Dance This Mess Around
At the Transportation Commission meeting tonight (12/12), the TC will be receiving a report on “Review of Practices to Evaluate Development Impacts to Bicycles, Pedestrians, and Transit.”
Don’t fall asleep just yet!
As boring and mundane as this sounds (and probably is to many), this is a big issue for our city and its future development.
Essentially the issue is this: currently, the city, and most cities (in fact nearly all cities, though this is changing) look at the effects of development on traffic. Traffic impact is almost entirely defined as the increase in delay at an intersection. To lapse into planning speak, the Level of Service (LOS). Once an impact is identified, mitigations are put in place, the most popular/typical, build bigger roads, bigger intersections, add capacity.
Since 2000, a number of different measuring tools have been created to look at the LOS for a variety of modes (namely biking, walking and transit) and cities are starting to roll these into their project studies. The reason is simple, mitigating traffic impacts creates impacts of its own and currently, these are captured in the EIRs, etc. that are done around large projects.
And so the TC, with unanimous approval of the City Council, recommended that the city identify and start using LOS metrics for walking, biking, etc. The argument being, these are modes that the community has identified as wanting to make viable, as well as being bellwethers for quality of life issues around neighborhoods. Their use and safety shouldn’t be degraded by new projects.
It’s likely there will be multiple TC meetings on the subject, as well as planning board and city council approvals as a part of the Transportation Master Plan EIR heading to the council next summer.
A great resource for more info on this topic (and many other transportation related issues) is: VTPI.ORG
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