Planning the City’s Transportation Infrastructure
At tonight’s joint meeting of the Planning Board and the Transportation Commission, there will be a public hearing on the EIR for the Transportation Element of the General Plan (aka Transportation Master Plan aka TMP).
While the overall document is 876 pages long, 537 of that is detailed traffic model information that I can’t imagine why they included it. Luckily there’s a summary of impacts on pages 23-29 which identify what the EIR found when studying the proposed plan.
Appendix B (page 261) includes the entire TMP, it’s this 66 page document that was studied and which includes all the policies that are being proposed.
An overview of many of the parts of the TMP can be found here. The TMP sets forth three overall goals for the city: Circulation, Livability, Transportation Choice, and implementation. Each goal has objectives and each objective is supported by policies that will help the city attain these objectives.
For instance: The livability goal is a completely new addition and attempts to create a policy framework for the protection of all of neighborhoods as a part of transportation planning. This goal presents 5 major objectives:
Objective 4.2.1: Design and maintain transportation facilities to be compatible with adjacent land uses.
Objective 4.2.2: Plan, develop and implement a transportation system that enhances the livability of our residential neighborhoods.
Objective 4.2.3: Plan, develop and implement a transportation system that protects and enhances air and water quality, protects and enhances views and access to the water, and minimizes noise impacts on residential areas.
Objective 4.2.4: Develop a Transportation plan based on existing and projected land uses and plans. Encourage land use decisions that facilitate implementation of this transportation system.
Objective 4.2.5: Manage both on-street and off-street parking to support access and transportation objectives.
The attempt of the TMP is to balance the need between mobility and Alameda’s historic street layout. It also attempts to encourage transportation planning that balances the need to accommodate growth.
The TMP does not have anything to do with creating growth. It must work with the city’s General Plan which lays out the prospective growth patterns. It would not be possible to have a General Plan that plans for growth and a transportation element that assumed zero growth ever. Growth, Smart, Slow or “that fits” is coming based on our General Plan policies, The TMP looks to balance the need to accommodate traffic, one might even say induce it, with the need to protect existing residents.
If there are points of controversy, or possible differences of opinion, it is the EIR Policies (#7 in particular) found on Page 273:
EIR-1 Roadways will not be widened to create additional automobile travel lanes to accommodate additional automobile traffic volume with the exception of increasing transit exclusive lanes or non-motorize vehicle lanes.
EIR-2 Intersections will not be widened beyond the width of the approaching roadway with the exception of a single exclusive left turn lane when necessary.
EIR-3 Speed limits on Alameda’s new roads should be consistent with existing roadways and be designed and implemented as 25mph roadways.
EIR-4 All EIRs must include analysis of the effects of the project on the city’s transit, pedestrian and bicycling environment, including adjacent neighborhoods and the overall City network.
EIR-5 EIRs will not propose mitigations that significantly degrade the bicycle and pedestrian environment which are bellwethers for quality of life issues and staff should identify “Levels of Service” or other such measurements to ensure that the pedestrian and bicycling environment will not be significantly degraded as development takes place.
EIR-6 Mitigations for future development should be solely directed at reducing traffic through TDM measures and transit, bicycle and pedestrian capital projects, as well as more efficient use of existing infrastructure via traffic signal re-timing, etc. in order to reduce the negative environmental effects of development, rather than attempting to accommodate them.
EIR-7 After the implementation of quantifiable/verifiable TDM measures (verified on a yearly basis), and mitigation measures, including identification of how multimodal infrastructure relates to congestion concerns, some congestion may be identified in an EIR process as not possible to mitigate. This unmitigated congestion should be evaluated and disclosed (including intersection delay length of time) during the EIR process, and acknowledged as a by-product of the development and accepted with the on-going funding of TDM measures. The General Plan Amendment EIR process for the TMP and EIR policies will identify intersection congestion concerns. This information will be used to facilitate discussion at multiple public meetings concerning allowable congestion levels at specific significantly impacted intersections.
EIR Policy number six says that the city will plan to mitigate all traffic impacts using existing transportation infrastructure and by creating programs that help to reduce vehicle trips. This policy allows the city to go to developers and say “You’re building X number of homes/businesses/etc. and will create traffic at Central and Eighth, therefore you need to contribute $Y hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to a TDM fund to pay for programs that reduce that traffic. More than just la-la land, this is exactly what the city did with Catellus at Alameda Landing, to the tune of $435,000 a year, with a COLA each year.
EIR Policy number seven then says that if TDM measures are too much burden and the city council decides not to implement them all (because state EIR law protects developers too, and won’t allow cities to overburden projects with too much). Then we will acknowledge the traffic as an unavoidable significant impact. Again, something we already do. Worse, even at intersections where an EIR identifies an impact and a major construction mitigation, there is nothing that holds a city to building that mitigation so a city may acknowledge an impact, identify a mitigation and then proceed by doing nothing.
EIR 7 says that we’ll just cut to the chase, IF we are going to approve Project Z, we are going to do so while acknowledging that traffic congestion will be created and likely unmitigated at various spots. It’s clean and it’s honest and it’s open. This is a big point of discussion for Alameda in the EIR process. The EIR for the TMP identifies 8-9 intersections that will have impacts in the future based on possible growth (like Alameda Point) and says that the TMP can’t fix them. This isn’t true at all. In fact it points to a major reason why these EIR policies have been proposed.
The City Council has already accepted these policies (with a minor re-write of #7) and encouraged the TC to study them. And yet, the current EIR ignores them because they haven’t been adopted. (See the Towne Centre EIR, in it’s responses to the Transportation Commissions comments, staff responds that the council has not adopted the EIR policies (despite giving them their support) and therefore does not need to use them in the EIR. (There is nothing stopping them from doing so, they choose not to do so).
It’s highly ironic that this EIR does not even look at traffic reduction strategies as mitigations, but instead immediately declares “significant and unavoidable” impacts.
The second point of difference will be the Transportation Street Functional Classifications. These propose a new naming system for the city’s streets. In terms of major reclassifications, the TMP proposes “transitional” streets which would move from an existing classification to a new/lower one over time. There are very few of these, the historical street grid does a pretty good job of identifying traffic circulation, and decades of traffic engineering has already created a network. The proposed classifications impose limits on street size and add new priorities to some some streets, raising pedestrian and bicycle use above it’s current “if it fits in 30 years” status.
The Plan also removes a number of streets from the transit-planning map. Currently, every street in Alameda is a transit street, the proposed plan refines the maps to identify which streets would be acceptable for transit if such transit was identified as being needed.
In the end, the EIR states that “The proposed project would result in a slight reduction in VMT [Vehicle Miles Traveled] in comparison with projected buildout conditions from 3,617,513 to 3,609, 617 VMT.” This does not include any assumptions in the change between modes, something that the EIR finds will be better accomodated in the proposed plan. Meaning it’s likely that the TMP will see greater reductions in VMT.
In looking at the Air Quality impacts, the EIR finds:
“Implementation of the proposed Transportation Element Update would implement initiatives of the Local Climate Action Plan, result in a reduction in VMT and greenhouse gas emissions, and promote alternative modes of transportation. Therefore, the project would result in a cumulative reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from vehicle transportation”
The first ever joint planning board/transportation commission meeting on this subject is tonight at 7pm at City Hall.
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