The standard story that we always here – a project is going into a certain location, its so many units, therefore a traffic study is done to determine the impact on key intersections in town.
They will then look into so called cumulative effects – what happens if we build said project and then build three or four other projects at about the same time – without taking any mitigation measures into account.
There is definitely something to that approach. But in the end, it scares the hell out of people and you get these absurd findings by armchair traffic analysts that you are going to add an hour to someone’s commute time.
I’ve raised this point a number of times – but traffic analysis just like analysis of climate impact, tends to only look at these things unidirectionally.
A decade ago, traffic analysis concluded that Nishi 1.0 would add all of this traffic onto Richards Blvd. Nevermind that the project called for a new bypass around the Richards Tunnel. Nevermind that a good number of people who would be residing at Nishi were already coming town, many of them exiting at Richards and therefore the expected impact on Richard would be a good deal less than feared – particularly since the bypass might have eliminated a lot of the traffic going through the tunnel.
But traffic – given how close the election was – probably killed the project – and while the next project that bypassed the problem altogether passed easily, it created access problems that have yet to be solved, and so all of this approved housing hasn’t been built yet.
A key point that a lot of critics missed however is that if a good percentage of people living at the site were already commuting into town, the net impact of the project might have actually decreased traffic (especially when coupled with the mitigation measures).
The problem is that for whatever reasons our brain do not think “four dimensionally” instead we think housing equal traffic.
As we get closer to the EIR release on Village Farms, we should bear this in mind.
A big reason why Covell Village lost in 2005 was concern about traffic impacts at the already congested intersection of Pole Line and Covell. That intersection is still dicey to be sure and there is no way to really mitigate that with a bypass a la Richard Blvd.
However, unlike in 2005, Davis is in the middle of a housing crisis. Housing over the last quarter century has not kept up with demands. And this has forced more and more families to commute into Davis.
As I have been arguing, we really are not going to have that much choice here. The state is saying we need to build housing. Infill opportunities have largely been exhausted and somehow we need to build 930 units of low income housing this RHNA cycle and who knows how much more in the next.
Everywhere we could possibly build is going to be traffic impacted. There is no avoiding that and there is really no avoiding building additional housing.
But again, if traffic is your major concern, you ought to rethink traffic a little bit.
Consider Will Arnold’s comments from a month ago: “This is the absolute best place in town for that project to be full stop. A child could go to every level from kindergarten and graduate high school without traveling a full mile.
“The idea that it being near existing travel destinations is somehow a negative, and that because it’s near an intersection that a lot of people already use on a daily basis because they have to, because it’s a major crossroads of our community. The idea that that’s a negative is absurd.”
He added, “The alternative would be building it out in the middle of nowhere, right?”
But it’s more than that. If the people buying the homes are already working in town, then you actually could decrease traffic impacts overall, because the folks that live at Village and work at UC Davis, can bike or even walk to work rather than travel on Highway 113 or Road 102 from Woodland – that’s what is causing a lot of the traffic impacts.
People who moved to North North Davis to get cheaper or more available housing and then commute back to Davis to work. If we can reduce at least some of that traffic, then overall the situation could improve.
But we don’t think that way. Our brains think, more housing, more cars. And it could be more housing, less commute.
Better for climate change. Better for traffic impacts.
