Final draft 10 upgrade
It’s super important that people feel safe on public transit, and that people feel safe biking and walking. The new plan, said Clementson, is “about equity and connecting people to upward mobility, to jobs, to higher education – it’s about truly affordable transportation, and making it safe. “I’ve been a planner in the public sector for over 25 years,” she said, “and I gotta say, this is the most exciting plan I’ve ever worked on.” SANDAG staff drew connections not just between land-use patterns and transportation, as required by the state, but also acknowledged that other issues are just as connected. “So we set it aside, and we used cell phone data to see where people are traveling – and looked at where people couldn’t get to. “In the past, we had a set of transportation projects that we just kind of did a refresh on,” added Coleen Clementson, SANDAG’s Planning Director. For the first time, we were able to use cell data to understand commute patterns.”
“One thing that differentiates this plan from many others is that it’s data driven,” said Ikhrata. These include: complete corridors that accommodate all users safely transit improvements that would greatly increase service frequency, hours, routes, connections, and priority mobility hubs where all forms of transportation can meet and mingle to make getting around easier flexible and shared fleets of everything from transit vehicles to cars to “ridables,” as the plan labels bikes and scooters and technological advances in safety, clean vehicles, wayfinding, and the like, including autonomous vehicles. San Diego Forward focuses on “ Five Big Moves” to shift the region’s transportation system towards a sustainable and equitable one. That pretty much turns the previous plan on its head. So this regional plan prioritizes – for funding and implementation – projects that reduce, rather than increase, greenhouse gas emissions. That means that, in order to meet state climate goals, investments that cut greenhouse gas emissions have to be made sooner rather than later. Most of the potential funds it identifies would not be available for at least fifteen years from now. The plan, San Diego Forward, is expensive – more on that below – and it covers a 30-year time period. Those issues are important enough for sustainability that we believe it’s going to take utopian thinking to change direction – and I hope that our board sees it that way.” There are social equity issues, emissions, breathing, bad air, greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise. “But we found ourselves with a lot of challenges from it. “Over the last five or six decades, the country built out an interstate system that brought economic progress,” SANDAG Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata told Streetsblog in a recent interview. The new draft plan – written under new SANDAG leadership – presents a utopian vision of what a connected, equitable, easy-to-navigate transportation system could be, focusing on new technologies for managing vehicle traffic, improving transit, and building streetscapes that work for people on foot and on bike. The previous SANDAG plan included some transit and bike improvements, but those investments were all put on the back burner, and highway expansions came first. That’s in part because SANDAG got into a bit of trouble over its last, very inadequate draft plan, which pretended to be forward-looking but, like many regional transportation plans, was mostly a warmed-over rehash of previous plans that prioritize freeways. It is unlike any previous regional plan in San Diego, or in California. San Diego is about to get a good look at its new Regional Transportation Plan when SANDAG staff present the final draft to its board for approval on December 10.