A Better Bay Area By The Numbers

When the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) issued their draft Plan Bay Area last month, thousands of pages of documents and appendices went up on their website. We think several charts speak volumes. That’s where MTC/ABAG reported the performance outcomes our region can expect to see from their draft plan (which they are calling the “preferred alternative”) compared to the community alternative: the Equity, Environment and Jobs, or EEJ, scenario.

In April, MTC/ABAG identified the EEJ scenario as environmentally “superior” to their draft plan. But as soon as they released that news, they backpedaled on their own analysis, saying the EEJ scenario was only slightly better than their draft plan. For instance, when their Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) concluded the EEJ scenario was the “environmentally superior alternative,” the agencies claimed the environmental impacts were “only marginally lower” than the proposed plan’s impacts.

We wondered about that. So we asked some experts at UC Davis to look at the underlying data and tell us what they saw.

Their analysis shows some striking differences. Let’s start with environmental impacts. Compared to the proposed plan, the EEJ scenario would result in:

1,900 fewer tons of CO2 emissions per day and 568,000 fewer tons of GHG emissions per year
6.4 fewer tons of Toxic Air Contaminants (TACs) per year
1,290 fewer tons of carbon monoxide emissions per year
Daily energy savings of 68 billion BTUs, the equivalent of burning600,000 fewer gallons of gasoline each day.

Note that getting that level of environmental and public health benefits wouldn’t require starting the whole planning process from scratch. It would only mean making three critical adjustments that respond to community needs:

Spend 5 percent more on running transit service.
Move 5 percent of the housing growth from low-income communities (mainly in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose) to transit-connected suburban job centers, so more families can live close to work.
Add protections against displacement pressures that are pushing struggling families to the distant edges of the region and beyond.

Sound good? Well when you tweak the proposed plan in those three ways, you get a lot of other benefits as well. For one, you get less traffic:

83,500 fewer cars on the roads
3.5 million fewer miles of auto travel per day.

That’s because you’d have 165,000 more people riding transit each day, a benefit that comes both from locating more housing near jobs and transit, and from boosting transit service levels. The EEJ scenario would give us:

12.5% more local transit service (bus and light rail)
13% more express bus service, and
6.5% more BART service

We also wouldn’t waste scarce public funds – $2.5 billion worth – on building highway expansions in places that are expected to be under water by 2050. Nor would we put more people’s homes under-water:

30,000 fewer residents subject to flood risk due to sea level rise by 2050.

Tired of potholes? Instead of wasting that money, you’d get:

More than 3,400 miles of local streets repaved.

But that’s not all. Making those changes to the draft plan would give struggling families and kids the break they need to continue to be able to live in and contribute to our communities and our regional economic engine. For instance, the EEJ scenario would put

15,800 fewer struggling families at high risk of displacement, and
Save low-income families $79 million a year in rent.

The EEJ scenario would also increase youth transit ridership, with a regional free youth transit pass, resulting in more hours of active transportation (biking and walking) per day. That, and transit service increases, translates into a reduced incidence of obesity and other public health threats, and healthier kids who learn better in school.

If we can get this many benefits by making just a few key improvements on the draft Plan Bay Area, shouldn’t we be asking MTC and ABAG to incorporate the best elements from the EEJ Alternative into the final Plan Bay Area? That’s exactly what a broad group of stakeholders are joining us in asking.

The Bay Area has the rare chance to choose a better future. Let’s not pass it up.