A Local View of Regional Transportation

What does "regional" transportation look like to Bay Area residents who are not close to the Bay? For one panelist in a Transportation 2030* forum in Vallejo in November, "regional" meant trucks and other heavy long-distance traffic on freeways that also need to serve local residents. For an audience member, it meant buses or ferries that need to run farther or later to get riders to distant jobs and classes. For some county transportation planners in the group, it meant trying to keep up with other Bay Area counties that have voter-approved transportation sales taxes which can be used to leverage new projects and to provide badly needed maintenance.

The forum was cosponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Bay Area and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) as part of the public outreach for Phase I of the Transportation 2030 process (see sidebar on companion article). However, it sounded themes that will probably be heard again as Phase II brings countywide planning agencies into the regional planning process.

Transportation 2030 plans will challenge local officials.

"The planning process is difficult to understand, even for professional staff," said panelist Mike Zdon, Executive Director of the Napa County Transportation Planning Authority. Panelist Bernice Kaylin, League of Women Voters Sonoma County transportation chair, said that many elected officials are new to the process and bewildered by the "alphabet soup" of acronyms and transportation jargon. When regional programs are unfamiliar, local officials may be wary of participating in them or see them as mandates from the regional agencies rather than opportunities.

Every one of the nine counties in the Bay Area is different, even while they share regional needs.

Panelist Darryl Halls, Executive Director of the Solano Transportation Authority, noted that maintaining roads is a large expense in the North Bay compared to transit, while in the "inner Bay Area" these priorities are reversed. Many local problems cannot be solved by regional programs, although some local projects may also address regional needs. Kaylin pointed out that changes at the truck scales near Cordelia could relieve a regional bottleneck which is getting worse as expansion at a regional facility, the Port of Oakland, puts more trucks on Bay Area freeways. Panelist Pam Belchamber, Transportation Manager for Vallejo Transit, suggested the solution is to "reach consensus on where to expand, then give the money to the locals to do projects within those parameters."

Land use and transportation planning need to be better integrated.

Panelist James Corless from the Surface Transportation Policy Project commented on existing MTC programs which reward local jurisdictions for building more infill, mixed use and transit oriented development. Halls observed that the region does not have an economic or housing plan similar to the Transportation 2030 plan, and suggested that this kind of planning should be done as a basis for the MTC incentive programs. Halls and Corless agreed that "local control is here to stay in California," but Halls noted that incentives are working, with many cities already doing exciting projects and coordinating planning. Audience participants in breakout groups strongly supported the financial incentives for better planning.

No single mode of transportation is the "right one"

"We need choices—now we often have only one, driving," said Corless. Belchamber noted that, "All modes work if people use them all—some use ferries, some use buses, some use both. We need to build on what is already working." Audience members placed linkages between transit systems at the top of their priority lists, particularly noting TransLink®, a universal ticket good on all Bay Area transit systems.

Maintaining the system is as important as expanding it, but it is not as glamorous.

"Maintaining the system keeps people using it," said Belchamber. Even when sales tax measures focus on capital projects, they expand the pot and allow other funds to be shifted to needed maintenance.

Both current and new sources of money are essential to getting projects done.

MTC has allocated less money to county congestion management agencies for local project selection in the Transportation 2030 process than in the predecessor 2001 Regional Transportation Plan. According to Zdon, the money for counties is a "drop in the bucket", especially when some money has to be used to match state and local funds to complete planned projects. Napa will be considering putting a county sales tax measure on the ballot for the first time in November 2004, and other North Bay counties may also try again to pass sales tax measures.

As Belchamber observed, "Hard times push us to set priorities". For some, a priority may be to pass a county sales tax measure; for others, a priority may be to build bicycle and pedestrian paths to increase transportation choices. County agencies have already had considerable input into regional priorities and the level of funds allocated to counties for further local decisionmaking in Phase II.

With regionwide goals for Transportation 2030 and a commitment by county agencies to support a certain level of regional programs, MTC is confident that local plans will continue to be guided by regional priorities and will contribute diversity to the Transportation 2030 plan without disrupting it.