A Cautionary Note on Policies to Curb ‘Vehicle Miles Traveled’

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Research by professor and chair of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Michael Manville is the focus of Reason Foundation articles on state policies aimed at reducing the growth of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on California’s roads. Manville is among transportation professionals in the U.S. concerned about current state policies enacted to reduce VMT. California has the most ambitious goal of reducing VMT by 20% by 2030, while other states including Washington, Colorado, Minnesota and Massachusetts have set their own reduction targets. Manville’s work on VMT is reviewed in the October issue, and the November review takes a detailed look specifically at California’s VMT-reduction policy. In creating his report, Manville used input from a panel of experts from academia, as well as transportation practitioners to examine current practices for estimating induced travel from freeway expansions, to resolve areas of disagreement and to provide recommendations.

Read the November article

 

 

Manville on California’s Proposition 33

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Michael Manville, chair of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, commented on a KQED podcast on California’s Proposition 33, which would repeal the 1995 Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act. The state law prohibits local ordinances that limit initial residential rental rates for new tenants as well as rates for current tenants in certain residential properties. Pro-Prop. 33 advocates cite the state’s sky-high rents, while anti-Prop. 33 proponents characterize the ballot measure as a corporate anti-housing scheme. “If we’re serious about helping our most vulnerable tenants, that’s really going to involve some combination of making housing in general just much more plentiful, and spending money in targeted subsidies for low-income people,” Manville said. In a Caló News article, Manville said that Prop. 33, while well intended, could have a number of untended consequences. “Prop. 33 does not offer rent control to more Californians. It removes a law that limits how strong a rent control law can be right now.”

Listen to the KQED podcast
Read the Caló News story

 

On U.S. Cities’ Reluctance to Embrace ‘Congestion Pricing’

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Urban Planning Chair Michael Manville spoke to LAist’s “AirTalk” about the reluctance among some cities to launch “congestion pricing” systems to ease traffic, raise revenues and improve climate conditions. Just weeks before Manhattan was due to implement congestion pricing, becoming the first U.S. city to take the plunge, New York’s governor halted the program. “Seeing it go down is not a good omen for the political fortunes of L.A.’s program,” which is far from getting off the ground as officials keep a series of studies under wraps, Manville said. In international cities including Singapore, London and Milan, he noted, congestion pricing has been successfully launched, with growing support among residents. “The funny thing about congestion pricing is that, in places where it has been implemented, people like it,” Manville said. “But it’s noncontagious. Almost no one looks at the success abroad and says, ‘Oh, we want to do that here.’”

Listen to the podcast

 

Ripple Effects From NYC’s Pause on Congestion Pricing

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to indefinitely halt a long-awaited congestion pricing plan for Manhattan reverberated in cities across the country that had been closely watching the ambitious experiment in traffic management. Media outlets covering the impact called on Michael Manville, chair of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and an expert on congestion pricing. “With a policy this controversial, it is always helpful if someone else goes first,” Manville told the New York Times. “Being able to say, ‘These guys did it and it worked out,’ seems like a small thing, but it’s much, much better than saying, ‘We’re going to stick our necks out over this untested policy.’” Manville also spoke to the Los Angeles Times about prospects that congestion pricing will take hold elsewhere. “Had New York moved forward, I think it would have opened up some breathing room for Los Angeles and San Francisco to take their fairly dormant proposals and rev them back up,” he said.

Read the New York Times article
Read the Los Angeles Times article

 

Congestion-Pricing Ambitions Slowed by ‘Internal Trepidation’

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A Wall Street Journal story about legal challenges to a plan to launch a congestion-pricing zone in parts of Manhattan in June cited Michael Manville, chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin. Pending litigation could delay the start of the program, which would charge passenger vehicles $15 during the day and $3.75 at night to enter the zone, with higher tolls for trucks. Many businesses and commuters argue that the program, approved in 2019, is ill-timed because communities continue to struggle in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Congestion-pricing zones have been successfully launched abroad, and transit advocates had hoped that New York’s program would spur action in other U.S. cities. But in places including San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, momentum has slowed. “I would say it’s at a bit of a standstill,” Manvile said. “What’s happened in California, and particularly Los Angeles, is internal trepidation.”

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Stepping Up L.A.’s Plan for Safer Streets

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Urban Planning chair Michael Manville spoke to Bloomberg CityLab about the passage of a ballot measure aimed at speeding up the addition of hundreds of miles of bike and bus lanes, as well as wider sidewalks, on Los Angeles streets. The vote on Measure HLA served as a referendum on pedestrian and bicyclist safety and revealed frustration at the city’s slow pace of implementing a mobility plan adopted in 2015. “Hopefully, what this does is it lights a fire under the city to take seriously its own law that has been in effect for quite a while,” Manville said. The story also cited Jiaqi Ma, faculty associate director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and director of the UCLA Mobility Lab. “Unintended consequences need to be considered,” including potential increases in congestion, emissions and freeway traffic, Ma said, but he called the measure’s passage a “good step.”

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A Fee to Ease Manhattan Traffic

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News outlets covering New York City’s plan to charge a congestion fee to drivers entering the most traffic-choked parts of Manhattan called on UCLA Luskin transportation experts to provide insight. Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, told Gothamist that New York is unusual in that nearly all of the curb spaces are unmetered. “This is some of the most valuable land on earth, and you could use it free if you bring a car,” he said, calculating that the city could generate $6 billion annually by charging $5.50 a day for every free curb parking spot. Urban Planning chair Michael Manville told the Associated Press that American cities should take heed of London’s experience, where several exemptions to a congestion pricing program have contributed to the return of clogged streets. “There’s always going to be carve-outs,” he said. “But the further and further you start going down that road, there lies madness.”

Read the Gothamist story
Read the AP story

 

I-15 Expansion Highlights Tension Between Commerce, Climate Goals

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Michael Manville, chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the approval of a freeway-widening project on Interstate 15. Truck movement along the I-15 is a major driver of the region’s economy, and the project highlights the friction between efforts to expand infrastructure to accommodate commerce and the state’s ambitious climate goals. Now, federal officials are looking into allegations that state and local officials mischaracterized the potential harm the project could cause communities that breathe in some of the nation’s worst air. Proponents of the I-15 expansion had argued that new lanes would speed up commutes, but critics said the opposite was true, that making more space for vehicles would draw even more drivers, increasing congestion and pollution. Traffic modeling studies can be used to say what you want them to say, Manville said. “From the moment we first started using these models many decades ago, they have aspects of being a black box.”

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Political Courage Is Key to Curing Traffic Ills, Manville Says

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UCLA Luskin Urban Planning chair Michael Manville spoke to the Los Angeles Times about plans to tap into artificial intelligence to find ways to make California’s roads safer and less congested. Caltrans is asking tech companies to pitch generative AI tools that could analyze immense amounts of data quickly, perhaps helping the state’s traffic engineers make decisions on signal timing and lane usage. Manville said that the problem is not a lack of data-backed solutions but rather a lack of political courage to put existing solutions, such as congestion pricing, into play. “If you want to make cities safer for pedestrians, if you want to lower speeds, if you want to deal with congestion in a meaningful way, technology is not going to rescue you from difficult political decisions,” he said.

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A Freeway Closure That Reverberates Around the Region

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Michael Manville, chair of Urban Planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the traffic disruption caused by the closure of the 10 Freeway after a massive fire. Freeways carry a hugely disproportionate share of L.A. traffic, Manville said, and “when there are big interruptions to them, they really do have effects that reverberate around the region.” About 300,000 vehicles on average move through the affected stretch of the 10 Freeway each day, and officials at L.A. Metro have been working to entice affected commuters to try public transit. Manville said he is not confident that people will change their commute habits over the long term. “Most people’s experience with the freeway at rush hour is already pretty miserable — and that does not drive a lot of people to public transportation,” he said. “I think most people in Los Angeles understand that we are over-reliant on a bunch of roads that don’t perform well because they’re overused.”

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