Christopher Hawthorne of the LA Times forms a rather harsh opinion of the Expo Line, the latest addition to the region’s rail network, based on its urban design elements. As a commuter from the Westside to downtown, I take a more pragmatic view. How well does it operate, and does it offer a viable alternative to the 10?

Let me say that I am a transit advocate, but I am also a rational commuter and will weigh the time disadvantage of the train against the benefits of reclaiming my auto commute as productive/leisure time on the train.

On a dreary overcast Wednesday morning, I am heading east on the 10 Freeway from the PCH and traffic begins to thicken. At Robertson Boulevard, the amber panel reads: Minutes to Downtown: 25.

I make an impulsive decision to veer into the rightmost lane and head toward the shiny new Expo light rail station at La Cienega/Jefferson. It turns out that the station is some distance from the 10 off-ramp at La Cienega, especially when traffic is clogged in the mornings.

Upon arrival, the park-and-ride lot is free (nice surprise), and has plenty of available spaces on the upper levels, a convenience that will probably diminish over time as ridership increases. Disappointingly, even though I am at eye level with the station platform, there is no sky bridge directly from the parking structure. I walk down steps from the upper level of the park-and-ride lot and then up several flights of steps to the station platform.

I miss the first train because I fail to notice the ticket vending machine at street level and walk back down the steps.

Poor signage and placement of ticket vending machines at street level. Missed train as a result.

The next train soon arrives and whisks me to downtown at a fairly brisk pace. Minutes to Downtown: 29. Plus some additional wait time at the platform. Here’s how Metro scored against the freeway both on commute time and cost:

From 10/La Cienega to Downtown: Metro vs. Freeway

Could the Expo Line provide a viable alternative to a commute on the 10? Well, sort of. It will become much more viable once the station at Venice/Robertson, located in much closer proximity to the 10 Freeway, opens later this summer.

Residents feel besieged by traffic and demand action to slow down growth. Governor Brown abolishes redevelopment agencies, eliminating a critical source of locally-controlled revenue for transportation and infrastructure improvements. Additional strictures are placed on the government collection of “fees” by Proposition 26.

Combine these forces et voilà, the Transportation Impact Fee (TIF) becomes one of the last games in town for cities on the hunt for additional revenue sources. But that doesn’t mean they’re the right solution.

Santa Monica’s proposed TIF ordinance is particularly regressive and awful. It would add thousands of dollars to the cost of each new housing unit, including affordable units and mixed-use projects near transit – the very types of projects that the City has been trying to encourage in recent years.

Unless the ordinance is substantially modified to exempt a broader array of projects, these fees will singlehandedly set back the cause of sustainable growth on the Westside by decades, negating the opportunities created by the new Expo Line to Santa Monica and other future transit investments.

Housing advocates should be furious. LA Metro, which is funding the Expo Line to Santa Monica, should be furious too, since the proposed fees will ultimately discourage transit-oriented development (TOD) at station hubs and reduce the new ridership – and hence fare revenue – often associated with TODs.

Why is this happening? The City’s recently adopted 2025 Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE) established the goal of “no net new trips” during the afternoon rush hour in Santa Monica.  This concept can only work if every additional trip generated by new development can be offset by a “mode shift” from solo driving to transit/bike/walking/carpooling.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether “no net new trips” is even achievable, let alone desirable. Here’s the broad strokes of what’s wrong with the current version of Santa Monica’s TIF ordinance:

1) The regional growth impacts will be unfair. Every housing unit not built in Santa Monica due to prohibitively high impact fees translates into one more housing unit built somewhere else – likely much farther away from accessible public transit, job centers, and/or a temperate coastal climate where average energy usage per resident is lower. This is essentially Ed Glaeser’s argument in The Triumph of Cities, which I summarize here in an earlier post.

2) LA County residents are essentially subsidizing Santa Monica’s NIMBYism. Consider this: the Expo Line will play a major role in helping Santa Monica achieve its goal of “no net new trips” by shifting solo drivers to transit starting in 2016. For every car taken off the road thanks to Expo, Santa Monica can then approve  more traffic-generating development without violating its “no net new trips” mantra. New development will in turn generate TIF revenue for transportation improvements within the city’s borders. But the 99.9% of LA County residents outside Santa Monica are the ones generating the lion’s share of Measure R sales tax to fund Expo. Without Expo, Santa Monica could not have it both ways: enrich its coffers with impact fees and make increased congestion at the regional level someone else’s problem.

3) TIFs are an unpredictable revenue generator, subject to the boom/bust cycle of the real estate sector. Fees are collected only when new development enters the construction phase. The inherent volatility of TIF revenues means that they cannot generally be used to issue revenue bonds without backing by the full faith and credit of a city’s general fund. So they may increase funding levels in some years but they don’t always increase long-term debt capacity.

4) A city’s ability to leverage additional State and federal funding through TIFs is also limited. If a city wishes to use TIF proceeds as the local “match” for State or federal grant programs, it will typically need to let these fees accumulate over several years before the balance is substantial enough to fund major capital projects. The extent to which such fees can be used as a leveraging tool is hence overstated.

5) Santa Monica’s fee levels are set unnecessarily high. A devilish detail, but the City appears to dramatically overestimate the cost of transportation projects to be partially funded by the proposed TIFs over a 20-year period. It cites Caltrans’ “industry standard” of adding 30% to 50% to a project cost estimate in the form of “contingency,” ie. potential cost overruns. That’s nearly $42 million in this case. The City could lower project contigency costs by using well-established Design-Build contracting methods to procure its projects. Any savings could be passed along to developers in the form of lower TIFs.

No doubt the “no net new trips” mantra is politically popular, but it is leading to some uncharacteristically provincial and myopic public policy decisions in otherwise progressive Santa Monica. Where is the chorus of opposition to this misguided ordinance? I would also ask, where is Denny Zane, Executive Director of MoveLA and former mayor of Santa Monica, on this issue?

In Westchester County, New York, cocktail conversation no longer revolves around the frothy real estate market. That is sooo 2006. Instead, the issue du jour is taxes. Even though I now live several states away, old friends from high school will tearfully recount how their empty-nested parents have been pushed out of the area by the engulfing tide of property and school taxes.

So it stands to reason that the New York Legislature has now passed a bill to limit property tax increases to 2 percent a year (or less if the inflation rate is lower). This is one potent political issue in the suburbs.

Watching this development from afar, though, I wonder, hasn’t New York learned anything from California’s 30+ years of experience with property tax caps? Where are the obvious comparisons to Proposition 13?

Proposition 13 is widely pilloried for contributing to the demise of public schools, skewing the incentives for local jurisdictions to attract certain types of development, and generally wreaking dysfunction on local finances.

So why does New York think the outcome of a 2 percent annual property tax cap is going to be any different there?

There are, of course, some important differences:

1. Local governments can override the cap with 60 percent of the public vote or the governing body. In California, a 2/3 supermajority (67%) is needed.

2.  The cap does come with potentially significant exemptions. Court judgments, growth in a town or school district, and employee pension costs can allow taxes to go beyond the 2 percent limit without voter approval.

This tax cap will sunset in 2016, but it is hard to see this piece of legislation not becoming a permanent part of the political landscape.