All year long people have been telling me that I should look at the Valley Vision paper “Regional Attitudes About Transportation” published in January 2018. Most of the people, transit and active transportation advocates, were pessimistic about the report, saying it indicates that suburban voters just want more roads and don’t care much about other modes including transit. The relevance is that as Sacramento Transportation Authority develops a sales tax measure for the 2020 ballot (tentatively still called Measure B), knowing what people want is important. My reading of the report is a different take, I find it much more hopeful.

At first glance, the chart to the right indicates that people want roads above all else. But the text says gives a more nuanced take: “If funds were made available for local road improvement, two-thirds (64%) of respondents would prefer that existing roads be repaired and only 6 percent preferred new roads.” This percentages shown are not dissimilar to what the failed Measure B was going to do. However, Measure B had a short and easily avoided commitment to repairing roads, with the clear intent that as soon as the worst roads were fixed, transportation agencies could get back to the real work of building new roads. But throughout the report, the highest priority for the respondents seems to be to fix the roads. So, yes, they do want a lot of money spent on roads, but it is not what the transportation agencies have claimed.

Perhaps the most revealing things are some of the pull quotes: ”

Those who use public transportation are less likely to say that transportation is getting worse over the last ten years or that transportation is a critical or serious problem in the region,” and “Most respondents would rather have a shorter commute and a smaller house.” These indicate to me two things: if more people used public transportation, more people would be happy with the transportation system, and if we were building smaller housing closer to jobs, more people would be satisfied. But instead we keep investing in a road network, mostly freeways (freeways, interchanges and bridges are the most expensive infrastructure we build), which seems to make people unhappy rather than happy, and we allow zoning and other restrictions that encourage exurban development rather than urban infill. We could do things a different way.

Another interesting chart is at right, showing what people see as positives and negatives using transit. No surprises here, this is what we pretty much already know, and is also what SacRT and other transit providers are working on. The biggest percentage for not using is “I don’t know what services are available.” I suspect that if people did know, a number of them would shift some or even most trips to transit, for all the reasons listed for using.

SacRT has long realized that it had a public perception problem, and with the arrival of Henry Li started actively working to both solve the issues and change the perceptions.

The problem that underlies everything in the report is the public misunderstanding that building roads solves congestion. It does not. Building roads encourages more driving and encourages people to live further away from where they work and all other aspects of their lives (don’t forget that job commuting is only about 15% of trips). Spending on new roads is a black hole, it consumes the money and doesn’t shed any light. Induced demand, the concept that roadway use will expand to fill the available capacity, is well know in planning circles (though not at the highways departments) and no one any longer challenges the science of it.

What the report does do is indicate that there is a major education effort to be undertaken so that the people who see more road capacity expansion as a solution to congestion instead come to understand that transit, walking and bicycling are the best (and much less expensive_ tools to reduce congestion.

The paper is only 29 pages, and is filled with photos and graphics, so I encourage a read.

 

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