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Make transit & walkable communities a priority, not just a mitigation for freeway widening

I-80TO Mayor Will Arnold and Members
Davis City Council

From: Judy Corbett, Professor Steven Wheeler, Alan Pryor, Professor Mark Huising, Professor Roberta Millstein, Jim Zanetto, Colin Walsh, Alan Hirsch, Robert Thayer

Our group supports walkable, bikeable, compact infill development near transit, shopping, community amenities, and jobs. Building a wider freeway to increase the auto capacity is contrary to our over-arching goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

It is well established science that wider freeways do not fix congestion but do increase driving and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), as noted in the well researched Davis Enterprise article of June 3th. The travel forecast model developed by the UC Davis Institute for Transportation Studies (and accepted by Caltrans and the Yolo County Transit District) estimates that the I-80 freeway widening will generate enough car travel (178 million miles a year !) to  equal the GHG emissions that would be generated by adding a new auto centric city the size of Winters.

Will Davis Decide to Ignore Climate Emergency?

On Tuesday June 6 Caltrans will ask the Davis City Council to make use of our GHG-reducing projects to justify the additional GHG that would be caused by the I-80 widening.

Apparently, if we allow Caltrans to justify the freeway expansion on our stretch of highway by using our City's current and future plans to reduce GHG emissions,  Caltrans is offering to pay us back by giving the City some small financial support to help the developers at Nishi and downtown. If we allow them to use our City’s infill efforts to justify the increased VMT on our highway, how many of more these projects would we have to build to make up for the increase in emissions on our highway? 

The backstory on this was not described to the public and Council in the staff memo for this agenda item. Caltrans is reviewing all local cities CAAPs to find projects planned for car-free living; it can use them to offset the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) from the I-80 widening.  VMT is now the accepted measure of the environmental impact of driving, as codified by Senate Bill 743, (adopted in 2013 and implemented in 2020 (link).  In fact, the widening project will be one of the first projects that is subject to this law, which requires Caltrans to address VMT in its California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA/EIR) analysis for the I-80 widening.

Most troubling is the city staff memo does not mention our City’s resolution declaring a Climate Emergency. This resolution lead to our recent adoption of our Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) to reach carbon neutrality by 2040. This codified as policy a sense of urgency, which seems to have been lost.

Allowing  our CAAP infill projects to be subverted means we will miss our zero carbon goal by a wide margin.  If we are serious about the Climate Emergency we declared, we need to act with urgency: we cannot continue to endorse the same transportation practices that are proven time and again not to resolve congestion, as UC Davis and other studies have shown.

We therefore urge the Davis Council on Tuesday to take the following actions:

  • Do not send a letter to Caltrans stating we are willing to trade our city’s urgency in address climate change in exchange for Caltrans money Signing a letter signals our CAAP — and our children future is up for sale at some, (yet unnamed) price. This would be an embarrassment for our community to even hint at this for any price.
  • Ask Caltrans instead to address I-80 congestion by studying transit as EIR alternatives, not just as mitigations. Ask Caltrans to first finish its “80 Comprehensive Multi-modal Corridor Plan” (from the Vallejo Bridge into Sacramento County) that seems to be stuck in a draft stage since January 2022. Until we have a true corridor plan, not a study only restricted to Yolo County, mass transit improvements for the full Capitol Corridor and a robust public bus service into Solano County will always be seen as an afterthought.

+ + + +

The City Council and much of the community supports infill and wants alternatives to driving. Yet if the City Council enables the I-80 freeway widening, this negates the benefits of infill because it will enable sprawl in the region as a whole.

Davis Council, like other cities in the region, has both the opportunity and the responsibility to make it clear to Caltrans that mass transit and walkable communities are a priority, not a mitigation to offset their projects.

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Comments

15 responses to “Make transit & walkable communities a priority, not just a mitigation for freeway widening”

  1. Ron O

    “Our group supports walkable, bikeable, compact infill development near transit, shopping, community amenities, and jobs. Building a wider freeway to increase the auto capacity is contrary to our over-arching goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
    Honestly – none of you should be supporting Covell Village II, then.
    400 acres of primarily single-family sprawl is what creates freeway demand in the first place.

    Reply
  2. Darell

    Thanks, gang.
    I wonder if we can point to any significant action that has been taken due to the “Climate Emergency.” We were supposed to be moving as fast as possible toward curbing emissions. Meantime, we still fully subsidize private vehicle parking all over town. We had to fight to make a percentage of one small block of G Street permanently car-free. We have to fight for proper bike lanes. We aren’t offering exceptional, car-free ways to get into downtown. We should be doing everything we can to get people out of their cars, but instead we’ll add more freeway lanes through town.
    I’m not sure that everybody knows what “emergency” means.

    Reply
  3. Victoria Whitworth

    Thank you all for your thoughtful (and need I say obvious?) argument against CalTrans’ absurd I-80 widening project. Why are we still favoring car travel over making public transit more efficient and cheaper? What happened to the high-speed rail project? Why don’t we subsidize Amtrak? Why don’t more people take buses?
    The answer is that it’s usually cheaper and more convenient to drive our cars but the money CalTrans is spending on continually widening freeways (which doesn’t work anyway) should be spent to improve better and more efficient public transportation.

    Reply
  4. Donna Lemongello

    In full agreement, of course. How absurd at this point to think that any progress toward lessening carbon output can simply be bought to increase it somewhere else. That is called no progress at all. I sure hope the city council “gets it”.

    Reply
  5. Susan Rainier

    Well, the sentiment is good, yet making a freeway wider when it is a dysfunctional design in the first place, does not make good sense. I-80 is effectively a 1-lane exit OFF of I-80 to stay on I-80. This is due to the horrible placement of spaghetti type ramps for multiple freeways right on the River!
    Didn’t you know that Yolo Bus and SACOG are planning on making I-80 at the causeway a TOLL ROAD? Do you see the insanity of this? We will now pay to be in stopped gridlock! No widening of the road will fix this – it will only make what is very bad worse. Toll will make the gridlock even worse. It will cause road rage. (I for one, plan to protest this).
    To “Build Back Better” would be to make I-80 connect in the Natomas area where it goes straight. I-5 needs to go straight at Woodland (makes a 90 degree corner now), and connect below Land Park South of Sacramento where it goes straight.
    We need a loop road around Sacramento to stop the sprawl and give fast access to internal roads easily. This has been done in other cities and once one has driven on these highway designs one understands more fully how dysfunctional the current old thinking design is here. Loop roads are so great for public transportation designs too.
    We have old thinking highway layouts that were based on THE POPULATION at the time. Now we have many more cars, often single occupants, that clog an outdated freeway design causing Palermo type gridlock every day! Worse on Fridays. Population just has to be part of the considerations.
    Sacramento is 10th in the country for smog air (gridlock) and close to number 1 in the country for road rage! Cars going slow pollute more. Trucks going slow pollute more and their particulate have metal filings from the brakes.
    I guess the recent removing of regulations for watersheds opens the door to do more freeway on the causeway – when it shouldn’t even be there in the first place!
    Where is big picture regional planning? We are not “building back better” the current non-leadership without vision is basically building bad onto bad.
    Having just returned from a hike in the Sierra’s I saw what is being done for I-80 up there – blowing up whole mountains to make I-80 go straight. No words can describe this massive, incredibly expensive action of a road dominating nature.
    On the other hand, if California can get the money to do this, then surely it can fix I-80 and I-5 at Sacramento that actually cause traffic gridlocks right in the downtown area of Sacramento.
    Move these freeways out! Make them go straight! FREE THE RIVER AND THE WATERSHED!!!!! Water is Sacred. Rivers are Sacred. Watersheds are Sacred.

    Reply
  6. Todd Edelman

    Predictably, I am waving my hands wildly in the air in appreciation!
    There’s some backstory, sidestory and related which is probably not mentioned due to space limitations (wordplay intentional):
    * For years the project promised a dedicated and new bicycle-pedestrian bridge across the ‘Bypass. In 2020 – when I was still on the BTSSC – the notification that it was dropped some months earlier was only indirectly mentioned in a summary for a BTSSC meeting by the primary liaison for the City of Davis at the time, Brian Abbanat (former Senior Planner; now he’s in a similar role for Yolo County and co-presenting Tuesday evening.) A couple of years later when this was mentioned to the other co-presenter, YCTD head Autumn Bernstein, she said it was not funded: I believe that the aggregate truth – to be precise as possible – is that Caltrans dropped it, never told any of the local interested groups about it (e.g. Bike Davis, Davis Bike Club) through their liaison Abbanat and that it wasn’t part of the initial, funded proposal to the Federal Government.
    * I arrived in town after Nishi 1.0 (retroactively supported a concept that would involve a complete redesign of the 80-Richards interchange inclusive of a parking structure and Park & Ride for regional buses which would have minimal impacts on Richards) and was against Nishi 2.0 because I don’t think there should be housing (buildings with windows people open!) so close to the noisy and arguably otherwise-polluting interstate, but it’s not why I am suggesting that the proposed “multi-modal” mitigation is a fallacy… anyway here goes: Use Google Maps (etc) to look at Pole Line over 80. It’s incredibly long because it has to go very high over the railway tracks, more so than to get over 80 itself (to better understand this, picture the crossings over 113 which are much lower as they only need to accomodate trucks.) First of all, this – and all the over-crossings of 80 in town – are simply not comfortable and suitable for people on normal bicycles, especially carrying children. 80 is a wall for people on bikes. The over-crossings have around a 6 to 7% grade, nearly twice as high as the Dutch standard: So to make it comfortable for hundreds of people to go from Nishi to campus and back once or more every day it would have to be nearly twice as long. Look again at the view of 80 at Pole Line: There’s no space for this in the Nishi-campus space unless it’s very circuitous and indirect and lands behind Shrem or just by the entrance to Solano Park from Old Davis Rd. And that’s just for cycling. Imagine walking this at least twice a day. Motor vehicles including buses can obviously do this… but it’s not truly “multi-modal”! in sum I feel confident in saying that since motor vehicle, bus, bicycle, walking, differently-abled/equitable mobility access is part of the agreement for Nishi, and Union Pacific forbids an under-crossing, there’s no way to build Nishi unless it’s returned to the voters. As far as this mitigation goes: There’s nothing to mitigate here as nothing can be built for mitigation.
    * It’s no secret that Mayor Will Arnold is a/the Media Relations Manager for Caltrans. Should he recuse himself from the discussion for ethical reasons? Should he be signing a letter to support a project he would then have to (continue to) work on at Caltrans? I don’t think he can recuse himself from the communications hierarchy at Caltrans. Note how the project communicates things, its lies (or obfuscations), its spin, lack of backstory. At a public presentation hosted by Cool Davis a couple of months ago, Bernstein said that Yolo County had convinced Caltrans to do the managed lanes variant. I think that Caltrans had decided this already, and I would not be surprised if they try to offer the bike-ped crossing of the Yolo Bypass as a carrot. Arnold’s job description at LinkedIn is: “Caltrans Headquarters Public Affairs, Office of the Director – Duties include managing media inquiries and press relations, designing and executing effective communications strategy, and writing/editing communication plans, press releases, talking points and social media content.” – https://www.linkedin.com/in/willarnold00/

    Reply
  7. Keith

    “Didn’t you know that Yolo Bus and SACOG are planning on making I-80 at the causeway a TOLL ROAD? Do you see the insanity of this?”
    I hadn’t heard that. Yes that is insane.

    Reply
  8. Dan Cornford

    Clarification please: Do the above authors mean a toll road or a toll lane? These are by no means the same thing (Go to Continental Europe for real toll freeways all over the place), though, for the reasons stated above (and others), I oppose both.

    Reply
  9. Alan C. Miller

    So the facts are straight here, Caltrans is proposing to add a ‘managed lane’, which is a toll lane triggered by FastTrak similar to a toll bridge fee. This is being done on I-680 and many other places. The lane is also for carpools and public transit. The other lanes will remain no toll. What is being changed to a tollway is Highway 37.

    Reply
  10. Christine

    Just a practical question – I live in Davis with two young kids and work in West Sac. School for my youngest begins at 8:15 and my childcare after school ends at 5:00. If I tried to take an e-bike to West Sac to work – I would not arrive the 13 miles until about 9:15 and have to leave by 4 to pick them up by 5. That’s not 8 hours of work. If I tried to take the Amtrak to old Sac and walk – it would take longer because the train only comes every 1.5 hrs.
    So without driving – how does one with kids work 8 hours and make it in time for pick up and drop off. Very few childcare centers operate hours outside of 8-5.
    And this is why many working parents support widening the 80.

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  11. Tuvia

    Christine, there’s a wide variety of answers and alternatives to widening I-80 in relation to your predicament…. Some of this is a bit late because bad decisions were already made …. For example:
    * Instead of spending, what’s probably like 1.5 billion for highway widening which won’t reduce congestion for more than a few years, and which will increase VMT, pollution and road crashes…. invest that money in rail.
    * Invest a tiny fraction of 1.5 billion into child care subsidy, so that all families can afford it. and facilities can operate longer hours
    * Create more good jobs in Davis.
    * Create a railway service between Dixon, Davis, West Sacramento and Sac
    * Create a railway service between Davis and Woodland that continues as a streetcar in Davis to West Village and in Woodland, both west and east on main Street,… With stops directly in front of the major shopping areas on the latter….

    Reply
  12. Alan C. Miller

    Christine,
    I don’t know your exact needs or locations, but you can take your e-bike on Amtrak to Sac and then into West Sac. The Capitol Corridor service is currently limited and doesn’t meet my needs well – whereas before the pandemic I used it both to commute and to travel to the Bay Area. You’ll have to check the schedules to see if it works for you.
    Freeway widening will take many years and your kids will be grown. Almost certainly with the massive construction in many areas (south Folsom, Vacaville to name a few) along with induced travel, the congestion will continue, but with narrower lanes and no left shoulder on the Causeway, reducing safety.
    Todd’s rail-expansion list has some good ideas, but is all over the map as far as prioritization, and given that most are not even on the drawing board, almost none could possibly be built in our lifetimes. Great expansion of the Capitol Corridor is not only possible, it is on the drawing boards. What we need is the political will to move forward on hourly service 5am-10pm(-ish), and half-hourly peak service.
    . . . or, decades more of a new freeway lane here, and then there, and there . . .
    Also, YoloBus has expanded service and straightened routes, and plans to go half-hourly all-day in the next year or so on it’s core 42 route.

    Reply
  13. Christine

    Tuvia, those aren’t really “solutions”. I have a great job that pays well with good benefits working for the state only 13 miles from my house. I have 13 years of my life that I need to be able to drop off & pick up my kids from childcare and make it to work for 8 hours. None of your solutions fix the immediate problem. Widening I-80 does.

    Reply
  14. Alan C. Miller

    Christine: “None of your solutions fix the immediate problem.” Did you not hear about ‘induced demand’. This is a very real phenomenon. The freeway widening, if it happens, will take many years to build — so much for many of your 13 years. Then within a short time – sometimes immediately, the increased ‘flow’ quickly balances out the increased induced demand, and traffic is back to as bad as it was before the widening — maybe worse with all the developments bringing more people. Did you check out the schedule and bringing your e-bike on the Capitol Corridor? What if Capitol Corridor trains ran every hour? That wouldn’t take a whole lot more funding.

    Reply
  15. Christine

    Yes – one leaves at 7:17 and one leaves at 9:00. Again – I could not be home until kids go to school at 8:15 and not get in to work until after 9:30. Train is not practical, efficient, or effective, for people with families managing work and childcare.

    Reply

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