In bustling city cores, people driving alone in their personal cars can be the worst thing for local merchants. Many of them simply didn’t know it before, but they’re slowly beginning to figure it out.
Three new stories out of California show that the state is taking the concept of transportation demand seriously.
Take this example: In downtown San Francisco, the drive-alone rate has dropped from 14 percent in 1989, when the non-profit Transportation Management Association was founded, to 8.5 percent in 2017. That’s both an impressive drop and impressive overall that so many people appear to understand the countless societal ills their personal actions can bring.
However, traffic congestion just keeps getting worse, with 81 percent polled in the city saying it has reached a “crisis level.” So it’s a practically Herculean uphill battle, but the San Francisco Business Times notes some of the strategies the TMA and others are trying:
The city passed a new Transportation Demand Management Plan encourages the creation of bike parking, car-share parking and delivery services and a boost in high-occupancy vehicles and parking management. It’s up to employers to provide commuter benefits, shuttles or incentives, and the challenge is growing in size without adding parking, said Carli Paine, who works on these issues for SFMTA.
Down in Los Angeles, Culver City has a new Metro station and leaders are hoping to take this opportunity to make sure it creates a much wider sphere of vibrancy than simply one immediately adjacent to the station. UrbanizeLA notes that Culver City:
… currently sees approximately 70,000 daily car trips into the city, mainly for employment – roughly twice its residential population. These commuters traverse a road network an “incomprehensible web,” with east-west circulation pinched into the center of town before spreading back out. Culver City may also consider a city-wide transportation demand management program, as has already been implemented in Santa Monica. This strategy involves coordinating with various employers in the city to manage automobile trips, with consideration to peak travel times.
Throughout the state of California, these TDM plans are simply a growing reaction to what the people truly want, according to a new survey commissioned by the California Bicycle Coalition. Streetsblog California sums up the findings:
The results seem to defy the notion that Californians want to drive everywhere. “Transportation officials are decades behind acknowledging this shifting demand,”wrote Jeanie Ward-Waller, the CBC’s policy director.
Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed say they believe that state and local transportation departments need to change the way they build streets and roads to make it safe for all users, including people who walk, bicycle, take transit, and drive. Voters want better bicycling conditions: two-thirds agree that their city government should do more to encourage bicycling.
Photo of San Francisco street by Richard Masoner/Flickr.