Abstract

What will California’s transportation and land use future look like? Will Californians gain more mobility and housing options that support the state’s economic, social, and climate goals? Or will the car continue to shape what cities look like and how people get around in them? These questions are important because how Californians live and move in the future will be shaped by investments and policies made today.The California 100 Initiative is exploring California’s future across many realms of public life, and they tasked the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies with mapping plausible futures of California’s transportation and land use systems. As part of this work, we developed a modified Delphi method and conducted a series of surveys and panel discussions with 18 experts. We presented panelists with four possible scenarios — two distinct land use futures intersecting with two transportation futures (see Figure 1). Their consensus opinion was that the most desirable scenario (“Easy to Get Around without a Car”) is also the least likely to materialize, due to faults in the political planning process. Despite promising state policies to increase transportation choices, problematic local land use politics and patterns appear likely to yield a future scenario (“Lots of Travel Choices, but Most Will Drive”) that continues car dependence and chronic congestion, absent a significant rebuilding of government trust and capacity