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New Transit Doesn’t Alleviate Traffic, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the anticipated effects of a new trolley line in San Diego. The 11-mile trolley runs from Old Town to UTC mall in La Jolla and is expected to carry 20,000 daily riders in the coming years. While the trolley line may seem like an ideal solution to reduce traffic congestion in the area, Manville explained that all the cars the trolley removes from the freeway “will almost certainly get replaced by backfilling prompted by reduced congestion” as open space on the freeway is filled by new commuters. “It’s a very established empirical fact that new transit doesn’t alleviate traffic,” Manville said. “It’s self-undermining, because congestion is the No. 1 thing that blunts demand.” He agreed that the new transit line is good for the economy and the region but noted that “you need to be realistic about what transit can and can’t do.”

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Manville on Proposed Per-Mile Driver Fees

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was mentioned in a San Diego Union-Tribune article about the city’s proposed road fee, which would charge drivers a set price for every mile traveled. The road charge would help pay for San Diego’s $160-billion proposal to expand rail, bus and other transportation services throughout the region. It would also help replace the revenue from the current gas tax as fossil fuels are phased out in efforts to combat climate change. “The gas tax, regardless of how much revenue it raises, is in fact a climate tax, a carbon tax,” Manville explained. “We probably shouldn’t just throw that out the window.” A statewide pilot program is also testing the road charge strategy. Experts are debating whether to adopt a flat per-mile fee or charge more to drivers with less fuel-efficient vehicles. While the second option would be more complicated, it would incentivize drivers to adopt cleaner vehicles.

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Monkkonen Analyzes San Diego Housing Plans

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy Paavo Monkkonen was mentioned in a San Diego Union-Tribune opinion piece about the need to enforce housing regulations in San Diego. Every eight years, California cities are required to adopt a state-approved plan that includes rules about regional housing targets, sanctions and zoning restrictions. San Diego is currently out of compliance, but it is unclear how California’s Department of Housing and Community Development will enforce the rules. State law says that cities that lack a compliant housing plan forfeit authority to deny or downsize affordable housing projects. Monkkonen and his students studied San Diego’s housing plan and identified grave shortcomings. For example, they found that 65% of the sites San Diego identified for low-income and multifamily housing are located in the poorest third of the city’s neighborhoods, and the plan fails to open up neighborhoods reserved for single-family homes to multifamily housing.

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Manville Endorses Parking Reform in California

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville co-authored a StreetsBlog article about the possibility of parking reform with Assembly Bill 1401, which would eliminate minimum parking mandates for buildings near public transit in California. “Eliminating parking requirements is the simplest, most effective step that California can take to reduce carbon emissions, make housing more affordable, and increase production of homes for families across the income spectrum – all at no cost to the public,” wrote Manville and co-authors Anthony Dedousis and Mott Smith. Some opponents of the bill argue that eliminating parking requirements could harm affordable housing production by making California’s density bonus incentives less valuable. However, the authors pointed to the success of parking reform in San Diego, which eliminated parking requirements in 2019 and saw record increases in the amount of new housing built, including over 1,500 affordable homes in 2020. They see AB 1401 as an opportunity to “learn from San Diego’s success and take parking reform statewide.”

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Manville Imagines Post-Pandemic Work Life

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was cited in a Bond Buyer article about how work patterns, commutes and transportation will look after the pandemic is over. The San Diego Association of Governments is drafting its 30-year transportation plan, but some experts are hesitant about investing in transportation projects due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. At a SANDAG board meeting, a panel of experts debated how long it will take for work patterns and traffic to return to pre-pandemic levels. While some firms will continue to offer work-from-home opportunities, Manville said he believes that “work patterns will largely return to how it was before the pandemic, as will traffic patterns.” He noted that it didn’t take long after the shutdown in March for traffic to return. “Though Zoom is great, so many companies have mentioned that it’s the unplanned interactions between employees that generate the best ideas,” Manville said.

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Newton on San Diego’s Unexpected Shift to Blue

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Lecturer Jim Newton spoke to Voice of San Diego about the city’s shift in support of the Democratic Party. After years of being a Republican stronghold, San Diego County has voted blue in the last four presidential elections. When asked in 1989 if deeply conservative Orange County would ever turn blue, Newton imagined it might happen sometime in his grandchildren’s lifetime. However, Barack Obama won San Diego County in the 2008 presidential election, and Orange County joined the movement in 2016 and 2020 by voting for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Newton pointed to the rise of the environmental movement and the increase in Latino voters for the shift. He explained that since the GOP drifted toward big business, “it’s hard to take the environment seriously and associate with the Republican Party.” He also noted that the GOP has become associated with deportation and intolerance in California. “It may take time, but political worlds shift,” he said.

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Manville on San Diego Transit Expansion Plans

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the city’s transit plans. San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata, who spent two years working on a transit expansion plan when the pandemic started, said he is determined to push forward with the $177 billion proposal. Ikhrata will present the plan, which includes 350 miles of new rail track, to the SANDAG board of directors. The plan has faced pushback from some who have said that the pandemic will radically change commuter patterns, threatening to render the plan obsolete by the time it’s under way. However, Manville argued that much of the pandemic’s impact will be temporary. “Right now, most of the economy’s still closed and you’ve got jammed roads,” he explained. “It seems hard to believe that in 20 years there will be no point to having mass transit to San Diego’s job centers.”

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Manville on Threat to San Diego Transit Plans

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the threat that the COVID-19 pandemic poses to plans to expand public transit in San Diego. A tax proposal for ElevateSD, a $24-billion plan to expand public transit and build a new commuter rail system, may be postponed as ridership plummets and fare revenue dwindles due to the pandemic. The government planning agency has announced that it will wait until the pandemic subsides to release a blueprint for the plans. Widespread unemployment, economic upheaval due to the pandemic and new fears about riding public transit may be obstacles to securing the two-thirds voter approval required for such a tax increase. “If you were an opponent of public transit finance, could you pounce on COVID as a new talking point to try to derail a ballot initiative?” Manville asked. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone takes a shot at that.”

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Manville on Public Transit Investment and Ridership Trends

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In a San Diego Union-Tribune article about the city’s new high-speed rail proposal, Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, highlighted the challenges of implementing public transportation improvements in cities primarily designed for automobile travel. San Diego recently proposed two tax increases to fund billions of dollars in bus and rail investments, but experts worry that it will follow the example of cities like Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles, which invested heavily in public transit only to lose riders. Manville describes Los Angeles as a “cautionary tale,” explaining that “you can’t take a region that is overwhelmingly designed to facilitate automobile travel and change the way people move around just by laying some rail tracks over it.” To avoid decreases in ridership, transportation experts recommend making it harder to drive by eliminating street parking, ending freeway expansions, limiting suburban home construction and implementing policies like congestion pricing.

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Wachs Defends Controversial Plan to Combat San Diego Traffic

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Martin Wachs, distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning, spoke to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the county’s newest plan for improving traffic. The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) proposed a controversial plan to invest in a high-speed commuter rail and implement congestion pricing on existing freeways. The proposal shelves planned freeway expansions, which experts have found does little to solve traffic congestion. According to Wachs, “the only proven way to reduce traffic is congestion pricing.” While the policy has been politically unpopular in the U.S., it has “increased highway capacity in the 30 or 40 places it’s been done around the world.” While the rail would not necessarily reduce traffic congestion, it would accommodate population growth in the region while reducing greenhouse gases from cars and trucks. “Transit enables higher density development and reduces vehicle miles traveled in relation to the population, whereas highways are associated with more dispersed growth,” Wachs explained.

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