary to what some may think, these are primarily not 
international students.
This trend is actually not limited to students. And it is not just limited to Davis.
The Wall Street Journal this week has a piece: “America’s Love Affair With Driving Takes a Back Seat.” They found: “Despite a strong economy, Americans are driving fewer miles than they did before 2007-09 recession.”
Writes the Wall Street Journal: “Around the country, the American love affair with driving is cooling in ways that are changing how cities look and feel. Over the past three years, the average number of miles driven per person has hovered around 9,800 miles a year, roughly 2% fewer than at the 2004 peak. Driving is down in states with urban centers like California and New York and in some rural states such as Wyoming and Vermont.”
The article found: “Among the reasons for the national decline are migration to dense urban areas; young adults’ preference to live close to their jobs or to use alternate modes of transportation; more online working, shopping and streaming; and a growing population of retirees who don’t commute to jobs anymore.”
These points are all crucial for understanding how planning ought to change in a place like Davis.
First, we have seen the trend among UC Davis students. Students living within a mile of campus simply do not drive to campus, the travel survey statistics show. But further, they also show that, more and more, students do not bring their cars to town – if they have them at all.
Why? Most things that students need, they don’t need a car for. Cars are expensive – there are maintenance costs, there is gas, there is insurance. With things like Zipcar and Uber and Lyft making ridesharing convenient, and Unitrans being well-positioned to serve student populations, students don’t drive as much.
This is part of a national trend – more and more young people prefer to live closer to their jobs and use alternative modes of transportation. That is a key reason why it was important to attach housing to proposals like Aggie Research Campus. It won’t guarantee that everyone living on the site works there or that everyone working on the site lives there, but for a key segment of the population, living near work is a huge quality of life issue.
We focus on the environmental dynamics of it, but we miss the other dynamic – time. Commuting is costly. It costs gas money and wear and tear on the car. But it also eats up time.
Since May I have done the long commute twice a week to San Francisco as we expanded our court watch program. It means about five hours a day in the car. That turns what would be a four or five hour a day project into a nine or ten hour a day project. Even for more modest commutes, my wife commutes to Sacramento, that adds between five and ten hours a week to her job – time that could be spent with family or leisure. That has a cost.
In terms of planning and policy, that means we should have less parking at new housing developments close to campus where people can walk or bike rather than drive to get to work. Those who want their cars will learn to move to places that are more likely to accommodate them with parking spots.
We should start re-thinking how to get people to work.
And we should focus on mixed-use and getting people places to live close to their jobs. That is why the University Research Park is proposing mixed use on its site and why we are looking at densification and residential housing in the core.
The world is changing the way people live. We should keep these trends in mind as we do our planning. Remember, the places we build now will be functional well into the future – a future that could be very different from the present.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Nothing about electric vehicles. One of the oversights of this densification paradigm is that we will shortly be switching to solar powered EV cars. VW plans on making 1 million EV’s a year by 2025 and China plans on making 5 million that same year.
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Driving is actually tending upward based on U.S. Federal Highway Administration data. In the past 5 years, per capita VMT in the U.S. has increased by about 5%. Add in a population increase of about 4% over the last five years, and that’s about a 9% increase in total driving miles.
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Since Rik provided neither links nor timeline context for his statement I followed the time-honored Paul Harvey approach and located “the rest of the story.” Here is a bit of what I found, with links to the respective sources.
https://assets.aarp.org/rgcenter/ppi/liv-com/transportation-funding-reform.pdf
One of the important factors in the Federal Highway Administration data is that U.S. VMT includes all truck and bus traffic as well as not only personal driving. And that the consistent growth in VMT from 1981 until 2004 (1.8 percent per year growth over that period) was spurred substantially by the trucking deregulation enacted in 1980. Similarly, the resumption of VMT growth since 2014 has been spurred by the rapid growth in internet commerce, with all its individual purchase shipping activity.
Source = ENO Transportation at https://www.enotrans.org/article/trends-in-per-capita-vmt/
Of course the national VMT data can be sliced and diced down to state-specific VMT, and the following graphic, also from the ENO Transportation Centers look at Table VM-2 of the Federal Highway Administration VMT, shows how California VMT have trended when compared to three other states and the National average. The data speaks for itself and I add no editorial comment to it.
Matt W: that data only goes to 2017. 2019 data shows a significant increase from 2017.
Matt has shown us his (data)… are you prepared to show us yours (data)? [and please cite source(s)]
I know this household’s VMT/Capita has declined in last 15 months.
The article itself cites the Wall Street Journal which has a data presentation from the Department of Transportation. I provided a link in the article to the article.
Greenwald: your article is wrong and your conclusions are wrong The actual federal data is extremely to find (took me all of about 10 seconds).
As the data Matt W. posted shows, per capital VMT has been trending downward in the past decade and has increased 5% in the past five years. Then, when you factor in population increases, total VMT has increased about 10% in the past 5 years.
Again, Rik, post your data. Until we see a link (for a year that isn’t yet finished, BTW), you have no factual basis for your claim. This Federal Reserve Bank site using FHWA data shows VMT up 0.9% over the last 12 months, which is about the same as population growth: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles
The actual 5-year figures for total VMT from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (in millions of miles) divided by total civilian population estimates from the Census Bureau
3,250,407 VMT/328,744,045 population = 9,887 VMT per capita (October 2019) = 4.7% increase in per capita VMT in 5- year period from 2014
3,013,226/319,005,484 = 9,446 VMT per capita (October 2014)
And over the last 5 years, total VMT has increased 7.9%.
Just about every argument that the Vanguard puts forth (regarding development) is intended to support more of it.
The purpose of this latest article is to deny the link between development and automobile use. In particular, it takes a certain amount of (let’s just say “confidence”) to make these claims in regard to a 4,340-parking spot, peripheral development proposal on prime farmland, adjacent to a MAJOR freeway – which is ALREADY creating problems for Davis.
By the way, services such as UBER and Lyft still count as “driving”, and there’s indications that they’re (currently) under-priced.
Except, often those trips include 2 or more passengers, which still decreases VMT/capita.
As with taxis, driving to pick up passengers without anyone in the car, or otherwise “going out of the way” to pick up/deliver another passenger increases VMTs.
For example, I recall articles which show that a lot of Uber drivers live many MILES away from their primary markets (e.g., San Francisco). They are essentially “commuters”, themselves – just to reach their “workplace”.
In contrast, using your own vehicle delivers one (or more) persons directly from their origin, to their destination.
Reposting of a comment that has been removed by the moderator will get you blocked.
In general, not providing adequate parking allows developers to shift the impacts onto existing neighborhoods and business districts.
In addition to the statistics cited by Rik (above), it turns out that information which conflicts with David’s claims is not difficult to find:
My claim comes from the WSJ journal article which is linked in the article which has its own data presentation.
Greenwald: your claim is wrong.
Again, Rik, show your links support. I took your 10 seconds and didn’t find your supporting data, but did find David’s.
There is so much wrong with this article I’m not even going to try to take it on point by point. And apparently some that have tried are already had their posts removed, as there are only six non-mod posts as I write , and the “five per person” limit checkered-flag is already slowing cars circling the track.
Just look at the sentences above: seven negatives in four sentences. Those aren’t logic arguments, those are verbal skitters.
Talk about contradiction. How about the fact touted here that I-80 keeps clogging our local streets, that when I-80 roadwork is done in 10-15 years, the highway will be more clogged than it is now? How about that Folsom recently OK’d expansion of Folsom to the south side of the freeway, a footprint a good chunk as large as current Folsom, and it’s mostly singe-family homes with limited alternative transit? Or the massive building on the east side of Vacaville, also single-family homes. That all means one thing: more cars.
Without MASSIVE building of alternative transit infrastructure, cars are here to stay. Land use don’t matter if there’s no transit to back it up. And forget the dream of the local bus — ask oneself, are you one of those people who will hop on a bus to run your errands around Davis? Do you have hours to do what you can do today by car or bike in one hour? Some little dip in anecdotal student car ownership, especially with the massive use of Uber and Lyft, proves nothing.
uh huh . . .
Fascinating… have you thought of taking Amtrak to Richmond, BART to SF? Driving, all you can do is drive… Amtrak, you can read, write, think, sleep/nap, eat food (but bring it with you). If you look the cost of “non-productive time (for things you’ll probably do during waking hours anyway), and total cost, you just might find that taking the car is not the ‘most economical’ all things considered. Hundreds of folk in Davis have come to that same conclusion…
Interestingly, I did my own ‘court’ watch @ Santa Clara Co CH 3 times this Fall… Amtrak to Diridon (San Jose), free transfer to light rail ending up about 2 blocks from the CH. Had breakfast and lunch on the train, no parking fees, no gas, no road rage. Read newspaper, kindle book, and relaxed… I think I chose the better tactic, as opposed to driving.
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Total VMT trending upward:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA
I appears that is VMT, not VMT/capita…
As the data Matt W. posted shows, per capital VMT has been trending downward in the past decade and has increased 5% in the past five years. Then, when you factor in population increases, total VMT has increased about 10% in the past 5 years.
Same data I found that shows that VMT per capita over the last 12 months is static. Since the last peak VMT in November 2007, VMT has increased 7.0%; meanwhile the U.S. population has increased 9.0%.
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“The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released new data today showing total U.S. driving in 2018 surged to a record-setting 3.225 trillion vehicle-miles traveled (VMT).
“Record-setting vehicle-miles traveled reflects a robust economy, lower gas prices and is another reason to ensure that America’s roads and bridges are well-maintained and modernized to improve safety,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao.”
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/fhwa1905.cfm
“surged”? Language used by the wife of the U.S. Senate Majority Leader to extol the economic “miracle” of the Trump Administration. 0.9% increase isn’t a “surge”. As with the 11 year economic expansion, it’s just a continuation of an existing trend.
Rik and Richard, Secretary Chao’s 3.225 trillion VMT at the end of 2018 is up from 3.213 trillion VMT at the end of 2017, which is a 0.3% increase. At the same time according to the US Census the US population rose from 326,218,096 to 328,231, 337, which is a 0.6% increase. So Secretary Chao should also have been reporting that VMT per Capita actually “surged downward” from 9,850 to 9,832.
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Uber and Lyft usage leads to more trips and travel in major cities, says study
“ A new study, released today by University of California Davis transportation researcher Dr. Regina Clewlow, found that while widespread usage of these services may be decreasing the number of miles users drive themselves, it appears, overall, to increase the total miles driven in cities. App users aren’t just substituting trips, but adding additional ones. The finding raises thorny questions about future transportation policy.
Clewlow’s research found that 49 to 61 percent of ride-hailing trips “would not have been made at all, or made by walking, biking, or transit.” It’s a key factor in her determination that “ride-hailing is currently likely to contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT)…”
https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/11/16459004/uber-lyft-transportation-driving-urban-planning
The FHWA VMT data, which shows a decreasing per capita VMT since the last peak VMT, includes ride hailing service driving.
And what does ride hailing have to do with a new development? Since these services aren’t likely to be used for regular commuting, this seems to support the premise that workers are less likely to be driving to a new work site.
Rik, my anecdotal personal experience is that 100% of my Uber/Lyft trips would have been by taxi.
Appears 8 = 5. The new math…
Make of this article what you will. I’ve cited some sections which seem pertinent.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/California-Is-Booming-Why-Are-So-Many-14937905.php
What I make of it, is that it is ‘off-topic’. Separate ‘agenda’…
Which is extrapolated to the world . . . how?
Six “edited”‘s and an unknown number of total removals. It’s a bright and shiny day at the ranch.
Seems like all edits, thus far, re: one poster.
Two.
Noted.