DAVIS — When the Davis City Council takes up Task 9 of the city’s General Plan Update on Tuesday, the discussion will center less on whether to approve development and more on whether a large-scale northeast growth concept is even feasible given its transportation demands, costs and long-term fiscal implications.
The analysis before the council, prepared by transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers at the request of the city, lays out in detail the infrastructure required to support such growth and the substantial tradeoffs involved.
At the council’s direction, the General Plan Update team conducted what Fehr & Peers described as “a high-level assessment of a land use and mobility concept plan aimed at meeting future housing and job needs for Davis consistent with GPU time horizon.” The study evaluated a potential new growth area northeast of the city limits and sphere of influence and a conceptual transportation network designed to serve it, according to the firm’s January 2026 memorandum to city staff .
The consultants noted at the outset that the concept is not a development proposal. “The land use concept was identified for planning purposes and may be explored further in the GPU pending direction from City Council,” Fehr & Peers wrote. The goal, they said, was to understand the scale of transportation infrastructure that would be required if Davis were to rely on peripheral growth to meet housing and employment needs through 2050.
Fehr & Peers framed the work in practical terms, noting that Davis already faces structural challenges funding its existing transportation system. “The City does not have sufficient revenue from existing sources to cover the full cost of operating and maintaining (O&M) the existing network,” the memo states. “Any expansion of the network will exacerbate this problem unless new development is capable of covering the full cost of construction and on-going O&M.”
The land use concept tested by the consultants assumes development of a large area northeast of Davis bounded generally by Pole Line Road, Mace Boulevard, County Road 32A and County Road 29. The area was selected after screening undeveloped land around the city to avoid floodplains and land encumbered by agricultural or habitat conservation easements and to focus on locations that could connect to existing roads.
Under the scenario analyzed by Fehr & Peers, the northeast area would include roughly 4,900 single-family homes, 3,700 multifamily units, employment for about 7,500 workers and a 150-room hotel. The scenario incorporates previously proposed projects such as Willowgrove and the Davis Innovation and Sustainability Campus, which together account for a significant portion of the projected housing and job growth.
The consultant analysis focuses heavily on mobility, reflecting the city’s concern that transportation impacts often determine whether large peripheral developments are workable. Fehr & Peers evaluated a grid-style roadway network made up of arterial, minor arterial and collector streets designed to provide redundancy and multiple travel routes. While such a network could reduce congestion by distributing traffic, the firm cautioned that it comes at a high price.
“The benefit of this configuration is that it would provide redundancy with multiple east-west and north-south streets,” the staff report summarizes, but adds that “this type of network…tends to have a high cost especially when building multi-lane facilities” .
Active transportation features prominently in the analysis.
Fehr & Peers assumed Class IV separated bikeways on all arterial and collector streets, along with more than 20 miles of new off-street bike paths and connections to regional routes such as the Yolo Active Transportation Connections corridor.
The report concluded that a grid network combined with extensive bicycle infrastructure would improve both internal circulation and access to the broader Davis network.
Transit service, however, emerged as one of the most constrained elements of the concept.
Fehr & Peers wrote that “providing transit service to the potential new growth area would be challenging,” citing low to moderate residential densities, high vehicle ownership rates associated with anticipated household incomes and the distance to downtown Davis and the UC Davis campus .
The firm noted that high-frequency transit generally requires at least 10,000 residents or employees within a half-mile of stops, a threshold that much of the northeast area would not meet under the assumed land use pattern.
As a result, Fehr & Peers concluded that only limited portions of the area, particularly near East Covell Boulevard and Mace Boulevard, might support more frequent service or a major mobility hub.
To evaluate systemwide impacts, the consultants modeled traffic conditions in 2050 both with and without the northeast growth area. The comparison showed that during the evening peak hour, the additional trips generated by the growth area would “substantially decrease travel speeds on County Road 32A,” creating likely queuing on westbound Interstate 80 ramps and slow traffic on parts of East Chiles Road and Mace Boulevard .
Outside the peak period, the analysis found that most roadways would continue to operate near posted speeds, but Fehr & Peers cautioned that commute and school traffic could still result in delays at certain intersections. Achieving higher speeds during peak hours, the firm concluded, would require significant auto-oriented capacity expansion.
Those potential expansion projects include a grade-separated crossing of the Union Pacific railroad tracks on County Road 32A, widening of Mace Boulevard and improvements at the Interstate 80/Mace Boulevard, Interstate 80/Chiles Road and State Route 113 interchanges. Fehr & Peers also identified potential widening of County Road 29 and new signalization at key intersections to address congestion north of the city.
The estimated cost of those improvements is one of the central findings likely to shape Tuesday’s council discussion. Fehr & Peers estimated that internal street infrastructure alone would cost between $850 million and $1.04 billion. Internal transit infrastructure would add another $60 million to $120 million, while off-site grade separations and interchange improvements would cost between $160 million and $300 million. Right-of-way acquisition and long-term operations and maintenance costs were not included in those figures.
If all of those capital costs were allocated solely to new development in the northeast area, the firm estimated that roughly 78 percent would be borne by residential uses and 22 percent by employment uses, based on daily trip generation. That translates into estimated transportation-related costs of $125,000 to $170,000 per single-family home and $60,000 to $85,000 per multifamily unit.
Fehr & Peers made clear that these figures are not financing plans but rather a way of illustrating scale. The analysis does not account for potential state, federal or regional funding sources, nor does it include ongoing operating and maintenance costs, which the firm flagged as a significant concern given the city’s existing fiscal constraints.
The consultants emphasized that the study is meant to inform policy decisions rather than prescribe outcomes. “The purpose of this assessment was to understand potential transportation implications of the concept, including effects on vehicle travel, roadway capacity and transportation improvements and cost,” Fehr & Peers wrote .
City staff echoed that framing in the staff report prepared for the council, which notes that the preliminary concept allows the city to consider multiple major development projects together rather than on a piecemeal basis. Staff also tied the analysis to broader General Plan goals, including housing supply, fiscal resilience, climate resilience and infrastructure quality.
On Tuesday, the council is expected to discuss whether the Fehr & Peers analysis omits key considerations, whether the magnitude of required infrastructure is compatible with the city’s fiscal realities and whether alternative growth patterns should be explored as part of the General Plan Update.
Council members will also be asked whether the preliminary land use and mobility concept should be refined further or whether other scenarios should be tested.
The meeting will not result in approval of development or expansion of the city’s boundaries.
Instead, it represents an early checkpoint in a multi-year planning process, one in which the Fehr & Peers analysis places hard numbers on a question Davis has wrestled with for decades: what it would actually take, in roads, transit and dollars, to grow outward.
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This study reminds me of the attempt to put in parking meters downtown. You have an issue at peak times so you want to build the entire system to accommodate peak conditions. Of course the study focused on daily trips but with work from home daily trips might not be the correct metric. Also with the rise of e-bikes assumptions about how people will travel within Davis might not play out as daily car trips.
Suddenly had this image jump into my mind…
But more seriously, I have been wondering what the rise in e-transportation will do for at least local traffic (but isn’t that another reason we don’t want to force people to commute?)
In my neighborhood I know people who only commute to the office in Sacto one or two days a week. I know others who commute to UCD on e-bikes.
Transit behavior is undergoing changes but I don’t know if this study that looks at daily trips is capturing present conditions not to mention future conditions.
I was disappointed to see the state pushing for in-office work for state employees, seems like a hybrid model would achieve a number of different goals.
Force people to commute? People make choices based on factors effecting the personal dynamics of their own lives. Nobody is forcing anybody to commute. The entire idea of somehow engineering the community for people who don’t commute is a fools errands.
If they don’t have housing in Davis but work in Davis, what do you call that?
If they live in Davis, but work out of town, what do you call that?
Forced commute is admittedly not the cleanest description, but that’s what I’m trying to describe.
I have friends who live in the Cannery. They chose Davis because when they got married he worked in Sac and she worked in Vallejo and Davis was somewhere in between and seemed to have good schools for the kids they wanted to have. The choices they made totally blow up all this nonsense about designing the community for internal commutes only.
They now have two kids under five and she transferred to a job with her company in Davis and he only goes to Sac two days a week and works from home 3 days a week.
What I find hilarious is the idea that we can create some sort of model for 20-40 years in the future when we don’t even understand the choices people are making or the transportation dynamics of today.
When my kid was looking for work a few years ago, living in Dixon, he was applying from Elk Grove to Loomis to Fairfield. There was zero intention of moving to those communities. People long ago decoupled their residence from their employment, especially in the younger generation where it is well understood that jobs aren’t forever.
“This study reminds me of the attempt to put in parking meters downtown. You have an issue at peak times so you want to build the entire system to accommodate peak conditions.”
Ron, I’m a transportation planner. That’s how you build transportation systems – to handle the peak.
As for e-bikes — just like the angelic bus — and I am an alternate transportation planner — when you model this stuff out, the percentages in the most optimistic situations still is a move of a few percentage points, and that assumes massive investment in alternative infrastructure — which I believe in — but the reality is the vast majority of people will commute by car and you have to plan for that.
Alan
At UCD, only 30% of workers drive to work who live in town; 90% from out of town drive. If we move other Davis workers into town, we could expect similar shifts in commuting patterns.
Assuming any of that is actually accurate, where do their spouses work?
And where would the people who currently live in their houses work, if they moved out?
And since there’d be a net gain of people in the area, where are those people living and working, now? Are they, for example, living and working in the Bay Area, where public transit is already robust, and the weather doesn’t necessarily necessitate air conditioning?
Is UCD even hiring anyone in the first place? If so, how many?
And if UCD does hire anyone, what makes you think they’d pick a new shoebox in Davis, instead of a pre-existing house (or a new one in Woodland for at least a couple hundred thousand dollars less)?
Does anyone else even ask these type of questions on here, or on the council for example?
This is for workers already commuting to Davis, and this would be new housing. That means that existing residents would NOT be displaced. Those spouses are likely commuting elsewhere, but they also may take jobs inside Davis. Most importantly, both workers in the household are most likely driving to work (at the 90%+ rate). This takes the VMT for at least one of them down to a third.
This is about existing, not new, UCD jobs. As I’ve pointed out several times, 1500 job positions at UCD have gone from being filled by Davis residents to being filled by out of town commuters. So any future hiring at UCD is irrelevant to this analysis. (I don’t understand your question about where existing residents would work if they moved out.)
And again, we have pointed out from empirical data that younger households are willing to move into smaller shared-wall homes to gain ownership. Plus the 50% premium on Davis housing over neighboring towns shows that the market is willing to pay for Davis amenities (as much as you seem to dislike them.) Under your theory, it’s a surprise that anyone wants to live in Davis because the only thing that matters is house price.
David, could you past an image in the article or here in the comments of page 17 of the report – just to put in context what they are talking about? Maybe toss in page the roads on page 18 as well?
I dont know if this report makes me want to laugh or cry. The land use pattern they came up with is absolutley baffling, is heavy on car-dependant low-density housing… and THEN they worry that the roads are expensive and that transit wont work???
It blows my mind… But at the same time, its not that surprising… the amount of land, and how far you have to go out to achieve the kind of long-term growth we would need is not dissimilar from PlanDavis.org’s predictions in this article:
https://davisvanguard.org/2025/09/op-ed-long-term-planning-corridor-development-beats-sprawl/
Only they put the sprawl in a different place. Honestly… I never had the audacity to assume that the city might grow around and BEHIND a large parcel with a permenant ag conservation easement on it…
Hopefully this report helps to make real to people the fact that status-quo types of low-density development are “problematic” at best
Thank you David.
Did anyone else notice that this plan treats both village farms and willow grove as though they were already passed?
Yet another structural impact of measure J: Even when a consultant is asked to do “proactive” transportation planning, they treat the measure J projects with deference and don’t dare question them.
Both of the current peripheral projects have parks at the bottom, which is a transit-hostile design decision. That should be the FIRST thing a transportation consultant should question… but apparently that is not the marching orders they were given.
OMG! Who had the audacity to come up with this land use plan? This is going nowhere soon. We need our planners to be less tone deaf to public opinion.
Don says: “When my kid was looking for work a few years ago, living in Dixon, he was applying from Elk Grove to Loomis to Fairfield. There was zero intention of moving to those communities. People long ago decoupled their residence from their employment, especially in the younger generation where it is well understood that jobs aren’t forever.”
Exactly.
Buying a house is a much more permanent decision, these days. Selling and buying another house (just for a new job) is a great way to lose money and set yourself back.
Especially if one intends to stay in the general region.
I used to work in Davis (and drove from a residence in Davis – as David himself does now). When I got a job in Sacramento, THAT’s the time that I started taking Yolobus (partly because my employer subsidized it, as they do with state employees).
Never even considered moving to Sacramento, and it was always a massive relief as the bus entered Davis. A completely different, and much better “feel”.
Though I always wished I could telecommute at that time.
Yeah, I agree with TK, this is baffling. Though I stick with the reality that we have to build for cars, we can build in a robust alternate transportation system as well. The way you do that is the city must incorporate a corridor that is dedicated to that — and parallel to, the road corridor — in this case Covell Blvd. Then you build your DENSE housing along that corridor, and densest closest to the rapid bus stops, and link to Pole Line through Wildhorse. My understanding (limited) is that Willowwhateever incorporated that, but the Taramino peeps rejected the idea — so no coordinated links between burbs, so permanent and total failure. Unless this is fixed by the City, I’m voting against everything J. Remember when Davis pioneered this stuff?
amen
On the one hand, they say that public transportation is complicated, but the conclusion is that complicated is inevitable.
The connecting to existing networks for cycling thing is a joke: cycling from the current outer reaches of town is really low, and even if everybody has an expensive E bike, the surface conditions are terrible and there’s absolutely no mention of actual networks from the existing periphery to the center from this direction.
There’s a little to no mention of how bikes and public transportation are going to compete with a quick trip over to I 80, a fill up at the Chevron, a fill up at the Starbucks and so on, on the way home shopping at Nugget, or going downtown and demanding parking.
There’s no plans for trains, regional trains have no concrete plans,
Absolutely impossible to suggest that a lot of people here can’t have cars, and in this case, it’s not just the entitlement and lack of imagination that’s it fault, it’s the complete lack of the state to provide funding that facilitates its housing construction requirements in a climate friendly way.
This might be the worst thing I have seen in this genre from the city. And why is the Senior Transportation Planner not one of the listed authors?
If I was a member of the transportation staff looking for a job elsewhere, I would only include a reference to this in my resume if I was trying to get a job in some suburban dystopia.
Much of the subject land is within 1 mile of the county landfill and sewage treatment plant complex/Davis wetlands and is designated “Open Space for Public Health and Safety”. The GP says “The intent is that residential development is prohibited”. See figure 31a and b in the 2007 GP. In addition much of the land is 100-yr floodplain. See SACOG FEMA floodplain map. That leaves only the Willowgrove and Mace blvd parcels as fully buildable. To add to this, much of the land is highest quality agricultural soil I would guess and it would be against Yolo County LAFCO to build on it. So that should eliminate even more of the land for expansion. So this planning exercise seems ill conceived and therefore sets a bad precedent.
“The goal, they said, was to understand the scale of transportation infrastructure that would be required if Davis were to rely on peripheral growth to meet housing and employment needs through 2050.”
Why this scenario? It seems to miss a lot of the constraints on development in that area plus it appears to ignore optimizing transportation system costs. Fehr & Peers may not be using the best data about local transportation modes and commuter patterns.