California Today: Can Californians Drive Less?

As long as the Koch's and others spend hundreds of millions to keep oil consumption high, probably not much.

A great many Californians want to live in single family homes, it is a nationwide culture unlike Europe where people live mostly in cities and even smaller cities like in Spain have high density residences. They are served by high speed rail. Madrid has an underground transit as big as any . Somehow the country managed to build it under an ancient city. Here in the Sacramento region, the developers are building on 2000 acre tracts, Placer county is the same. People are commuting to Oakland/SF on I 80 which looks like the I405 at rush hour, 70 miles of bumper to bumper. The Capital Corridor train is full at those hours. HSR would get you there in 30 minutes instead of 1.25 hours. People spend 2.5 hours or more a day commuting. Cal 99, and I5 are heavy traffic most of the day. HSR would cut traffic and emissions, but no one wants to spend the money. HSR would take 3 hours. Air only takes 45 minutes air time, but getting to the airport, being there a minimum of one hour early, nullifies any time savings. Worse yet the HSR commission was undermined by a couple of political appointees who promoted a route that would be good for the developers in Los Banos, instead of where the major bay area traffic is from, Livermore, Stockton, Modesto. LA had rail at one time to San Bernardino, and cities on the coast into Orange county. Southwest Airlines has been one of the biggest opponents to the Sac, SF, LA HSR, and have enlisted their GOP friends in the legislature.

We keep seeing more development and building in L.A., and it's always blue skies in the projections of the politicians and developers. The reality, of course, is that there is no improved transportation infrastructure to accompany all of the new units, which means more bodies in more cars. I had a meeting in downtown L.A. last week, so I decided to get some exercise and take the Metro train home. Our Union Station is one of America's grand railway buildings, but the men's room was disgusting and the train reeked of weed. From the buses on Santa Monica Blvd. to my experience last week, public transportation in L.A. is frequently barftastic. This is our great hope? Oh, brother.

Don't know what a dire housing shortage has to do with the poverty rate.... The poverty rate has to do with employment and wages. California has been driving manufacturing from the state for years with draconian regulations on business of every description. The housing shortage has to do with the USA being the goto place for money launderers from around the globe driving up home prices by paying cash for homes, apartments, and commercial properties. The fact we have millions of people in California who work without papers also leads to employers paying poverty wages and forcing US citizens out of the low end labor market

There is only one solution to the pollution problem in the Bay Area, and it is incredibly easy to implement: Mandate that all employees in computer-based jobs telecommute two days a week. This will dramatically reduce driving trips and road congestion, decrease pollution, and increase quality of life for Bay Area residents. A second solution is to build brand-new cities (like San Francisco) in other parts of the state that are undeveloped. I don't mean just put up some housing developments and strip malls--I mean, build full, brand-new cities where people can live and the cost of real estate is low, so companies will happily set up shop in these areas.

It is simple. If I drive to work, it takes me 20 to 30 minutes. I have taken public transportation a few times, and it takes me 90-100 minutes. California cities and suburbs, for better or worse, was not laid out like cities back east. The proposed bill will not change that, and commuters will not give up 10-15 hours a week more in traffic for the benefits of public transportation.

This is the lie that every one of us who lives along a rail corridor in CA hears at every City Council meeting or city planning meeting: adding thousands of new housing units will reduce the number of car trips and traffic. All the housing units that have been added over the last half dozen years have done nothing but dramatically increase the amount of traffic and pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has long been said that Caltrain goes from where no one lives to where no one works—And once you get there, there’s no bus to take you the rest of the way. Until there is a public transportation infrastructure to match the unbridled new housing developments, San Francisco Bay area will soon look like Los Angeles on the freeways.

"If you’re in Montclair and reading this while walking, you’re breaking the law. It is now illegal to cross streets while on a phone, texting or listening to music with buds in both ears." Typical Leftist lawmaking: find a popular issue, and instead of acknowledging that we're not all equal when it comes to multitasking and making distracted crossers responsible for their actions (and their fate!), make the risk-prone activity illegal for everyone, and create a new source of revenue with specialized fines. Equality in action, I guess. Legislating based on the (dis)abilities of the stupidest or the least mentally capable in society assumes that we're all as stupid and helpless as the stupidest and most helpless; and tends to push us all in that direction. Legislators think virtue signaling (we try to save lives) and increased revenue sources; in fact they're participating in the leveling down of society. Once again, if you're looking to achieve equality, easier to pull everybody down than to try to raise standards for everyone.

California has become a very sad place. Glad I left.

Pack people into high density communities, by moving people from the single family dwellings spread across thousands of square miles into high rise monoliths with views of distant landscapes between the buildings. The kind of planning leaves planners more time for golf, tennis, et al because they are simple and stupid solutions. High density living is exactly what people in California suffer auto commuting to escape. But if you want to eliminate automobiles and replace them with mass transit, it’s the simplest way to do it. It may be that circumstances make that kind of degradation to people’s quality of life necessary but it would not be an improvement. The high density cities like Manhattan have some advantages but generally people prefer to have a lot more space and private space over the high density living conditions.

If you look closely at that picture, there's a string of cars lined up bumper to bumper on the Bay Bridge. The car situation should clear up just as soon as the bridge toll plazas are inundated by the rising levels of San Francisco Bay. Not a one of them sits more than a foot or two about the mean high tide.

It's an unfortunate reality that living things reproduce and multiply, especially in the case of human beings. What's the point of trying to find perfect balances when one side of the scale keeps getting dumped on? Today it's eight story buildings, tomorrow it's sixteen stories . . . Then there's no more room on the trains. The best thing probably is to stop trying to compensate and let nature take its course, it's completely impartial.

This entire discussion is rendered moot unless Californians also take into account their population-growth explosion: 6.1% increase just since 2010. Expect another 6% increase in the next eight years. High-density housing, mass transit, etc.--all worthwhile, but it's just putting lipstick on the pig of overpopulation.

San Diego is expanding trolley service North along the I-5 corridor and adding several new park and ride areas along it, which is smart planning. I personally use the commuter train, trolley and bicycle to get to work, and I love it.

The real problem in California is Proposition 13. There are simply too many tax squatters who stay in their homes near major work centers because of the tax advantage, and not because of their proximity to work. This reduces the supply of affordable home, raises prices, and forces people to live much farther from their workplace than otherwise, which in turn causes extreme commutes, traffic congestion, and unnecessary carbon emissions. If Californians want to solve these problems they’ll have to get rid of Prop 13.

California isn’t. By that I mean the state is large enough and diverse enough, that it defies generalization. Poverty exist mainly in the rural agriculture economies of the Central Valley. Agriculture inherently is full of jobs that pay minimum, if not below, wages. So when you talk of growing poverty it’s those counties mainly. The central coast and south coast are affluent...very. The idea to get people out of their cars applies mainly to these counties. I worked on high density housing economic impact for Mountain View, right at a train station.. it’s very valuable property. So two things don’t generalize about California, and if you build it they will come. Ps no housing shortage in the Central Valley or north coast

As a native Southern Californian, I’ve seen this part of our state grow from semi-rural to increasingly urban. While this shift is apparent to anyone who drives our freeways, the *cultural* shift is trailing far behind. My observation is that most of us still want to live and consume as we did “back in the day” — big cars, big lawns, and big parking lots. As much as it pains me to say it, those days are gone. To thrive, we need to transition to thinking of ourselves as city-dwellers rather than suburbanites.

The perception private transportation is not “clean” is based entirely on two assumptions: 1) Californians are limited to fossil fuel-powered cars, and 2) Californians are limited to fossil fuel-generated electricity. With 400,000+ electric vehicles on California roads, we would be well on our way to making private transportation emission-free if we were building more nuclear power plants instead of shutting them down.

An idea that is long overdue. I would propose that the California cities take it one step further. Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It also has a world class mass transit system. Much of the financing for the construction of new mass transit lines comes from the lease of the land (government owns the land) where developers build mass transit stops. This model works. In California, since the land around the station stops are likely privately owned, a tweak to the model would be required. The city could impose a tax on developers for mass transit maintenance and upgrades. Then it becomes a "win win". Developers get to build more units at premium prices, City gets more revenue and the citizens get more residential units which eventually translate to lower housing costs in areas away from the transit stops.

The reporters conveniently overlook the fact that this bill would upzone nearly the entirety of San Francisco without securing a commensurate investment in transit. Public transit is already a dysfunctional mess for many of us, resulting in tens of thousands of Uber/Lyfts clogging our streets on a daily basis. Note that San Francisco has already been shouldering a disproportionate burden in providing new housing for a growing population, acting as a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. SB827 will exacerbate the imbalance by discouraging future investment in public transit in areas that currently lack quality transit.

I'd say the answer to whether Californians can give up their cars is, depends. I live in Santa Monica and because I do, I have transportation choices many Californians don't have. I can take three different bus lines- Culver City, Santa Monica and LA Metro. I can take the Expo train to connect with most of California, as well as locally. And there's Lyft and Uber. The dramatic geography and distance between many destinations make car use essential for most people. Because of my own personal situation I gave up my car in 2010 and found true freedom. Living in California is not like living in Manhattan, you know, where things are blocks apart, generally, and you live in a well laid-out grid.

The bay area here is cited as an example, but can Bay Area Rapid Transit even handle an increased capacity? The trains are often already full at the last few stops in Oakland heading into San Francisco. Increasing public transit use is a laudable goal, but not higher density housing around transit stops won't encourage people to take public transit if they can't rely on the transit to be meaningfully available because it is already full when they need to get on the train. The legislature should incentivize telecommuting if it wants to cut down on the number of people on the roads and free up more space on public transit for people in jobs where telecommuting is not feasible. I've thought the legislature should start with public employees on this to set an example and then offer the private sector incentives to do the same. Encourage telecommuting more than one day a week, especially on days when the roads and public transit are the most heavily burdened.