For too long, government policies and investments have supported poorly-planned, sprawling development and transportation systems focused only on the car.
This paradigm of growth has taken a terrible toll. We have lost some of our best farmland and beautiful open spaces.
The long distances between housing, services, and workplaces have left many people with grinding commutes, polluted air, exorbitant transportation costs, and no safe and healthy options for walking and bicycling.
For those who can't or don't drive, especially seniors and people with disabilities or limited incomes, the inability to access services in sprawling areas can be limiting and isolating.
Because of the tremendous growth in driving transportation is California's largest and fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions.
There is a better way, and TransForm is leading the way both in the Bay Area and California so we can change the paradigm for growth.
TransForm's very first victory in 1998 was getting the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission to develop a regional "smart growth strategy". The strategy lays out a way for a pattern of future growth in the Bay Area that is more compact and mixed-use, with a range of transportation options - showing a real alternative to low density development. This smart growth vision helped our residents and elected leaders understand how much better off the region could be with less sprawl and more compact, walkable communities.
Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego followed suit and developed their own regional "blueprints". Yet all of these blueprints had the same basic shortcoming: they had no funding or accountability to make them happen.
A groundbreaking California law, SB 375, is creating an incredible window of opportunity to fundamentally change this.
SB 375 will require regions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving transportation choices and how communities are designed so they require less driving. Right now, leaders are deciding by how much metropolitan regions will have to reduce their emissions by 2020 and 2035. Stuart Cohen, TransForm's Executive Director, has been appointed to the Regional Target Advisory Committee, which is helping the California Air Resources Board determine how to set the regional emissions targets.
Once regions have been assigned an emissions target, they will be required to develop a plan to meet it, called a "sustainable community strategy", which is similar to regional smart growth blueprints. Agencies are also supposed to identify transportation investments and policies that would support this growth in order to reduce driving and emissions.
The Bay Area's regional agencies have embraced SB 375 as a way to better coordinate our transportation, land use, and housing. Local governments are already signing up for "FOCUS", which unites the efforts of four regional agencies into a single effort to encourage future growth in areas near transit and within the communities that surround the San Francisco Bay. Willing jurisdictions have signed up for these Priority Development Areas and Priority Conservation Areas.
In the Bay Area, local governments will soon begin discussing their land use plans for the sustainable community strategy. County and regional agencies will be developing transportation investments and policy proposals, all working towards a 2013 adoption.
TransForm is working with Greenbelt Alliance, Urban Habitat, the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California and other partners to ensure that residents are deeply engaged in these issues and SB 375 leads to a new paradigm for growth and transportation in the Bay Area - and a more sustainable, livable, equitable future for us all.
To learn more or get active on these issues in the Bay Area please contact Carli Paine.
If you are interested in other regions or state policy efforts please visit ClimatePlan.
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| SB375 Fact Sheet by Stuart Cohen, TransForm Executive Director | 298.06 KB |
For the past 50 years, poorly planned growth has led to an almost complete reliance on cars and transportation is now the largest and fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in California.
But now, a groundbreaking 2008 law (SB 375), is creating an incredible window of opportunity to reduce emissions, clean our air, reduce traffic and save families money.
Thanks to SB 375, each region in California will be assigned transportation-related emissions reductions targets for 2020 and 2035 in September 2010. Regions will then have to meet these targets by improving transportation choices and land use. This could spur big increases in terms of how much regions invest in everything from pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure to public transportation improvements and affordable housing – and ultimately trigger the kind of reform we need.
On August 9, 2010 the California Air Resources Board (CARB) took a major step by releasing draft greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets from transportation for each of the state's 18 major regions. These targets are emissions reductions per capita.
| Region | 2020 | 2035 |
| SCAG (Southern CA) | 8% | 13% (or more) |
| MTC (Bay Area) | 7% | 15% |
| SANDAG (San Diego) | 7% | 13% |
| SACOG (Sacramento) | 7% | 16% |
| San Joaquin Valley | 5% |
10% (to be revisited in 2012) |
These draft targets, especially those for 2035, are a great step forward but could be more ambitious in some of the regions:
CARB will vote on the final targets on September 23, 2010. Read their full report on the targets.
Ambitious targets will lead to transportation investments and land use policies that make our communities healthier places; creating more places where we can walk and bicycle and reducing pollution from driving. It will also spur changes that will dramatically reduce the cost of living for residents, as well as our strapped local governments.
To learn more about SB 375 you can visit ClimatePlan, a collaboration of environmental, social equity, health and other organizations working at the state level to ensure targets are ambitious. TransForm co-founded and provides programmatic support for ClimatePlan.
To stay updated please sign up for our action alerts in the upper right.
For more information regarding the targets contact Stuart Cohen.