ABAG/MTC

Drawing of a proposed string of high-density, bike- friendly, mass transit-oriented developments along a stretch of El Camino Real between Daly City and San Jose.

A sweeping “green” vision for the future of transit and housing in the Bay Area inched a step closer to realization in Oakland last night.

Officials from the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission voted on portions of Plan Bay Area, a 25-year strategy for land use and transportation for the Bay Area’s growing population, which is expected to surpass nine million by 2040.

The plan also proposes ways to meet the state’s greenhouse gas reduction target of 15% by 2035 outlined under SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act – namely by encouraging high-density housing near transit hubs and along corridors.

“What this strategy is about is trying to be more efficient in our use of land,” MTC executive director Steve Heminger told KQED’s Cy Musiker before the meeting, “and also trying to be more cost-effective with our transit investment. As repeated studies have shown, if people live near BART they’re much more likely to use it than if they have to drive a long distance to get there.”

But the meeting was not without its share of contention. Some in attendance viewed the plan as an example of bureaucratic overreach. One resident called the document a “utopian masterplan.” Another said it was “quasi-dictatorial” and “collectivist.”

Others in attendance, such as Carl Anthony, co-founder of Oakland-based Breakthrough Communities, said the plan does not go far enough to address long-standing historical inequality in housing and access to transit across the region. His group was part of a larger coalition of social and environmental justice groups in attendance called Six Wins for Social Equity.

“Many people are very disappointed,” Anthony told me. A high-profile figure in the Bay Area environmental justice movement, Anthony said that among other things, the current version of the plan does not take public health into consideration, nor does it ensure that proposed investments in high-density housing won’t displace poor communities near transit hubs.

“We want to make sure the public participation we’ve invested for the last 18 months means something,” he said.

A 2011 analysis of the goals of SB 375 by the Public Policy Institute of California suggested that policy should make driving more expensive to get people out of their cars, and that it’s just as important to co-locate transit with jobs, as with housing.

A final draft of the Bay Area plan is expected later this summer, said Napa County commissioner and president of the Association of Bay Area Governments, Mark Luce. From there, he said, completion of the Environmental Impact Report is expected to take about six months.

Craig Miller/KQED

Critics say that San Diego's regional transportation plan focuses too much on freeways.

The spotlight is on San Diego to lead the way on regional transportation planning that reduces greenhouse gas emissions. But critics say that the regional planning agency’s proposal is anything but a model for sustainable planning.

San Diego’s regional planning agency, SANDAG, is the first to develop a plan since California passed a law requiring that regions try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through land use and transit planning. The law, SB 375, went into effect in 2010, and falls under the Air Resources Board’s Sustainable Communities program. The ARB approved SANDAG’s plan when it was submitted in November of 2011, saying it would meet short-term greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2020-2035.

Critics of the SANDAG plan, including the Cleveland National Forest Foundation, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, say that the plan focuses too much on expanding freeways that extend into the far-reaches of the county and not enough on improving public transportation, bicycle infrastructure and pedestrian walkways in the more urban areas. Today, the State Attorney General’s office put out a statement agreeing that:

“…the plan does not adequately address air pollution and climate concerns and prioritizes expanding freeways while delaying public transit projects.”

The statement also cited the region’s poor air quality and the need to invest in a healthy future for its citizens.

The SANDAG plan has been carefully watched by planners and governments across California because it’s the first plan adopted under SB 375. “This is the first SCS [Sustainable Community Strategy], it’s a 40-year plan and it’s flawed,” claims Rachel Hooper, a managing partner at Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, the firm representing the environmental groups. “It should not serve as a precedent for other transportation agencies as they adopt their SCSs in the future.”

For its legal clout, the suit draws on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) which requires an environmental review of government projects, including impacts from air pollution and global warming. According to the Attorney General’s statement, the crux of the legal argument is that SANDAG cut corners with its Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and “did not adequately analyze the public health impacts of the increased air pollution.”

“What we have is a plan that is rooted in the past, in transportation planning that we saw in the 1960s,” said Hooper, who claims SANDAG ignored suggestions for ways in which the plan could be improved to comply with state law. She said that the Attorney General’s decision to join the suit underscores the importance of getting this first plan right, so that it will be a sound model for other transportation agencies to follow.

A representative from SANDAG told Forbes that his agency worked hard to come up with a good plan that he believes is in compliance with CEQA.

Ana Tintocalis

West Village features sleek lines and cutting-edge energy-efficient design concepts.

The typical American master-planned community sill features cookie-cutter houses, cement driveways and green lawns. But UC Davis is putting a new spin on the concept with the unveiling of West Village, a $300 million student and faculty housing community designed to be “zero-net energy.” Developers say it’s the nation’s largest to employ this kind of green construction.

And although “zero-net” [PDF] may sound complicated, the concept is actually quite simple: All the buildings in West Village will take in as much energy as they put back into the power grid — not on a daily basis but at the end of each year, the total consumption of the entire housing development should “net out” to zero.

The modern, colorful development taps into a four-megawatt photovoltaic system driven by 15,000 solar panels. The panels are mounted on rooftops, parking canopies, sides of buildings and even the village clock tower.

“It’s a sizable amount of solar,” Bob Segar, UC Davis director of campus planning told me on a recent walking tour (slide show below). Roughly 3,000 students and faculty in 662 apartments and 332 single-family homes will call the West Village home once it’s fully completed in 2013. For now, 800 students and faculty live in two residential halls.

But the development’s energy efficiency goes beyond solar panels. Segar said the entire complex was strategically built on 200 acres of university land to reduce residents’ need to tap into solar in the first place.

For example, mixed-use residential halls featuring retail space are situated along streets that run east-west in order to maximize the “solar gain” or breeze on any given day. All the buildings are equipped with energy efficient appliances, as well as customized window awnings with moveable wooden slats that allow residents to control the amount of sun that enters their rooms. And a smart phone app lets residents turn off lamps and plugged-in electronics remotely.

“First you reduce the energy demand through the layout of the community and investing in energy efficiency,” said Segar. “And then you produce green power on site.”

Another way West Village plans to produce its own green power is with a waste-to-energy bio-digester – an invention patented by UC Davis engineer that will be in full use next year. It will convert the village’s garbage and waste, also referred to as “feed stock,” into energy.

“The technology will allow us to put all those ‘feed stocks’ into the bio-digester, which will decompose at different rates that will then make methane and hydrogen to be burned for electricity,” Segar said.

The bio-digester underscores the influence UC Davis researchers have had on the overall development of West Village. Campus planners relied heavily on faculty from several engineering departments to make this development among the most energy-efficient in the nation.

The project is a collaboration between UC Davis and West Village Community Partnership, LLC (a joint venture of Carmel Partners of San Francisco, and Urban Villages of Denver. The developer has a 65-year lease with the university.

Other West Village features include:

• Sacramento City College’s Davis Center at UC Davis West Village, the first community college center to be housed on a University of California campus. The center will open to an estimated 2,400 students in January.
• UC Davis’ first “uHub,” a prototype for future campus innovation hubs and an incubator for innovation in sustainability. Located in commercial space surrounding the village square, the uHub will be home to the campus’s energy research centers, serving as a living laboratory and fostering interactions with the private sector in the area of energy research.
• A recreation center featuring a game room, gym, pool and study areas.
• Energy-efficient exterior lighting fixtures, indoor occupancy sensors and “daylighting” techniques, to help the community use about 60% less energy than if standard lighting had been used.

Craig Miller

You’d think that kicking thousands of solo drivers out of the carpool lane would make traffic move faster…at least for carpoolers. But you’d be wrong, according to researchers from UC Berkeley.

In 2005, California granted drivers of hybrid vehicles access to carpool lanes (regardless of the number of riders) as a way to spur adoption of low-emissions vehicles. But that program ended this summer, after critics argued that the 85,000 cars that had qualified for special lane access were too many, and all the new hybrid drivers were clogging things up for carpoolers.

But instead of returning the roads to smooth sailing for carpools, the change actually slowed traffic for everybody, reducing speed as much as 15% in the “high-occupancy vehicle” (HOV) lanes themselves, according to the Berkeley study.

The researchers found that the speed in the carpool lane is affected by the speed of cars in the adjacent lane. So, if the regular lanes are more congested and creeping along at a snail’s pace, carpoolers are less likely to be blasting past them at 70 miles per hour.

Their conclusion?  Let more cars into the carpool lane, not fewer, and everyone will move faster.

Hear Krissy Clark’s companion radio feature from The California Report.

Craig Miller

Afternoon rush hour with a mostly-empty HOV lane

I’m a Bay Area native who has about evenly divided my adult life between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So, I have a schizophrenic relationship to driving. Which is to say, I have the same kind of relationship that California as a whole has to driving.

Here’s what I’ve learned during my intra-state sojourns: my transportation habits have very little to do with how environmentally conscious I am as a person, and have a lot to do with parking spots.

When I lived in San Francisco, my daily life was 90% car-free. I owned a car but aside from moving it on street sweeping days (or trying to remember to), I barely thought about the thing unless I was leaving for a weekend trip. My bike, my feet, the bus, BART and the transbay ferries were my chariots. Some of it had to do with the city’s human-scaled streets and efficient public transit. But mostly, it was just too damn time-consuming–or expensive–to find a parking spot most of the places I wanted to go. I couldn’t be bothered to drive.

When I moved to L.A., nothing about my core being changed (despite what my Bay Area friends feared), but now my daily life is about 90% car-full. I drive to work alone, where I park in the free parking space my company provides me. (Even though my partner works in the same office as I do, I confess we do not carpool.) I drive to the grocery store, where I park in the free parking space the shopping center provides me. I drive to my exercise class and, yes, park in the free lot out back. I drive pretty much everyplace except one: the airport. Parking costs too much at LAX, so I take the city shuttle.

My Jekyll & Hyde habits come as no surprise to UCLA Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking.  Ample, free parking works like a “fertility drug for cars,” he argues. “Driving becomes the natural way to get anywhere” in a place like Los Angeles. When he looks at a traffic jam in L.A., “I think, how many of these people are driving to a free parking space?” Count me as one of them.

It turns out my different lives in L.A. and San Francisco, and my different parking options, are no accident. They’re based on different approaches the places take to parking. According to a RAND study from 2007, in San Francisco there is “a deliberate effort by planners to reduce private vehicle use” which “limits the number of parking spaces that may be included in a new development.” In contrast, across most of L.A., developers are required to provide a certain number of parking spaces, “ensuring that parking will remain cheap and abundant and reinforcing auto-dependency.”

How cities deal with parking is one of those invisible choices that change the way we live. For those of us who use cars a lot, which now includes me, our habits are often described in psychological terms. Love affair. Dependence. Addiction. But that gives cars too much power, argues Harvey Molotch, a professor at NYU (who splits his time in Santa Barbara, so he, too gets a glimpse of life on both sides of the transportation spectrum). We’re not addicted to cars he says, “We’re addicted to going home.” It’s about the inertia of life, he says. Filling a tank with gas is interconnected “with all the other things we do in our lives… going to work, going to school, and all the rest.” And how much time, or money, it will cost to park influences those micro-decisions we make.

A few weeks ago, my partner’s car broke down, and we’ve been sharing mine ever since. We keep different work schedules, so sometimes one of us spends the day carless, and I’ve discovered the bus is actually a pretty convenient way to work (Despite LA’s reputation, the city has a pretty extensive public bus system). And though there are no bike lanes, it’s only 20-minute ride on my bicycle. These are discoveries I didn’t need to make until now–with all the free parking, I never needed to.

See and hear our entire series, Miles to Go, on the many challenges to reducing our transportation footprint.

Jefferson Beavers

Reporter Sasha Khokha hits the road.

By Jefferson Beavers

When we decided to take a look at smart growth in the Central Valley, we wanted to see if the goal of compact, walkable living was a realistic option for the largely suburban, car-loving communities of central California.

So, Central Valley bureau chief Sasha Khokha decided to get out of her car, put on her walking shoes, and burn some shoe leather…almost literally.

As the story’s field producer, I first researched dozens of developments in Fresno and Madera counties. I looked for good examples of high-density housing and sustainable neighborhoods as defined by the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint, the area’s land use and transportation planning process.

Finding examples of smart growth communities here proved to be harder than we thought. A 2010 study [PDF] out of UC Merced detailed the significant challenges of implementing smart growth practices in the Central Valley. People here love their cars. They love their detached, single-family suburban homes. They are immersed in a commuter culture, and old habits are hard to break.

I found the biggest and most successful smart growth project near Fresno to be Harlan Ranch, with its “high-density” housing and eco-friendly features. The development features a school, lots of shared playgrounds and green spaces, miles of walking paths, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a communal clubhouse with activities for residents. Within its walls, Harlan Ranch is an award-winning oasis of good living and sustainability.

But here’s the catch: Residents of Harlan Ranch must drive to get there. It’s more than three miles to the nearest bus stop. It’s nearly five miles to the nearest supermarket. And from its spot on the suburban fringe, it sits nearly fifteen miles away from downtown Fresno.

This is when Sasha laced up her cross-trainers and hit the road.
View Central Valley Smart Growth in a larger map

Using Google Maps and some advance scouting in the field, I plotted out the routes from the main entrance of Harlan Ranch to the nearest amenities. While the Harlan Ranch master plan does include a shopping complex at some point in the future, residents living there now must rely on their vehicles to get to basic services such as a grocery store, pharmacy, or bus stop.

For our experiment, we imagined that Sasha lived at Harlan Ranch and didn’t have access to a car.

I dropped her off at the Harlan Ranch entrance with a map, a bottle of water, and a small bag of radio gear. We arranged to meet three times along the 4.8-mile route to the supermarket, when I would refill her water bottle and check to see if she was OK. While Sasha walked, I photographed the area for the story’s photo gallery.

Not long after walking out of the development, Sasha faced long stretches of rural roads without sidewalks. She made her way along weed-strewn fields. She passed farmhouses and orchards. She said hello to a grazing horse more than once.

Sasha began in the mid-morning and she quickly faced the Central Valley heat, which rose to above 90 degrees by the walk’s end shortly before noon. Fresno’s notoriously poor air quality was technically “moderate” on this day, but a few days later would have been in the “unhealthy for sensitive groups” range.

Sweaty and tired, Sasha made it to the supermarket in about two hours. (We didn’t count our three check-ins toward the total walking time.) She eagerly gulped a Gatorade as we debriefed about the trip, luxuriating in the car’s full-blast air conditioning.

Her conclusion: Even under the best of circumstances, it would be nearly impossible to walk from Harlan Ranch to the nearest grocery store. Sasha had only walked one way – without lugging bags of groceries all the way back – and she was beat. If she lived in Harlan Ranch, she’d still have to rely on a vehicle, a contradiction of smart growth’s ultimate promise.

Jefferson Beavers is a freelance journalist based in Fresno. Listen to the companion radio feature with this post, reported by Central Valley bureau chief Sasha Khokha, airing Friday on The California Report.

All radio and web features from our series, “Miles to Go: Building a More Sustainable California,” are posted on our special coverage page.

Los Angeles traffic (Photo: Gabriel Bouys)

Most car insurance is priced in the United States kind of like an all-you-can-eat salad bar, says Justin Horner, a transportation analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. You pay a set amount once or twice a year, and then you can eat one little salad, or you can totally chow down, making several trips back for more food, piles of cole slaw and jello threatening to topple from your over-filled plate. Either way, it makes no difference to your wallet.

And, of course, regardless of hunger level, it can be kind of tempting to go back again and again, just because you can.

On the other hand, if you get your salad at one of those pay-by-weight places, you’re likely to be a lot more discriminating about what’s on your plate. That’s how we buy gas, says Horner.

And, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank, that’s also how we should be buying our car insurance.

“Just as an all-you-can-eat restaurant encourages more eating, all-you-can-drive insurance pricing encourages more driving,” states the report. “That means more accidents, congestion, carbon emissions, local pollution, and dependence on oil.”

According to the study, if car insurance premiums were priced per mile driven, driving would decrease nationwide by eight percent (it would take a $1 per gallon increase in the price of gas to achieve this kind of reduction). This would:

- Decrease carbon emissions by 2%

- Decrease oil consumption by 4%

- Save $50-$60 billion in reduced “driving-related harms”

In California alone, the study finds that an eight percent decrease in driving would account for between seven-and-nine percent of the total CO2 reductions needed to meet the states mandated levels for 2020.

In another study, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if all Massachusetts drivers switched to car insurance priced by the mile, fuel consumption would go down 9.5%, cutting two million tons of CO2 emissions.

You can listen online to Gretchen’s companion radio report to this post at The California Report. You can see and hear our entire series, Miles to Go, at our special coverage page.

By Alex Schmidt

It really is true that decent public transport to Angelenos is like the Holy Grail to Indiana Jones — especially on L.A.’s Westside. Looking a bit more deeply into transportation in L.A. makes you check certain assumptions that you may have grown up with. There are, after all, over one million people who ride public transport here every day, and most of that takes place on buses.

L.A. Metro bus stop headed downtown..for now. (Photo: Alex Schmidt)

Now, and when bus cuts were previously threatened L.A. (notably when the Red and Gold lines opened on the east side of town), Metro has been accused of racism. In fact, in 1996, the NAACP and Bus Rider’s Union sued the MTA in federal court and won a consent decree to expand the bus system every year for 10 years. Now that the consent decree has ended, bus lines have been cut regularly. And once again, the Bus Rider’s Union has filed a complaint with the FTA’s Office of Civil Rights. Such investigations take many months, and sometimes as long as a year, so it’s not likely that it will halt the cuts this time around.

While playing the race card may sometimes be effective at halting bus cuts, such a tactic may drown out more detailed and pragmatic conversations that need to be had about the efficacy of Metro’s plans. Every planning expert I talked to for this story, including Allison Yoh, the very expert Metro pointed me to, said that rail was not an ideal public transit solution for L.A. in most places — having little to do with race, and mostly to do with ridership patterns, density, and budgets. Knowledgeable folks have been yelling about this for years, and yet even the existence of this argument comes as a surprise to many.

I myself was car-free in L.A. for seven months in 2009. I commuted from my home in Westwood to my job in Santa Monica along Wilshire Boulevard, on the 720 bus — and it was great — on time, regular, clean, fast. But once you go back to the car, that world seems far, far away. I forgot that a system of buses can work, and got caught up in the magic bullet myth of rail, until I reported this story. A few weeks from now, I may be cheering for rail as a cure-all once again. Why so many Angelenos return to this position may have to do with ineffective messaging coming from the leaders in this fight — leaders on both sides of the debate.

Alex Schmidt is a freelance reporter based in Southern California. Her companion radio feature to this post, airing Friday on KQED’s The California Report, was produced in collaboration with Spot.Us, a non-profit organization that supports independent journalists.

All radio and web features from our series, “Miles to Go: Building a More Sustainable California,” are posted on our special coverage page.

(Photo: Craig Miller)

A new study from the Brookings Institution finds that compared with the rest of the nation, the Bay Area offers pretty good public transportation options.

Among 100 major metropolitan areas, San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont ranks 16th, and San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale ranks second.  Areas were ranked according to how accessible transit is to riders, how long it takes to get to work on transit and how often the systems run during rush hours.

So…if Bay Area transit is so good, why doesn’t anybody seem to take it?

Just one out of ten people in the Bay Area commute by public transportation, according to John Goodwin of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. He says that number hasn’t changed much over the years, despite huge investments in the system. And the Bay Area isn’t alone in that. A recent study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that between 1990 and 2008, the share of commuters taking transit increased by less than one percentage point, from 5% to 5.5%, despite the construction of 217 new rail stations, and the fact that more than a third of California’s transportation spending since the early 1980s has gone to public transit.

“The California public likes the idea of public transit in the sense that they highlight it as a place where we should be investing a lot of our dollars,” said the PPIC’s Ellen Hanak. “But there is a gap between what people say, and how they actually sort of vote with their feet. It’s almost like people would like their neighbors to take transit so they could have fewer cars on the road.”

That sentiment fits what I found in my reporting for a companion radio segment on The California Report.  Every person I talked to liked the idea of public transit, but most of them don’t take it very often. Everyone seemed to have a slightly different reason, but the broad themes were the same: time, convenience, cost, reliability, and, to a lesser extent, cleanliness/quality of experience.

Those issues aren’t likely to get much better in the near term, with Bay Area public transit facing a shortfall of $1 billion a year for the next 25 years, according to Goodwin.

“The situation facing Bay Area transit right now is quite bleak,” said Goodwin, adding that over the last two-to-three years, “virtually every transit agency” has either cut service, raised fares, or both.

He says that since 1997, while the cost of operating Bay Area transit has increased 52%, service has increased only 16%, and ridership has increased just seven percent, which, he admitted, is a “crummy” business model.  Right now MTC is in the middle of a two-year analysis called the Transit Sustainability Project, which is looking at how to make the Bay Area’s public transportation better and more cost-effective.

But the transit itself is just one piece of the puzzle. And it’s a big puzzle.

According to PPIC, transportation makes up 37% of all greenhouse gas emissions in California. Passenger cars and trucks account for almost three quarters of the transportation slice, or 28% of all emissions. Senate Bill 375 was passed in 2009 to address this by prodding regional planning agencies to find ways to link land use and transit in ways that will get people to drive less.  Last year the California Air Resources Board set reductions targets for each region. They vary but most aim for about a seven percent reduction by 2020 and 15% by 2035.

MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments have released an “Initial Vision Scenario” that outlines how the Bay Area might meet these goals.The agencies are currently accepting public comment on the plan, holding public workshops through the end of May.

According to the PPIC study, our best bet for getting Californians out of their cars is to increase high-density development, improve alternatives like bike lanes and carpooling programs, and use pricing strategies to raise the cost of driving alone and parking.

“No single policy on its own is going to work”, said Hanak. “Price signals are the most effective strategy on their own, but even with pricing it’s more effective to combine that policy with better land use and transportation policies.”

For more on the opportunities and the challenges facing California’s efforts to plan for sustainable growth, and to try out your own “vision,” visit our Miles to Go series page.

Tonight the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) kicks off the first of nine “Plan Bay Area” workshops, aimed at gathering public input on plans for sustainable growth in the region. The planning agency is seeking comment on the Initial Vision Scenario, which was released by MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) last month.  This scenario is the first draft of the Bay Area’s Sustainable Communities Strategy, a planning document required under the state law, SB 375, which was passed in 2008 and requires planning regions throughout California to cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars by integrating land-use and transportation planning.

The Bay Area, Sacramento, and San Diego
have some of the most aggressive reductions targets: seven percent per capita by 2020 and 13-16% by 2035 (compared to 2005 levels).  The South Coast (by far the biggest region, including Los Angeles, San Bernadino, Ventura, and other counties) is shooting for an eight percent reduction by 2020, and 13% by 2035.

“The Initial Vision Scenario really does center on accommodating the growth that we expect over the next generation within the existing urban footprint of the Bay Area,” said MTC public information officer John Goodwin. “Ninety-seven percent of all the new households that would be formed in the Bay Area over the next 25 years would be accommodated in already existing urban areas, which is pretty impressive.”

He said the new plan looks at all the expected growth in the region over the next couple decades and accommodates for all the people working in the Bay Area to be able to live in the Bay Area, instead of relying on commuters from other regions such as the Central Valley.

“That’s a big change,” Goodwin said. “Realizing that vision is a big step, and we’re a long ways from it.”

Last fall when the state Air Resources Board issued the regional greenhouse gas reductions targets under SB 375, opponents voiced concerns that they were too aggressive and that they would stifle economic development, trigger increased transportation costs for families, and hurt an already suffering construction industry.

But advocates say the targets won’t stop growth.  In some cases, they’ll just encourage a different kind of growth. Denser communities closer to public transit – rather than sprawling new suburbs – could have a positive effect on the environment, air quality, and public health by reducing the number of miles people drive.

“The beauty of SB 375 is that it’s a performance standard,” said Amanda Eaken, deputy director for Sustainable Communities at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.  “It gives each region all the flexibility they need to choose the policies and programs that are most appropriate for their region.”

Tonight’s public meeting on the Initial Vision Scenario for Plan Bay Area is in Mountain View. Next week’s forums will be in San Francisco and at the San Mateo Public Library.  There is a calendar of the public workshops and their locations on the One Bay Area website.  The final draft of the plan is not expected until 2013.

You can see more coverage of how the Bay Area, and the rest of California, is grappling with the opportunities and challenges of sustainable growth, on our Miles to Go series page.