After a two-year delay, the periodic update of the San Diego County Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) is about to be sent to Sacramento. I watched as the SANDAG board voted, primarily along party lines, to approve the RTP that serves as a blueprint for the next 30 years of transportation planning and funding.
As expected, representatives of the more conservative areas, such as Poway, voted to reject the plan. Mayor Steve Vaus had been outspoken on this, calling it a “shell game.” The folk in Rancho Bernardo were represented on this board by Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer and Mayor Todd Gloria, who both voted in favor.
After devoting years to the plan, we might expect SANDAG to move on to other things. But a mounting uproar erupted regarding one of several financial elements in the RTP. The concept of a road use charge, proposed on top of several sales tax add-ons, seemed to be a bridge too far. There is no time to revise the RTP by year-end. However, the board ed a resolution to require SANDAG staff to look for a funding source that would replace the road use charge, and propose an amendment within six months.
The RTP represents a bold vision by the San Diego Association of Governments under its executive director, Hasan Ikhrata. That vision attempts to radically wean the county’s population from its dependence on personal vehicles to gain a three-fold increase in the use of mass transit and bicycles. That degree of change is considered necessary to make a dent in the production of greenhouse gases, as mandated by the state.
Several concerns have led to vastly different positions among the SANDAG Board of Directors and the public. Much of the RTP addresses ways to discourage driving personal vehicles. The most obvious are the multiple plans to impose new fees for driving and parking. These fees serve a dual purpose, (1) to discourage driving and (2) to generate income needed for the transit programs.
A major area of contention is whether even tripling transit patronage, bringing ridership to only about 10 percent of travelers, mostly commuters, is worth abandoning prior commitments for highway improvements. Another is who should pay for it and how. Those, especially rural residents, who cannot give up their cars, are incensed about being taxed for transit that they can’t use.
For the financial element of the RTP, there are -related fees and unrelated taxes. The disputed road use charge would impose a fee of about two cents a mile for every mile traveled in the county by a personal vehicle. That is in addition to a similar charge being tested by the state.
More fees would result from a Managed Lanes concept in which all but one lane on limited access highways would be toll lanes. There is also a plan to impose three half-percent additions to the TransNet Tax that would hit everyone in the county, regardless of how they travel. These would have to be approved by the voters.
It’s ironic that the road use charge idea has met with such resistance. It is, as many realists observe, the most reasonable path to funding transportation and transit needs. Ikhrata repeatedly said about the RTP that it would work “if we price it right.” He was inferring that if we make it painful enough, people will switch from personal vehicles to public transit. Apparently, he assumed he could press his way past a recalcitrant public and a malleable Board of Directors.
Perhaps, the better path to success is “if we sell it right.” The prospect of getting voters to new fees and taxes must be based on perceived benefits, not penalties. And the benefits must be distributed to all, not just a favored few. The details make it apparent that very few benefits were spelled out for RB and Poway. The RTP essentially says that the I-15 corridor and outlying areas in East and North County are not deserving of improved transit service. The focus on delivering benefits to the “underserved” areas may, in fact, exacerbate mobility in areas still lacking access to transit.
The RTP is commuter-centric. Moving people from personal vehicles to public transit, bicycles and car-pools may be reasonable for commuters. But this ignores the multitude of other purposes for using personal vehicles on a daily basis.
The RTP data is somewhat schizophrenic. We would incentivize people to buy electric vehicles, but penalize them for not paying gas taxes. We would use the road use charge to produce revenue, but simultaneously reduce vehicle miles traveled, which reduces that same revenue.
Looking to the future, SANDAG will have to address the major concern about how the RTP will serve the entire county, not only the south and central areas and not only commuters. An even greater challenge will be working up the details of programs that are now mostly visionary sketches. And during this time, SANDAG will need to consider the impact of autonomous vehicles on all of their assumptions.
On the financial side, they will need to sell three sales tax hikes, planned for 2022, 2024 and 2028, Managed Lanes fees, and whatever takes the place of the road use charge.
Lost in the discussion was the primary purpose of the RTP vision — to reduce the production of greenhouse gases, per state mandate. That mandate does not allow consideration of the gains made by electric vehicles. After all the machinations, it is difficult to see how greenhouse gases will be reduced to any significant degree, especially if the ill-advised push to reduce personal vehicle use does not meet expectations.
