The California Air Resources Board recently concluded in a report to the state legislature on progress in achieving SB 375 goals that development patterns in the state since adoption of the law run counter to achieving its objectives. In this context, and given severe housing affordability problems, policymakers need to understand how and whether localities are developing effective strategies to support affordable TOD. Localities face persistent barriers in doing so including obtaining and balancing funding for transit, active transportation, and affordable housing; designing effective programs to gain public benefits from private development; assembling land parcels; attracting market interest in certain areas; and addressing public concerns about new development. This research project will build upon a recently completed two-year research project that investigated motivations, perceived obstacles, and policy-making patterns of California cities for promoting TOD as well as public transit and active transportation. Specifically, this project will examine more deeply the barriers to TOD that California cities experience, how they overcome them, and what support they need from state and regional agencies to do so. The research team will review public policy documents and conduct interviews with city planners and other stakeholders. In addition, the research team will investigate policy tools shown to be promising based on findings from previous research, including development of Specific Plans, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) streamlining through “tiering” from Specific Plans, density bonus programs that provide for “ministerial” project approvals, and transport-related land use strategies including reducing parking requirements and linking SB 743-required environmental review at the project level with impact fees and transportation demand management ordinances.

Over the past year, academic studies of COVID-19’s impact on the transportation sector have focused on preferences for and perceptions of different travel modes, changes in vehicle mileage, traffic congestion and pollutant emissions, public transportation operations and ridership, and equity considerations, among many others. Overall, some of the impacts of the pandemic are likely to be transitory whereas others might have longer-term consequences. In partnership with several planning agencies, the research team will construct short-range mobility scenarios for Northern California to help inform planning and policy-making processes. The project team will review the available literature on the impacts that the pandemic has had on different cities’ passenger mobility patterns (i.e., non-freight related travel), focusing on studies based on the analysis of both passively-collected data (e.g., location data from personal mobile devices and survey data (and their integration). The research team will use passively-collected data supplied by the Streetlight Data platform from various location-based services, and information from concurrent survey research being conducted by UC Davis researchers, to build a baseline and future multimodal mobility scenarios to explore the extent to which recent changes induced by the pandemic (e.g., increased telecommuting, remote shopping, mode shifts from public transit to cars, changes in vehicle ownership, changes in time of day of trips) might affect multimodal passenger travel (e.g., changes in vehicle mileage, trip patterns, transit ridership, and bicycling) in different geographic locations, at different times of day, and by multiple modes. Finally, the project team will draw insights and policy recommendations to help inform agencies’ investment and policy decisions.