SF bay area sustainability vision

Houston working on one

David Crossley, Apr 18, 11.

Note: As the Houston region cranks up its Sustainable Communities effort toward a Regional Plan for Sustainable Development, the San Francisco Bay Area has already released an initial Vision Scenario. As other regions around the country make progress on their plans, Houston Tomorrow will publish reports of those proceedings. The following comes from the Transbay Blog:

Last month the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and regional partners released the Initial Vision Scenario, a document that lays the groundwork for the Bay Area’s Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS). MTC and ABAG will develop an SCS with the goal of reducing regional per capita vehicle emissions 7 percent by 2020 and 15 percent by 2035, in accordance with the greenhouse gas reduction targets that the Bay Area was assigned by the State Air Resources Board (ARB).

In 2013, MTC will publish an update to the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP). The 2013 RTP, consistent with previous RTPs, will outline the Bay Area’s transportation needs and priorities in relation to the funding that is expected will be made available for investment in the region through the planning horizon. This time, however, the RTP will include and be coordinated with the SCS. The essence of the SCS, as described in Senate Bill 375, is

a forecasted development pattern for the region, which, when integrated with the transportation network, and other transportation measures and policies, will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and light trucks to achieve, if there is a feasible way to do so, the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets approved by [ARB] …

The SCS will essentially serve as a blueprint that calls for focused growth in the region, preferably in established urbanized areas that are accessible by transit and are designed to encourage walking and biking. The Initial Vision Scenario, which is a preliminary step in the process toward developing the SCS, compiles information on those urbanized areas and estimates their capacity to absorb new growth. The Initial Vision Scenario asks the region as a whole to accommodate a population increase of 2,081,600 people (in 902,600 households) and 1,222,000 jobs by the year 2035. These totals are based on aggressive annual growth averages that outpace historical trends (e.g. +48,800 jobs/year for the next 25 years compared to about +10,000 jobs/year for the past 20 years).

MTC’s calculations at this stage suggest that the Initial Vision Scenario achieves 11 percent per capita emissions reduction by 2020 (exceeding ARB’s 7 percent target) but only 12 percent per capita reduction by 2035 (falling short of ARB’s 15 percent target). This represents a slight improvement over the existing RTP, but these numbers are preliminary. The Initial Vision Scenario is not a comprehensive analysis of all relevant factors, and its suggested distribution of growth does not represent the final housing allocation that will ultimately be adopted.