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.

The $52 million pledged by the now-defunct agency to subsidize the Broad Museum’s parking structure was controversial, but the contribution is apparently being put to (good?) use, as the project is exceeding its target for local job hiring, according to a report by the City.

“Local jobs” are defined as work hours performed by residents living within a 3-mile radius of the construction site. 42% of all work hours accrued thus far have gone to locals, many from “disadvantaged” communities. The target was 30%.

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to walk up to Bunker Hill and observe progress on the future contemporary art mecca.

Broad Museum, May 8, 2012

From a planning perspective, the latest OPR proposal marks an interesting (and quite frankly, overdue) evolution away from the traditional focus on “transit-oriented development” and instead emphasizes walkability as a key performance measure of sustainable growth. Namely, it focuses on “low vehicle travel areas” in which “project-generated per capita VMT is less than regional per capita VMT.”

To encourage a walkable neighborhood scale, for example, big box stores with a floorplate greater than 50,000 SF locating in these areas would not be exempt from CEQA requirements. Commercial and retail projects would qualify for exemption only if they (a) use 50% or less of the project area for parking and (b) are located within one-half mile of at least 1,800 households.

The proposed OPR guidelines also define a new category of “Small Community Walkable Projects,” which includes residential areas within “approximately” one-quarter mile of  a retail downtown area. Such projects would need to achieve a residential density of at least 8 units per acre (upa) or a commercial FAR greater than 0.5, or both. (Interesting, a density threshold of 8 upa would still allow for single-family housing.)

This type of fresh thinking extends the potential for CEQA exemptions not just to dense urban cores but suburban areas, where pockets of walkability may thrive amid conventional sprawl.

This latest step toward CEQA reform appears to reflect a broader, emerging consensus that the grip of the regulatory State is stifling economic development in California. Indeed, CEQA has become a fashionable bête noire of late, blamed for blocking a pipeline of “shovel-ready” public works and private development projects that represent hundreds of thousands of potential construction jobs, from high-speed rail to new stadiums and hospitals.

The public policy question becomes: should mega projects, like the proposed Farmers Insurance Stadium in downtown Los Angeles, enjoy a “streamlined” environmental review, as they now do under AB 900? Or should that privilege be limited to “transit-priority” urban infill and “small community walkable” projects? What about medium-scale projects that fit neither category?

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?

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.

As a Venice resident, I contemplate this question with some frequency and sense of resignation.

So it was refreshing to see USC urban planning students re-envision Lincoln Boulevard as a sustainable, vibrant hub of employment and activity, in a presentation given to the Venice Land Use and Planning Committee (LUPC) last Wednesday.

“Lincoln Place” would capitalize upon Venice’s creative, beachy vibe to attract a “tech” corridor nestled between Santa Monica’s emerging Silicon Beach and the LAX Airport/El Segundo’s aerospace/engineering cluster. Not such a stretch in light of Google’s pending move to Main Street.

Shown in red below, the new tech park would stretch along Lincoln Boulevard adjacent to the existing Lincoln Place apartments, a 38-acre complex with its own interesting history. It would displace two retail centers, Ralph’s supermarket and Ross Dress For Less, with the new building footprints adopting the New Urbanist best practice of a zero lot line and parking in the rear.

Lincoln Place Tech Park

Lincoln Boulevard itself would be transformed into a “complete street” featuring dedicated rapid bus lanes in the center lane, an all-electric fleet technology (notice the overhead catenary wires), wider sidewalks, and an enhanced public realm.

Lincoln Boulevard reimagined as a "complete street"

As one of the LUPC members pointed out, Lincoln Boulevard’s official designation as a state highway (Route 1) means that little in the form of traffic calming or retrofitting may be legally permissible, let alone desirable, given existing traffic woes on the Westside.

The leap from concept to implementation is always a tricky one. The makeover scheme also begs the classic question of phasing: Would public investment in better amenities and transportation options need to come first to make Lincoln Blvd more desirable for high-wage tech workers, who value quality of life, or would the increased employment base come first and then provide the tax dollars to do so?

That aside, USC students are spot on in identifying the locational advantage that Lincoln Boulevard currently enjoys but does not successfully exploit. City planners would do well to take note.

On its face, this effort may be a cynical attempt to reduce the power of environmentalists. That said, no one can deny that CEQA imposes enormous additional costs on new housing and infrastructure projects by creating an uncertain and onerous approvals process.

What a streamlined CEQA review process could look like vs. the existing process.

In the newfound belt-tightening spirit of “doing more with less,” even some liberals are willing to consider regulatory reform as a form of economic stimulus. Dan Rosenfeld, LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas’ deputy for economic development, made such a remark at ULI’s Urban Marketplace forum earlier this month. Indeed, regulatory reform is one of the few tools available to localities that does not involve the direct expenditure of tax dollars.

In his latest book, Triumph of the City, urban economist Ed Glaeser criticizes CEQA, pointing out that it is prejudicial against new development, since it only considers the impacts of a given project against a “no-build” alternative.

This is unrealistic, Glaeser points out, because new growth pressures demand a release valve; if denied in one place, a developer will inevitably decamp to a more receptive city or region.

In Glaeser’s view, since its enactment in 1970, CEQA has displaced new growth away from the greenest possible locales in the U.S.—namely, coastal California, where per-capita energy use is relatively low—out to areas with more extreme climates, such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Dallas, that are intrinsically less green.

For urban infill projects, CEQA’s point of reference for assessing greenhouse gas impacts, for example, should therefore be not a no-build alternative, but a base case scenario in which the same project is instead built in a car-dependent, less temperate environment. Such a scenario would be equally hypothetical—and more reflective of the real world.

Rather than simply throw more money at the problem, the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) has formed a new $50 million revolving loan fund in partnership with the private and non-profit sectors. Its $10 million contribution will be in a “top loss” position and provide developers of affordable housing the opportunity to acquire land near transit stations while they navigate the approvals process at the local level.

This arrangement not only reduces borrowing costs for the developer, but effectively mitigates regulatory risk as well because the MTC’s participation in the fund implies public agency support for a given project just by virtue of granting the loan.

Plus, it leverages commitments by the private sector to stretch affordable housing dollars much further than they would otherwise go as direct grants or subsidies. MTC staff estimates its $10 million contribution to “a $40 million TOD Fund could be used to help finance the acquisition of at least 20 to 30 acres around the region, which, depending on the density of build-out, would support development of anywhere from 1,100 to 3,800 units of affordable housing.”

New York City has a similar partnership in place. With the region’s transit network poised to expand significantly under the 30/10 Initiative, it is time for the City of Los Angeles to step up the financial committment to its own New Generation Fund, too!

Becerra’s note of candor acknowledges new political realities at the federal level, where Republicans have flat out rejected the idea of subsidizing the interest rate at which financing could be tapped for Metro’s program of construction projects under 30/10.

The proposed financing program, nicknamed QTIBs (or Qualified Transportation Investment Bonds), would have the Feds pick up those financing costs in full, by making funds available to Metro at zero percent interest – essentially free money. QTIBs would have to be written into the tax code and their fiscal impact assessed by the Congressional Budget Office. Anything that adds red ink to the federal balance sheet is most likely off the table, for now.

Becerra does believe that the Obama administration’s proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank, which was first launched as a trial balloon last fall (and lauded by the conservative Wall Street Journal), may soon be revived. An I-Bank may be the best option for leveraging local and private funds, Becerra said.

During the cocktail hour, some attendees at the event quietly questioned the seriousness of the administration’s backing for an I-Bank. This might be a sacrificial lamb quickly offered up to the GOP during upcoming negotiations over the federal budget.

While boosters for the 30/10 plan remain undaunted, the path forward remains as uncertain as ever.

This announcement has predictably added fuel to the fire of HSR critics, who believe it will be a train to nowhere.

Assuming the segment from Borden to Corcoran is completed on budget, however, it will rank as one of the lowest-cost high-speed rail projects ever built on a per mile basis. Look at this capital cost comparison of international HSR projects completed in the last 20 years (adjusted to 2010 dollars)*:

Granted, it is impossible to do a precise apples-to-apples comparison due to variations in key cost inputs such as land and labor across countries. Obviously, too, a tunnel is going to be more expensive than an alignment cutting through farmland in the sparsely populated Central Valley.

At the same time, as the first project of its kind in the United States, the CAHSR does not benefit from the economies of scale and other efficiencies that ordinarily result from, say, a coordinated nationwide program of HSR projects, as in Japan or France, making its low (estimated) cost all the more remarkable.

This analysis is not likely to silence the critics. That said, if the project is successfully completed within budget, it would constitute a tremendous bang for the buck, while boosting the CHSRA’s credibility as a competent steward of taxpayer dollars.

* Adapted from UK Commission for Integrated Transport, High-Speed Rail: International Comparisons (2005). Excludes trainsets, financing, and project management costs. Since the CHSRA cost estimate for the 66.7 mile segment presumably includes project management, an adjustment of -8.7% was made to the total $3.312 billion cost, reflecting the percentage attributed to this cost category by CHSRA for the entire Phase I project (San Francisco to Anaheim.)