Metro's Leahy, Katz Grapple with SB 375-RTAC's Process for Setting CARB's VMT, Emission Targets

Richard Katz: There is an interesting division on the RTAC between people who believe that if we spend months creating the perfect model, then by definition we'll have a perfect outcome, and other folks who believe that a model is a tool, that it's not the end all and be all, and that a model is only as good as what you put in it. Frankly, some of us feel that we are spending too much time trying to design a table as opposed to figuring out what the goal is or what the policy is. That, in essence, is going to be an argument that will be taking place at the RTAC over the next several meetings as we try to reach consensus...

...If you choose a start date of today-as opposed to 1990, which was the start date or baseline for AB 32-then you ignore people who have done a lot of work or made a lot of progress. Many cities have gone ahead and done programs already. They are ahead of the curve on sustainability. If, all of the sudden the baseline is today, their low-hanging fruit is gone. Other areas that didn't do anything-and in fact exacerbated the problem by not doing anything-get the benefit of going after that low-hanging fruit while early adopters have to deal with more complicated, difficult, or expensive things. That is something we need to find a way to delve into.

You may see that the RTAC comes with a recommendation that we have a target (and this is just random, don't write this down or commit this to memory) of 10 percent across the board. That's progress, I guess. The real concern is how to equalize this out because it also has serious economic implications for a lot of areas. The areas that have low-hanging fruit have it a lot easier than the areas that have already done things. If you have businesses that are competing in their jurisdictions, you don't want this to become something that gives someone a competitive advantage. On the other hand, we need to make progress. We need to set goals that are not necessarily easy to meet, but that can be met even if it means stretching. We have a long way to go.

SB 375 leapfrogs ahead by taking this out and saying, "Look, this is what we want to get to. How do we do it?" I am one of the folks who'd much rather focus on what we want to achieve. One thing that will come out of this RTAC process is flexibility in strategy. One thing we may all agree on is that we should set targets but not prescribe solutions. Solutions will vary by group session. Clearly, some areas have done more. Pam O'Conner has been working on this for a long time-trying to tie land use decisions together. One example of land use and transportation is that if you create a baseline today you reward people who ignore the jobs-housing balance and penalize people who have been doing that for years because they have already taken off some of what you can achieve...

...I am much more interested in something that works as opposed to something that is perfect but sits on a shelf. We could spend all of our time creating the perfect model, but if it doesn't work anywhere in the real world then we are not going to see any real world reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or VMT or any real world improvement. On the other hand, you can say that the solution to this is going to be a jobs-housing balance, which in Los Angeles County makes it almost impossible to achieve. You can do jobs-housing balance in a real world situation today where you have large parcels of undeveloped property. It is a lot harder to do when you are already built out. We are achieving some of that in L.A. just simply because something like 70 percent of the work done in the last five years has been infill in Los Angeles. But that is more by accident of the market than a design to reduce VMT-"accident" may not be appropriate; "nose-dive" of the market may be more appropriate.

A lot of people view RTAC as involving people sitting out on the corner, playing with modeling and maybe working with the ARB to make this more realistic so we can achieve it. I would seriously encourage you not to ignore the RTAC process, because while it is a pain, and while RTAC would like to share its misery, you might find that it's one of those things where if you don't argue about the design specs when you have a chance, you can't argue about the procurement process that gives you a bad result.

The next meeting of the RTAC in June is going to be in Oakland. The July meeting is going to be in Los Angeles ...Don't ignore the RTAC process, as painful as it can be. Plus, it is where a lot of this framework is going to be hammered out that will then trigger decisions or at least narrow decisions down the road. Please get involved with that and let the members from our staff know what you think. Talk with the elected officials in your cities and counties that are on the RTAC or have representatives on the RTAC because the RTAC has an expiration date (thank God) in September and there is a lot of work that has to be done between now and then to get this in shape. Art Lehy will share that consensus is going to be hard to achieve but your input to it will be invaluable. Again, it's easy for us to sit back and come up with this great model and great idea, but you're going to have to live with it and implement it. This is a good time to give input.

Art Leahy: We all understand the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is no need to justify the objectives of the program. We all know that we need to do this. We have all experienced what is going on with the world. We all know that the ice caps are melting. Having said that, I will be somewhat optimistic about what is going on with SB 375...

I want to note that in the RTAC meetings to date there seems to be a focus reflecting a preference for regulatory actions to achieve reductions and vehicle miles traveled. And we've had a great deal of discussion with the focus often on reducing emissions rather than simply reducing miles traveled. In addition, it would be my ideal hope that CARB and the RTAC would review their assumptions about gasoline prices and other market conditions.

RTAC ought to seriously explore market forces and economics to achieve our objectives rather than simply relying upon regulatory approaches. I'm worried that with the latter approach, we will produce very heavy regulatory rules and requirements that would be very hard for people to understand and be very hard to implement. In the end these rules and requirements may not have the impact we hope to achieve with the reduction of greenhouse gases.

It is important to note, the committee is tasked with recommendations for CARB by September 30 of this year. I don't know at this time if there will be a consensus on those recommendations. A lot of time has been spent trying to sort through the issue of what SB 375 means and the charge of the Regional Transportation Advisory Committee. Frankly, I'm not optimistic that we will come to consensus. I hope we do.

The folks in the Bay Area believe that we should have more aggressive targets on vehicle miles traveled than the people in the south believe. Some of that reflects basic, underlying urban form issues. It has to do with the BART system up in the Bay Area-a relatively small land area compared to Southern California. We have Riverside, Orange, San Bernardino, and L.A. counties, which are very, very widely spread out. We are not going to have a BART system all over Southern California by the year 2020 or by the year 2030. Clearly, there are material differences in how Metro's counties operate and how they are structured.

I like Boston, and I like San Francisco, but it is very difficult to imagine where we get the money to plan, much less reconstruct, Southern California on their model. It's beginning to happen in L.A. The amount of downtown residential here is astounding. I worked down here a long time ago and I never would have imagined what has happened here-in Orange County, too, with the Metrolink service. Things are changing. I'm just not optimistic they are going to change in a way that we can plan on by 2020 or 2030.

Part of my concern about the RTAC is that some members of the group seem willing to accept assumptions that I believe are unrealistic, for example, a full restoration of state funding for transit operations. They want to therefore establish goals based on the assumption of that restoration. Well, that might be a nice wish. It's good to have dreams. But I don't know that it constitutes a plan. I don't know that it constitutes an action plan that has components, actions, and incentives that will take us where we want to go.

I'm not trying to be negative toward the objective, but we need to figure out how to bring resources into alignment to achieve the objectives.

There is, right now, a big discontinuity at the state. On one hand, the state has mandated SB 375-I don't argue about that as an objective-but at the same time they de-fund transit operations. Orange County is going to cut 20 percent of service in the next year. Riverside is cutting. San Diego is cutting its service. Metro will hold constant his year. Next year we will be having some discussion about what our deficit might be. Some Metro staff has said there is a structural deficit. I'm not sure that I believe that yet. But there is a problem. There is a problem on the order of $90 million a year for Metro transit operations. That is a lot of money. As we seek to achieve the goals of SB 375, as we seek to put together strategic plans that allow us to achieve the objectives with transit as a component, it would be helpful to bring our policies and actions into alignment. We don't have that right now.

Thus far, SCAG has taken an approach with the various subregions of collaboration and encouragement, seeking to not be forceful or coercive. We're beginning to hear from the various subregions; some are enthusiastic about setting goals and strategies and some are not so enthusiastic. It remains to be seen how we get subregions to work together to achieve a set of goals all over L.A. County. This applies to other counties in Southern California as well...