In This Issue
Spring Workshops Roundup
Scenarios
OneBayArea Grant Program
Agencies Unveil Travel Time and Housing Prices Mapping Tooll
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Welcome!

 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of our new Plan Bay Area e-newsletter. As we work toward our goal of developing and finalizing this long-range transportation/land-use plan, we will use the newsletter as a way to keep you informed about the process, policy decisions, upcoming events and more. We hope it will be a fun, engaging way for you to keep up with this complex endeavor, which is so critical to ensuring a prosperous and sustainable future for current and future generations. If you like this newsletter, please forward it to your friends and encourage them to subscribe. 

Spring Workshops Roundup  

 

In a June email alert, we updated you on the results of the public workshops and community-based outreach we held in all nine counties to hear from Bay Area residents about how they think our region should grow. A key message was that most workshop participants supported efforts to house more of the expected population growth within the Bay Area, rather than promote policies that will encourage longer commutes from homes outside the Bay Area. Of course, people had different opinions on how this could be done, and dissenting views were also expressed.

   

All told, nearly 800 participants attended the spring workshops. An additional 1,600 people completed surveys as part of our outreach partnerships with 14 community-based organizations. For the complete tally of spring workshops results, including the summary and presentation made before the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) Planning Committee and Association of Bay Area Governments' (ABAG) Administrative Committee on June 10, you can visit the workshops results page on the OneBayArea.org website.

 

Oh, and by the way, please stay tuned for future announcements about the next round of workshops, which will likely commence in the next few months.

Scenarios

 

If you were a fly on the wall at MTC's and ABAG's headquarters this summer, you'd be hearing a lot of talk about "scenarios." Or maybe you've been to one of our recent agency meetings where planners have been briefing commissioners on the five scenarios they're analyzing. What in the world, you might ask, is a "scenario?"

 

A scenario is simply a planning term for a possible land-use/transportation future that the agencies will analyze and compare amongst other possible futures. The intent is to determine whether distributing housing and job centers and operating and building roads and transit in different configurations will meet our Plan Bay Area performance targets. Two of the 10 targets are required by law: reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks by 15 percent by 2035, and housing 100 percent of the region's projected 25-year growth by income level without displacing current low-income residents.

 

This summer MTC and ABAG directed staff to work on five scenarios for detailed analysis. The first two are identified as "unconstrained," meaning that they assume a strong economy with available resources for meeting housing targets required by state and federal law.

 

  1. Initial Vision Scenario (unconstrained) - Completed in March 2011 as a starting point for Plan Bay Area. It assumes that there are sufficient resources to meet one of two performance targets required by California Senate Bill 375 (SB 375) - housing 100 percent of the region's projected 25-year growth by income level without displacing current local-income residents.
  2. Core Concentration (unconstrained) - Modifies the Initial Vision Scenario by concentrating development in the inner Bay Area to meet the other performance target required by SB 375 - reducing per-capita carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light-duty trucks by 15 percent.
  3. Focused Growth (constrained) - Maximizes the potential of Priority Development Areas (PDAs) to accommodate household and job growth across the region with an emphasis on density along several transit corridors in the Inner Bay Area.
  4. Core Concentration (constrained) - Builds upon the pattern of growth outlined in the Focused Growth scenario, but shifts additional growth toward the regional and city centers in the inner Bay Area, to take advantage of the core transit network. This would result in a denser, more compact development pattern than the Focused Growth scenario.
  5. Outer Bay Growth (constrained) - Also builds upon the Focused Growth scenario, but incorporates a regional employment analysis to address higher levels of growth in PDAs in the outer Bay Area than those considered in the Focused Growth and Core Concentration scenarios. Most growth would still occur in the inner Bay Area, but additional jobs and housing would be clustered in key transit-served locations to promote economic development and greater access to services in the outer locations.

 

For a more comprehensive review of the scenarios, click here.

MTC Considering New OneBayArea Grant Proposal  

 

A proposal to establish the OneBayArea Grant program was approved for release to the public by the MTC Planning Committee and ABAG Administrative Committee at their joint meeting on July 8, 2011. The new grant process aims to better integrate the region's federal transportation program with land-use and housing policies by providing incentives for the production of housing with supportive transportation investments.

 

Feedback from stakeholders and technical working groups is being sought over the next several months. More information, including the preliminary timeline for development and approval of the OneBayArea Grant, is available online.

Agencies Unveil Travel Time and Housing Prices Mapping Tool

If you're in the market to buy a home in the Bay Area, wouldn't it be nice to know how long it would take to commute from neighborhoods in your price range to your work place? Well, now you can, thanks to a new mapping tool on OneBayArea.org.

 

The interactive map shows you approximately how far you can get from any address within the nine-county region by car, public transit, bike, or on foot, at different times of the day. You can customize your view by the travel time between areas, and the median price of homes in each area.

 

The multitude of calculations that happen behind the scenes to make the tool work are based on ABAG's housing and land-use model and MTC's transportation model. The models are complex, but they're basically designed to help planners and decision makers input data to ask "what-if" questions and receive output that will allow them to evaluate the Plan Bay Area scenarios and how they are projected to perform against the 10 Plan Bay Area performance targets adopted by MTC and ABAG.

Plan Bay Area is a joint effort led by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) in partnership with the Bay Area's other two regional government agencies, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). For more information visit our website.