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Image courtesy SFMTA.<\/p><\/div>\n
By Marc Salomon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n July 29, 2010<\/p>\n The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has bedeviled efforts to alter the streetscape of San Francisco to implement voter approved Transit First policies for the past decade.\u00a0 But it appears now that efforts to change the way that CEQA works have been as ill conceived as the fundamental analysis of the problem has been in error.<\/p>\n The initial assumptions were that existing CEQA practice required an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) in cases where an initial study of a project indicated that removing an automobile lane in favor of a bicycle lane, or a transit lane, would likely delay private auto traffic to below a significant threshold.\u00a0 To determine whether there was an environmental impact, as measured by the auto Level of Service (LOS) metric, would require an expensive and time-consuming analysis of traffic circulation.<\/p>\n The thinking was that if we could change the standards so that private auto LOS was no longer considered an environmental impact, and was replaced, instead, with a standard that realistically measured actual environmental impacts or projects – the science would be accurate, projects would not be delayed, and the City would be relieved of having to spend $100 thousand to study the problem.<\/p>\n So was born the notion of the Automobile Trips Generated (ATG) metric.\u00a0 Beginning around 2002, the ATG metric was conceived by City and Transportation Authority staff and has been in development since.\u00a0\u00a0 ATG would measure the number of new auto trips a project would generate and based on that would generate a metric that would determine the environmental impacts of a project on the street network.<\/p>\n Under ATG, each auto trip would be considered an environmental impact and would be mitigated by a predetermined impact fee.\u00a0 A bike lane project would have zero ATG impact, while a luxury condo building with one-to-one parking would generate some positive number of auto trips based on parking spaces and any other applicable considerations.\u00a0 The calculated impact fees would go to the MTA.\u00a0 As of mid 2010, the ATG standard has yet to be completed.\u00a0 The development of a minimally complicated standard has taken longer than it took to do real rocket science, to conceive and execute the Apollo project in the 1960s.<\/p>\n This was all based on the assumption that the only significant environmental impact that removing an auto lane for transit or bike lanes would entail, is to degrade private auto LOS.\u00a0 That practice, and the law, has evolved to the point where we were considering a social impact of auto delay as if it were an environmental impact.\u00a0 According to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAQMD), emissions technology has improved since standards were developed in the mid 20th<\/sup> century to the point where contemporary engines do not collectively emit sufficient pollutants as to constitute a significant environmental impact.<\/p>\n Developers salivated at the thought of being absolved of funding expensive transportation circulation studies for their buildings, preferring to have the certainty of a fee, which had been predetermined to mitigate some fraction any impacts their projects would entail, and quickly came on board, which opened the door to support from the Mayor Gavin Newsom and conservative supervisors.\u00a0 Of course, the fee only covered a fraction of the impacts, with San Franciscans being expected to eat the rest without compensation.<\/p>\n As the ATG standard was slowly moving through the bureaucracy, the 2002 Bicycle Plan Update was simultaneously progressing through the pipeline.\u00a0\u00a0 Several of us warned that issues with LOS were going to trip up the omnibus document.\u00a0 But we were successfully marginalized as disruptive obstructionists by the nonprofits and City staff. \u00a0Under political pressure, the Bicycle Plan was granted a General Rule Exclusion (GRE) from CEQA analysis at the vociferous request of bicycle advocates.\u00a0 The GRE is used for projects that cannot possibly have an environmental impact even though we \u2018disruptive obstructionists\u2019 knew that auto LOS remained a live wire.<\/p>\n [The BP Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico received a similar exemption from federal NEPA environmental analysis, because it was \u201cobvious\u201d that deep water drilling is so safe that there would never be a blow-out and the abundant tropical Walrus populations in the Gulf of Mexico, described by BP’s disaster response plan, would never be threatened.\u00a0 Besides, the region needed jobs.]<\/p>\n But the lawsuit filed by Mary Miles and Rob Anderson revealed that the City erred not only in assuming that the only impacts of removing auto lanes for bike lanes would be in degraded auto LOS, it also did not even contemplate that transit impacts would be a legitimate environmental impact.\u00a0 The Miles lawsuit was successful because CEQA errs on the side of complete analysis, and the legal bar for challenging a GRE is very low.<\/p>\n Cities have great flexibility to customize CEQA standards and thresholds, but there are certain immutable requirements that jurisdictions inherit from the statute to which they must comply.\u00a0 One of these areas affirmatively occupied by state law is the mandate that jurisdictions analyze potential impacts of projects on public transit.\u00a0 The standards and thresholds of significance for evaluating impacts on public transit had traditionally been as a measure of capacity.\u00a0 If a project would involve housing or job creation, then some portion of those residents or workers living and working in those buildings would increase the load on the proximate transit resources<\/p>\n But apparently starting around 2005 [see attached memo below], the City began to study the impacts of projects on transit delay.<\/p>\n The Candlestick EIR of 2007 [1] speaks to the impacts of congestion on transit vehicle speed, on reintegration into traffic after making a stop, and on passenger boarding delays:<\/p>\n 6. Transit Delay Methodology<\/p>\n Project impacts to transit measured in terms of increases to transit travel times on routes serving the Project vicinity which would be most likely affected by congestion associated with Project-generated vehicle trips. The analysis evaluated the increases to transit travel times associated with the following three influencing factors. [*]<\/p>\n – Traffic congestion delay\u2014Traffic congestion associated with increases in area traffic slow down transit vehicles and results in increased transit travel times. Traffic congestion delays were calculated by summing the average vehicular delay at each intersection along the transit line\u2018s route within the study area. The increase in total route segment delay is equal to the increase in travel time associated with the Project.<\/p>\n – Transit re-entry delay\u2014Transit vehicles typically experience delays after stopping to pick up and drop off passengers while waiting for gaps in adjacent street traffic in order to pull out of bus stops. As traffic volumes on the adjacent street increase, re-entering the flow of traffic becomes more difficult and transit vehicles experience increased delay. Transit re-entry delay was calculated using empirical data presented in the 2000 Highway Capacity Manual (HCM). Total transit re-entry delay for each route was calculated as the sum of transit re-entry delay at each stop within the study area.<\/p>\n – Passenger boarding delay\u2014Although increases in transit ridership are generally viewed positively, the amount of time a transit vehicle has to stop to pick up and drop off passengers (i.e., the transit vehicle dwell time) is directly correlated to the number of passengers boarding the vehicle. If, as proposed, the Project includes substantial improvements to transit service in the future (and as general transit ridership grows), vehicles would have to spend more time at stops, which may increase overall transit travel times. Passenger boarding delay was calculated assuming two seconds per passenger boarding for buses, and 0.5 seconds per passenger boarding for light rail vehicles. Passenger boardings within the study area were estimated by examining the increases in ridership across the study area cordons.<\/p>\n [*]\u00a0 The methodology used is similar to that used in the San Francisco Bicycle Plan Draft EIR, San Francisco Planning Department, November 2008, except that methodology included the additional transit delay associated with substantial increases in bicycle volumes, which was appropriate for a project contemplating large-scale changes to the City\u2018s bicycle network. Bicycle volumes are not expected to substantially change as part of this project, so the ?bicycle delay was not included. However, instead, this evaluation includes the added delay associated with increases in passenger boardings, which is more appropriate for this project since the project includes major improvements to area transit service.<\/p>\n The CMPC Cathedral Hill EIR of 2005 [2] includes transit-delay mitigation measures as follows:<\/p>\n CPMC shall ensure that the transit delay impact related to the Cathedral Hill Campus project on the 38\/38L-Geary bus routes is reduced to a less-than significant level by financially compensating the SFMTA for the cost of providing the service needed to accommodate the project at proposed levels of service. The financial contribution shall be calculated and applied in a manner that is consistent with the SFMTA cost\/scheduling model. The amount and schedule for payment and commitment to application of service needs shall be set forth in a Transit Mitigation Agreement between CPMC and SFMTA.<\/p>\n If preliminary studies indicate that a project would impact transit, according to \u00a7 21092.4 of CEQA, an EIR is required to disclose the nature of those impacts and suggest mitigation measures to decision makers.\u00a0 Clearly, a well functioning transit system is an environmental asset, and projects that delay transit negatively impact the environment.\u00a0 In San Francisco in particular, Muni has been on the receiving end of all sorts of hell.<\/p>\n From the green lighting of massive new development envelopes on the east side of town, with all of those new parking spaces, to the Newsom\u2019s pilfering of Muni funds for his \u201cwork orders,\u201d Muni is trying to dig itself out of a hole by optimizing projects such as the Transportation Effectiveness Project.\u00a0 Surface transit speeds average less than 7 miles per hour.\u00a0 The 9 mph figure cited in the press includes the Metro lines in the subway. The last thing Muni needs under these trying conditions is for allies in the alternative transportation community to be throwing soil on the transit system as we try to dig it out of a hole.<\/p>\n The cruelty here is that the analysis required to determine transit delay is the same analysis required to analyze auto delay, of the same complexity that we had tried to avoid, according to the Parkmerced EIR of 2010:<\/p>\n The calculation of transit travel time as a result of roadway congestion is based on movement delays calculated at intersections as part of the intersection LOS analysis. [3]<\/p>\n Transit delay is a secondary impact of any project that causes auto delay.\u00a0\u00a0 Even with ATG, the City must still perform what has traditionally been time-consuming and expensive circulation analysis to figure out the cascading effects of removing a lane of auto traffic on increasing congestion on surrounding roadways to see how it effects surface transit.\u00a0\u00a0 There is no shortcut.<\/p>\n Similar to the omnibus Bicycle Plan EIR, ATG is so complicated that it contains innumerable toeholds for legal challenges to the methodologies involved.\u00a0 Were it to be implemented and replace LOS, each moving part would be in court for years, if not decades.\u00a0 We need standards, in these instances, to pass the \u201cbathroom scale test,\u201d a common practice in devising Internet protocol specifications.\u00a0 The Bathroom Scale Test holds that that any standards document produced which registers weight on a bathroom scale is too complex.\u00a0 The Bicycle Plan EIR and proposed ATG standards fail this test and that is their shared vulnerability.<\/p>\n So after the better part of a decade chasing ATG down rat holes, after being taken to school in court by Rob Anderson and Mary Miles, it turns out that the City is going to have to follow CEQA and do it right after all.\u00a0 The only honest question before us now is how can we streamline that process of assessing impacts on transit from projects so that we can produce and implement bicycle safety facilities in real time?<\/p>\n First off, the City is going to have to develop the expertise in-house to produce these EIRs or \u201cMitigated Negative Declarations\u201d which include steps that mitigate all impacts, thus avoiding an EIR.\u00a0\u00a0 The major costs of EIRs as currently produced involve time and money.\u00a0 The bidding process for consultants takes a minimum of three months.\u00a0 This needs to be resolved by developing in-house analytical capacity so that the City does not have to go through a cumbersome and time-consuming process of contracting out EIRs.\u00a0 CEQA also requires a public approvals process that can last the better part of a year.\u00a0 We can\u2019t change that, so we\u2019ve got to optimize our process to deal with that reality.<\/p>\n Second, the City is going to have to home-grow staff expertise with traffic circulation models to comply with state law requiring study of impacts of projects on transit as measured by various contributors to delay.\u00a0 One can only assume the worst for the methodologies that each consultant uses to reinvent the wheel of circulation analysis.\u00a0 The City needs to own that knowledge and process so that it can be deployed in real time.\u00a0 The bulk of the EIRs for these projects are largely boilerplate.<\/p>\n Third, the City must develop accurate and legitimate standards and thresholds to measure and evaluate transit delay.\u00a0 The sudden fabrication of a standard and threshold of significance of transit delay is welcome, but has not been legitimized with substantial evidence as required by law.\u00a0 The City needs to comprehensively study contributing factors to transit delay and establish standards for measuring delay as well as thresholds of significance above which the environment is impacted.\u00a0 The true measure of environmental impacts for transit delay is the tipping point where mode shifts, either positively by encouraging transit over autos, or negatively by delaying transit so that riders abandon transit to become drivers.<\/p>\n Under state law it must establish thresholds for handling cumulative impacts so that private projects are not permitted to off-load their impacts to trickle down on the transit riding public by incrementally slowing down Muni.\u00a0 Even alternative transit projects like bicycle lanes must \u201cmove to the back of the bus\u201d in favor of speedy transit.<\/p>\n Finally, City must revisit the Octavia Market and Eastern Neighborhoods neighborhood plans as well as the Bayview Redevelopment plan to ensure that their environmental impacts are disclosed to the public and to decision makers.\u00a0\u00a0Anything less will shift the impacts of profitable new development from project sponsors onto the backs of beleaguered Muni riders in the form of countless uncompensated hours spent delayed in transit.<\/p>\n The holy grail of alternative transportation is a mode shift from private autos.\u00a0 The gold standard in inducing mode shift is a robust, reliable rapid transit system.\u00a0 Vapid transit does not cut it – and actually induces mode shift back towards private autos.\u00a0 This is going to require environmental analysis and that\u2019s a good thing when it comes to safeguarding Muni.\u00a0 We\u2019d do well to quit fighting it and gear up to do it right.<\/p>\n Instead of blaming Anderson and Miles for their error, alternative transportation advocates should be thanking them for forcing the City to consider impacts on transit as we move forward our bicycle agenda. \u00a0Under our system of government, it is always okay to go to court to sue the executive branch to command compliance with the law. \u00a0It is especially unacceptable for those who urged breaking the law to blame those who went to court for exposing that short cut. \u00a0Don\u2019t do the crime if you can\u2019t do the time.<\/p>\n The best way to avoid legal process delays like this is to do it right the first time, next time, learning from our errors. Had the City done it right the first time, we would be well into implementing the bulk of 1997 bicycle lane network and other improvements which comprised the bulk of the 2002 update that was held up in court.\u00a0 We are really that far behind.\u00a0 Yet we are still in court begging the judge to see things our way and still anticipating only a partial lifting of the injunction.\u00a0 And it does not appear that the MTA Bicycle Program is involving the public in the planning of the next generation of bicycle improvements, or if they are even planning for the future.<\/p>\n Marc Salomon is a San Francisco cyclist and has reluctantly become intimately familiar with the California Environmental Quality Act.<\/em><\/p>\n Foot Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n [1] Hunters Point Shipyard EIR:<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.sf-planning.org\/Modules\/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=284<\/a><\/p>\n [2] CPMC Cathedral Hill EIR:<\/p>\n