I saw the article from Susan Shelley entitled: “California’s VMT restrictions have no effect on climate change, but make housing more expensive.”
I actually thought I would end up agreeing with her—as I have noted, how California calculates VMT impacts of housing I find problematic. But when I read her article, it was just bad. She failed to argue her points well and didn’t seem to understand the overall issue
She writes that “homeowners might sell if there were new home developments that they found appealing. Freed from a daily commute, either because of retirement or remote work, many people might like to live in a newly built home in a community far from the city center.”
Then she adds, “But that’s rarely possible for a reason so ridiculous that it couldn’t be true anywhere but California.”
There is an air of truth to it, and, while the housing crisis is spreading across the country, California has done a poor job of combatting it in the last five years—as I have explained in various columns and articles during the last five to nine years or so.
But Shelley’s ire is focused on SB 743, which shifts the evaluation of traffic impacts from Level of Service (LOS) to VMT (Vehicle Miles Travelled). I don’t have a problem doing that as long as we can figure out a way to gauge the net effect of housing.
After all, you could add VMT to a location by adding housing, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you end up reducing the reliance on driving overall. That’s why I think we have to be much more careful about how we evaluate a project like Village Farms—because it might be that providing housing closer to the university will actually reduce VMT overall by putting people closer to work.
Back to Shelley’s column, she notes that SB 743 explains the limitation of using LOS.
LOS “neglects transit, pedestrian crossings, and bicycles,” and “has traditionally led to widening intersections and roadways to move automobile traffic faster at the expense of other modes of transportation.”
She continues, “The state would calculate the ‘induced travel’ created by a new project and disincentivize or kill projects that created more driving.”
She attacks the way this is done, noting that the state “relies on Caltrans to figure out the VMT from proposed projects, including housing developments, in areas that are served by the state highway system. Caltrans also calculates the value of ‘mitigation’ measures, such as paying to build bike lanes somewhere else.”
She calls this “arbitrary” and writes it’s a “nauseating blend of made-up numbers and political favoritism that raises costs and blocks needed housing construction, unless it’s the high-density, urban in-fill rental housing preferred by the government.”
She doesn’t like high-density, urban in-fill. It doesn’t by the way, have to be rental housing and, in fact, some of this high density housing can be more affordable because it’s land footprint is small, it’s overall size is smaller, and you can build it without environmental impacts (which really do matter) and put it near transit or near work to reduce driving.
But her piece gets worse. She notes that SB 743 is working to “reduce the amount of driving” but then seems to conflate less driving with “zero-emission vehicles” which she argues “don’t help.”
She then argues—or more like asserts— “The tragedy is that California’s VMT restrictions have no effect on global climate change…”
Based on what exactly? She offers no reasoning other than “zero-emission vehicles” don’t help.
But she does argue that “by preventing single-family home construction in areas where land is more affordable, they’ve wrecked the dreams of a generation of young Californians.”
So basically Shelley is proposing building more single-family homes in areas that were not previously developed.
She fails to analyze any of this of course. One problem is that will force more and more people into vehicles for longer commutes. Another problem is increasing the urban-wildfire encroachment.
I completely agree that the VMT analysis is fraught with problems and is in fact part of the problem with building new housing, but her analysis shows a distinct lack of research or understanding of the complicated nature of housing problems in a world with a very serious climate change problem.
Ms. Shelley’s opinions are typical of the big-oil-funded opposition to anything but sprawl. There are plenty of VMT studies, which, incidentally, demonstrate that pedestrian-friendly mixed-use (residences, offices, commerce and even light industry) cuts VMT roughly in half (one-third to two-thirds, depending on the specifics). The Southern California Association of Governments mathematically modeled every conceivable congestion remedy, up to and including double-decking the freeways. Their conclusion: only mixed use would have a significant impact on congestion. These are not new conclusions.
But…it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding. It’s a perennial feature of the American public policy landscape, and Ms. Shelley has decided she’d rather have a paycheck than the truth.
DG say: “how California calculates VMT impacts of housing I find problematic.”
But isn’t it ‘evidence based’?
So, I’ll go ahead and return to the Vanguard as well, for now.
From article: “because it might be that providing housing closer to the university will actually reduce VMT overall by putting people closer to work.”
I’m glad that you use the word “might”, since there’s no evidence of that. Would they, for example, start tearing down houses in Woodland if Covell Village/Village Farms was built? Or, is the theory that people living in North, North Davis (Woodland) would then move into a shoebox at the new Davis development – thereby freeing the housing Woodland for someone else so that they can commute to Sacramento, instead?
Seems like a pretty flimsy, unsupported justification to support a massive shoebox development.
Regarding worsening levels of LOS (due to more development), is there evidence that this actually encourages far-flung development (where LOS isn’t as much of an issue)? Again, using the example of Woodland which has a direct, unencumbered commute route to UCD?
Well well. Well-come back RO. The three (or is it four?) mustketjeers, reunite in the comments section.
While the world burns 😐
DG say: “—because it might be that providing housing closer to the university will actually reduce VMT overall by putting people closer to work.”
That’s not ‘evidence based’, that’s speculation. And you do it frequently, while criticizing others for their speculation, then using ‘evidence base’ while ignoring ‘other’ ‘evidence’ that doesn’t fit the narrative.
I work with models in transportation, some outputs used as inputs for VMT impact and then air impact studies. While not using VMT models, I know how they work. They look at demographics, similar towns, surveys of transportation movement and mode choice in Davis itself, distance for many trip pair types, aggregated, price of gas, availability of parking. It’s not important to understand the mechanism.
What IS important to understand is that you can model all this, and even push various parameters to their limits to see the outer limits of how people will behave and what the effect is on movement, choice, VMTs and air pollutants. While not precise, the overall trends, if done well, can show pretty good global predictions. And the disturbing thing is that as long as people are given *choice*, the auto still is king unless you make radical design changes in design and transportation, and even then auto is still king, just a smaller king.
But my main point is that statements like, “—because it might be that providing housing closer to the university will actually reduce VMT overall by putting people closer to work.” can all be modeled and tested. It is never ‘people will do this’ and then other political side says, ‘and people will do that’ — No, all the patterns are known and the overall trends can be tested and balanced. It’s not mysterious; it’s always in between what the ideological pundits say people will do. Of course, beware consultants that entities can hire who will give the results the entity wants instead of the ‘real’ results, by tweaking the model or its inputs — because that will become ‘evidence’ that can be ‘based’.
But in all these cases — while I’m not a no growther — I do believe California has limits, will always be expensive as hell, and there will always be people willing to sleep in the bushes in a relatively nice climate and do drugs and not pay the rent if we let them, and growth, built wrong especially, has serious consequences on the environment. And building in fire zones and flood planes and on top of earthquake faults is all f*cking stupid. And we are all going to pay for this mass stupidity in unbelievably higher insurance rates which are going to be reflected in rents. Housing in California never will be affordable. Find that “dream” is a less dynamic, less dramatic, place.
“And the disturbing thing is that as long as people are given *choice*, the auto still is king unless you make radical design changes in design and transportation, and even then auto is still king, just a smaller king.”
Exactly. If the goal is “shoebox living” (density) in places like Davis, the way to accomplish that is to control what occurs in nearby towns. Woodland, for example, could use a “Measure J” (though I’m not sure it would help, there).