Gail Goldberg’s Verbal Report to City Council on Transportation and Traffic in Los Angeles

· Thank you….

· If they all hate our traffic so much …..why are they all still here???

· Los Angeles is a very large city – both in land size and population. People choose to live here because of the greater choices provided in large cities—more jobs, services, cultural and social networks.

· But there are costs associated with those greater choices, higher priced housing, a faster pace, more competition and the cost that is most talked about in Los Angeles—traffic. It is also a fact of life that all large vibrant and growing cities have traffic congestion. Still, most people stay because they think it’s worth it.

· While they stay, they don’t stay quietly—they continue to demand relief. So the question for all of us is: Can we provide some relief to traffic congestion? What are the ways? How successful are they? And can we afford the costs?

· What can we learn from other large cities and are we “like” those other large cities—are their solutions transferable to Los Angeles. Can great public transit save us?

· Well, no surprise to all of us, Los Angeles is different. We have a unique development pattern. Most large cities across the world reflect the much more common pattern of development—dense clusters of urban development separated by much less dense suburban or even rural scale development.

· Los Angeles spreads its density more consistently over its wide geographic area. The most dense areas of LA, our urban core and centers, are much less dense than the urban cores of other cities. Our least dense areas are much more dense than the suburban/rural areas of other large cities—this gives LA the worst of all worlds – dense sprawl.

· In other cities it is easier to connect their dense clusters with public transit providing a high level of connectivity between people and the places they want to go. For Los Angeles, our dense sprawl makes transit a more challenging solution—one that we need, one that we plan for, but one that cannot be the only solution.

· We also need to recognize that vehicle miles traveled on an annual basis is rising faster than population. We are all taking more trips daily and our trips are becoming longer.

· As our demand is increasing and the supply of road capacity is not keeping pace—the resulting congestion and delays are skyrocketing—the cost of congestion is rising both in time and impact to our environment.

· So, how can traffic congestion be relieved? There are mobility strategies and, more recently, accessibility strategies.

· Mobility strategies are about our ability to move from place to place. The most common mobility solution in the past has been to increase road capacity (more roads, more lanes). The problem with that strategy has been that there is not nearly enough resources to supply the growing demand and a growing body of evidence suggests that increasing road capacity itself induces new demand…can’t win.

· A more recent mobility strategy is Intelligent Transportation Systems which use technology to manage the roads and transit—these show limited improvements but haven’t been in play long enough to really create good data about long term improvements.

· Beyond mobility—is a new word cropping up in transportation circles—accessibility. It changes the focus from the transportation system to the user of the system: do people have access to the activities that they need or want to participate in.

· This is the place where land use planning can make a great contribution. Planning for accessibility rather than mobility can create benefits by expanding choices and reducing the need to drive.

· A typical household makes 10 vehicle trips per day. Only two are work trips—the other 8 are for school, the doctor, movies, drycleaners, etc. We have limited control over the 2 work trips but we have a great deal of control over the other 80%. It is these non-work trips we can affect most with good planning.

· Most of these non-work trips are less than 5 miles. They occur within peoples own neighborhoods. If some of these neighborhood serving uses were located within walking distances of homes and if that walk was pleasant—some of our 4 million people would have to drive all over the city to meet their daily needs. We could walk, ride a bike or take neighborhood DASH-like vans or jitneys.

· If we could eliminate one of the 8 non-work trips for each of our residents, traffic would be reduced by 10%--with few or even no public dollars.

· We can even improve our transit opportunities with good land use planning--by creating new dense clusters—transit oriented developments around stations. In the next decade, we need to concentrate on transit oriented districts and development oriented transit.

· This is what “do real planning” means—matching up the uses and the people in a more perfect balance to create the most benefits for the most people, while spending the least amount of money and incurring the fewest environmental, economic and social impacts.

· We need to maximize opportunities for walking, biking and alternative transportation while minimizing automobile trips.

· It also means rejecting decisions aimed solely at moving more cars faster when they result in driving pedestrians away.

· We are never going to take people’s cars away but we must provide pleasant and viable alternatives to those cars—we need more efficient forms of transit to more neighborhoods –not all of our citizens have access to a car and with our aging populations we must offer alternatives to driving.

· Good land use planning is the means to provide the opportunities for a more sustainable city, a city where people have access to all that they need and want, but in an economically and environmentally rational way.

Some of the policy documents and projects that we are currently working on provide opportunities to integrate these ideas….