San Diego region plans to lower per capita emissions

Regional planning initiative

Roha Teferra, Jun 13, 11.

The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) has adopted a combined Regional Transportation Plan / Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) that aims at reducing per capita emissions by 7% by 2020 and 13% by 2035. Mandated by California Senate Bill 375, SCS requires the state’s 18 MPOs to develop their own strategies to reach this goal by “efficiently coordinating transportation, housing, and commercial development” according to Josh Stephens of the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR).

Those expectations for the region are too low, according to Bruce Reznik, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League. Reznik says “you pass this law, and (Sen Darrel) Steinberg and the Legislature and the environmental groups want to see the momentum and see the first one be successful. The problem is you can’t lower the bar so much that anything looks like success.”

Reznik also states that the strategy focuses too much on automobiles rather than light rail expansion. In 2008, San Diego won the American Planning Association’s Burnham Award for excellence in a comprehensive plan for its strategy callled City of Villages, in which “future development in the famously sprawling city is concentrated around commercial and mixed use nodes to create neighborhoods that are both pleasant and energy efficient” reports Stephens.

[Locally, the Houston Galveston Area Council will begin the public processes for both the 2040 Regional Transportation Plan and the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development (RPSD) some time this year. While the two processes are not combined in the way mandated in California, the consortium created to develop the RPSD - including H-GAC, Houston Tomorrow, and 23 other regional partners - committed that “future regional plans will be based on the Regional Plan for Sustainable Development, including the Regional Transportation Plan,” in the application to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (pdf) that resulted in the $3.2 million grant to develop the RPSD.]

Photo Credit: tibchris (Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)