Is Regional Planning An Oxymoron? SANDAG's Bob Leiter and L.A.'s Bob Scott Opine

Bob, could you share, from the perspective of a SANDAG planner, the value of planning and transit oriented development at the regional level?

BL: At this point, the focus of regional planning is on connecting regional transportation plans with local land use plans and trying to do a better job of coordinating the planning that is going on in cities with some of the other regional issues.

One must develop a regional transportation plan that realistically brings together regional transit and highway development and looks at more multi-modal solutions as a way to work ourselves out of our congestion problems. I also think that cities are now understanding that if they plan growth near regional transit facilities, they can make their regional transportation system work better and also meet some of their local needs for housing and economic development.

Mr. Scott, is what Mr. Leiter is describing as the regional planning objective in San Diego consistent with what you experienced in your decade-long tenure on L.A. City Planning Commission?

BS: There are a lot of similarities between San Diego and Los Angles in terms of the urban land form, the problem with sprawl, the continuing growth, further and further out from the urban core. Perhaps we've gotten to where we start thinking about those issues, how we deal with them using smart growth solutions? Where do you put the housing if you have a growing population? We're beginning to come to grips with issues that we should have dealt with 20 years ago.

What was it about the agendas in front of you on the Planning Comission in the 90s that gives you some sense that growth was being directed, incentivized, and designed to maximize the transportation corridor infrastructure then in place?

BS: There didn't seem to be a lot of incentives for people to follow the general plan. Most of the planning was ad hoc for a particular developer, at a particular time, for a particular project. As much as we welcome new housing and new economic development, it makes it difficult for us to justify what we are doing when you compare it to the general plan and the community plans in the area.

Mr. Leiter, you were a city planning director before going to SANDAG. What's the evidence that urban city planning has any relationship to decisions on regional transportation infrastructure investments?

BL: I think that cities are recognizing more and more that to be able to continue to develop and upgrade their communities, they need to identify transportation solutions. The community won't accept the idea that growth occurs with promises that transportation solutions will come later. Cities are looking more often at opportunities presented by regional transit as a way, particularly in infill areas, to meet some of those transportation needs sooner and more economically. There is a greater understanding of the importance of regional transportation planning toward meeting local transportation needs. Likewise, there is a recognition that those transportation solutions must be planned and built at the same time development is occurring.

San Diego's respected city planning director, Gail Goldberg, faced this dilema when advocating her City of Villages projects over the last two years. In that case, neighborhoods were demanding infrastructure investment before approving greater housing density. Obviously, a planning director can't deliver resources and therefore the City of Villages planning effort ran into political opposition. In the near term, haven't state and local budget deficits compromised government's ability to deliver adequate infrastructure resources?

BL: As I understood it, the problem that the city of San Diego ran into is that they identified all of the existing deficiencies in their infrastructure, as well as future infrastructure needs related to growth, and put together a "grand total" of the costs for all existing and future infrastructure needs. The political reaction to that finding was that all of those infrastructure deficiencies had to be solved before any smart growth would be considered. Stepping back now, the city has realized that if they look at it more incrementally, they have a better shot at achieving the smart growth goals laid out in City of Villages.

Through their pilot village program, San Diego has selected some key locations where infrastructure deficiencies can be corrected and smart growth can occur. By focusing on those first, San Diego is taking a more practical approach than what was perceived as a sort of ‘all or nothing' solution in the City of Villages plan.

Mr. Scott, you've long been a leader of smart growth efforts in the San Fernando Valley, through the Valley's Economic Alliance. What is the evidence that cities are now able to connect resources and planning to build smarter and more thoughtfully in terms of infill?

BS: You have to look at what your community vision is and try to incentivize vision-friendly projects. Try to take some of the politics and the polarization away from the process. Unfortunately, elected officials, for one reason or another, often exercise their district powers in a way that impedes smart growth and smart development.

Also, when we refer to infrastructure, we are misguided in the way we think about transportation corridors. Many suggest that we should plan along corridors like the 101 corridor in the Valley. Unfortunately, the 101 is already functioning well beyond 100% of capacity. So there is really no infrastructure capacity along the 101 to support new development-as there might be along another freeway, like the 210 for example. These are very simple concepts that we tend to overlook. It doesn't solve anything to further overburden a corridor that is unlikely to add capacity anytime in the near future.

If you were writing a letter to the future mayor of Los Angeles about how best to smartly plan for growth and for the linking of land use and transportation, what would be the outline of your advice column?

BS: First, you've got to look holistically at the interconnection between where the population of the future will be situated and what the transportation and other infrastructure is going to be to support that population. Also, you should look at the realities of the communities-people in Los Angeles love their single-family neighborhoods. We simply haven't had success with densifying those single-family neighborhoods, particularly with such a huge amount of sprawl and the lack of resources to deal with issues such as crime and poverty in these low density, spread out environments. That's a big problem with growth. You are going to have growth in all sectors, including the poor.

Mr. Leiter, SANDAG has a board composed of elected officials. What unites these local officials around the value of linking transportation and land use planning? How do you unite them?

BL: Our board, which represents all of the cities and the counties in our region, needs to focus on the regional benefits of a balanced regional transportation network. At the same time, as representatives of their communities, they need to understand the importance of allowing their local planners to help make land use decisions that will make that regional system work better.

One of the ways that can be effective is to do collaborative sub-regional planning, to have the regional transportation agencies working with one or two cities at a sub-regional level to explore solutions in a more focused way than we can do at a regional level.

Likewise, the consolidation of our two regional transit agencies under SANDAG has so far been very beneficial in terms of balancing the way we view our transportation system between regional transit and regional highways. We're much more effective in being able to develop plans that are going to take a multi-modal perspective. Over time, we are going to see the real benefit of that along with the benefit of a one-stop shop for local governments that want to interface with the regional agencies.

Mr. Scott, during the ten years you were on the City Planning Commission, how much interaction did you have with SCAG in terms of its regional planning?

BS: We did not interface directly with them very much, although planning staff dealt with SCAG often. We use all of SCAG's figures, materials, and recommendations. But, there seems to be a uniform habit among municipalities within the SCAG region not to give as much credence to the SCAG regional planning recommendations as they probably should, particularly with respect to transportation and regional infrastructure issues.

Once again, you need to go back to the idea that if you are going to have transportation systems that are viable, that are accepted, and that people use, you need to have dedicated, grade separated systems around which development can occur. People are not going to invest in developments along a bus route. They have to build around permanent infrastructure, such as a rail route or a dedicated bus right-of-way, like the East-West San Fernando Valley busway, which is under construction.

If you both were to write the Governor and the Legislature advocating for regions to be given more capacity to link land use and transportation, what would be the outline of your memo?

BL: A large part of it has to do with funding for transportation facilities. I would recommend that funding be allocated and incentivized toward the kind of collaborative multi-modal solutions that most urban metropolitan regions are finding to be the real solutions. Instead of allocating funding based on other parameters, we should allocate funding on the basis of trying to promote the kinds multi-modal transportation solutions that are going to carry us through the next fifty years. We could use transportation funding a lot more effectively and give communities some assurance that smart growth will be served by a good solid transportation system.

BS: We must review and amend the incentive structure for the funding currently being distributed. We don't necessarily need an increase in resources, but we do need to review the way we administer those resources. Transportation funding is a great example of a system gone completely wrong, resulting in things happening that probably were not intended. Those localities taking the burden for increased population should have a proportionate share of funding.