By Ted Winterer Ocean Park
Mayor Bloom and fellow councilmembers: As you begin deliberations on the budget for the city’s upcoming fiscal year, I have two suggestions for new approaches to relieving Santa Monica’s traffic woes: 1) As novel as it may be for these sort of missives, I’d like first to suggest a way for the city to enhance revenues rather than increase expenditures — a traffic mitigation fee on all new commercial development. This isn’t a radical notion, as the City of Los Angeles has had such a fee for some time. It works like this: commercial development causes much more traffic than new housing; consequently, new commercial development has to pay a fee to offset the costs to the city of traffic mitigations; the fees are then dedicated to relieving congestion.
Recently, Bill Rosendahl announced his intentions to procure $11 million of these funds to alleviate traffic misery on the Westside. It’s about time Santa Monica had a similar fee. 2) Second, I believe it’s time for the city to adopt a new traffic analysis methodology to measure existing traffic conditions and the impacts of new development on congestion.
What’s interesting to me is that the city appears to have acknowledged in writing, in a recent grant application to Caltrans, that the current methodology is inadequate for the challenges of crafting a new LUCE revision: “Unfortunately, the city’s adopted Traffic Impact Analysis methodology (the Highway Capacity Manual Operational method), does not provide information regarding the impact of potential projects on the transportation system that is comprehensive enough to allow the community and Planning Commission to evaluate whether they would improve or worsen access, mobility, and cost of living here.
The current methodology merely assesses the impact of new auto trips from any project on peak-hour delays at isolated signalized intersections.”
How can we reasonably attempt to craft a new Circulation Element if the data currently available to city planners isn’t up to the task? The way I understand it, our current system averages the traffic flows from east-west streets and from north-south streets into one grade ranging from “A” to “F” for an intersection.
For example, if a street heavily congested with north-south traffic (Cloverfield Boulevard near the freeway comes to mind) crosses a less traveled east-west street (such as Colorado Avenue), the grade for the Cloverfield- Colorado intersection might be a “C” instead of an “F” because of the lighter east-west traffic, even though anyone waiting for five signal changes headed north on Cloverfield would have experienced “F” conditions. Then if an EIR is prepared for a new project on Cloverfield, which would add cars northbound and southbound, our current means of analyzing the traffic impacts would not account for the already gridlocked conditions on Cloverfield.
It doesn’t sound very sophisticated to me. I suggest it’s time to come up with the funds (perhaps through that fee on commercial development?) to institute a new traffic analysis methodology.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 6, 2007. Read the original PDF.