Why Proposition T May Not Be Good for Local Shop Owners

One of the curious arguments that I've heard in support of Proposition T is that by capping commercial development in the City we will be supporting Mom and Pop stores. To be fair, this is not the main argument in favor of the measure, but it has been offered as something of an indirect benefit. I assume that the belief is that by limiting new commercial development we will be minimizing the ability of new chain stores to come into the city and effectively put these local shops out of business.

However, I'm not sure I buy this argument. Local stores, such as my favorite second hand bookstore, Kultura Books on Ocean Park at 17th Street (shameless plug, I know, but it's owned by a great couple who really know books, music and art) survive and sometimes thrive because they effectively compete with the chains, either because they've carved out a unique market niche, offer superior service and/or pay cheaper rent. In most cases all three conditions are present.

So how will Prop T effect any of those three criteria? Well, I suspect it will have an affect on rents. Prop T will be of great benefit to existing commercial property owners in the City by limiting future supply. The price of real estate, like every other commodity is driven by supply and demand. Unfortunately, this measure will not affect demand. As a result, a scarcity of commercial space will be created over time driving up commercial rents. Commercial landlords will be handed a gift with this measure. For absolutely no effort, they will see an ever growing rise in commercial rents, merely because they have been freed from competition. Chain stores will still make every effort to come into the City, but they will have fewer options. This pattern of ever rising rents, in cities that have severely limited growth, is common. In this case, it's a sure way to drive out the Mom and Pop's we'd all like to protect.

Proposition T is a Simplistic Solution to Complex Problem

According the flyer I just received in the mail, the authors of Proposition T claim that it is very well written.  However, I beg to disagree.

Not that I have any problem with the grammar or syntax, or that it’s hard to understand. No, Proposition T gets a passing grade there. It is so simple that even a child could comprehend most of it.

When critics of Proposition T claim that it isn’t well written, they mean that as a policy document it is ambiguous and raises a staggering array of implementation and enforcement questions. Here’s a list that I generated on the back of an envelope. I bet there are more.

1. Who decides which projects get built in a given year? If it’s the City Council or Planning Commission; why would we trust them with these decisions any more than with the overall approval discretion they enjoy now, which this measure denies them? In fact, in a situation such as the one created by Prop T, when a scarcity is created, in this case a scarcity of buildable commercial space, isn’t the potential for lobbying, corruption (of the legal kind) and general sliminess even greater? Can you imagine what the developers will be doing to get their project selected?
2. What is the decision based upon? Aesthetics? Function? Whether it’s Re-use or New? Geography? Degree of sustainability? Location of the developer, or the architect? If function or geography is the determinate, is there a hierarchical list of uses or locations? Is it for a given year, or does that list change? Who decides on the hierarchy? If aesthetics govern, who decides here? Will we do a call-in like Dancing with Stars, where we pick our favorites, and certain projects get booted off the show. City TV would probably have a ratings bonanza. If it’s some combination of all of the above, would there be some sort of point system? Who would make that up? What would happen during the two years or so we were waiting for this point chart to be argued over and created? Would the competition or decision making take place yearly, bi-annually or on a first in line, first served basis
3. Why has medical office space been left out of the exemption? This seems to be big concern of both of Santa Monica’s hospitals. Was this just an oversight? If it was an oversight, and the authors didn’t mean that, will we need another ballot measure just to fix the mistakes in this one?
4. How much affordable housing must be built above ground floor retail to make it exempt from the cap? Can I build two –units atop a Target store? Is it at least 50-50 in terms of square footage? How much?
5. The measure allows an alternative methodology (other than ITE standards), from a city similar to Santa Monica for determining traffic equivalency when replacing existing commercial space. Who determines which cities are similar? Who determines the applicability of the methodology? It’s pretty clear that the many of the traffic planners the city has used in the past are not trusted by the backers of Prop T, so how why should we trust their determinations on methodology? If a traffic planner making the determination has previously worked for a developer that has given money to fight Prop T, are their judgments to be trusted?
6. The Proposition allows the city to borrow from future years on the 75,000 square foot cap, so for example a 100,000 sf. could be approved in one year, with 25,000 square feet borrowed from the future. How much can be borrowed? For how long? Can the City go a full year into debt? How about two or three?
7. If I am the owner of land with active commercial space on it, and I sell to a developer who plans to develop an affordable housing project with ground floor retail, in effect, taking a certain amount of commercial space is being taken off the rolls, does the developer get a “credit” for this space? Can that credit be sold back to the City or to another land-owner in another part of town? If so, does Prop T, in effect, create a new type of real estate market, say a commercial space equivalency market?
   

Whew! Quite a few questions, no? And I’m just getting started. So now when I hear folks say that Proposition T is well written, and that it’s simple, I respond, simplistic yes, but this it is not simple at all. What Proposition T creates is yet a new bureaucratic nightmare, more work for an overworked planning department, and in the end an ambiguous process whose potential for abuse is off the charts. Proposition T is a really bad idea.

RIFT Does Not Prevent More Shopping Malls

The literature for Prop T claims that the City has projected the equivalent of up to five more Santa Monica Place Malls in the future. Presumably, passage of Prop T will cut that in half, and so we’ll only have to deal with 2 ½ of these. That doesn’t strike me as much of an improvement.

I don’t ever want to see any of more these mall in the City -- Not one more ever!
I don’t want to see another Water Garden project either.

However, my problem with Santa Monica Place and the Water Garden is not a quantitative one. So I don’t think setting an arbitrary limitation on the quantity of commercial development in the future will, by itself prevent such abominations in the future. The problems of these two projects and others of their ilk are ones of design, and diversity, not mere quantity.

By diversity, I am referring to the mono-culture that each of these projects represents. One is a concentration of office workers only, the other an amalgam of shoppers. Both such concentrations are recipes for congestion. They each subject the city to a pulse of traffic at certain times of the day, while allowing the underutilization of expensive resources at other times. Diverse development provides a more round the clock set of experiences. This spreads out the traffic, and utilizes resources more efficiently, while allowing people to live, work, shop and play within a walkable area.

By design, I am referring to their lack of transparency, both literally and urbanistically. Both of these projects (and they are very definitely projects, not districts, not neighborhoods, not pieces of a town) are ‘coarsely grained.’ Think of a fabric, where the City’s warp and weave is very tight, but a moth has come and eaten a hole in it. Each of these project sits within that moth-hole eaten fabric, what urban designers call a super-block, completely out of scale with the urban street grid of the city in which they sit. In the case of Water Garden, a very sub-urban, highly irrigated and non-native buffer of unusable green space separates the project from the rest of its neighbors turning the edges of the project into auto-dominated no-mans’ lands. At SM Place, a set of parking garages, and blank walls (only some of which are being ameliorated by the renovation) isoloate the behemoth from the City.

If the quantities of commercial space that each of the project represent were distributed more evenly, in more diverse and in more transparent and pedestrian friendly arrangements they would hardly register in terms of traffic and no one would be using them as the poster children of ‘over development.’ I know this because there’s a whole lot more commercial development on the three blocks of 3rd Street that constitute the Promenade than there are at these two projects and no one uses the Promenade as the thing to avoid. I don’t here folks complaining about how lousy Wilshire Boulevard is or Main Street. Good urbanism, diverse and well designed always has a constituency.

Proposition T does nothing to assure good urbanism anywhere. In fact it does the opposite. It limits diversity in favor of a mono-culture of housing. With Proposition T we’re just making the same mistake over again, just giving it different, but worn out clothing.

Proposition T = Common Sense-NOT!

The other day, I noticed an aging little industrial building being rehabbed on Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica. It’s in the vicinity of the Upper School at Crossroads. Empty for at least three years now it was, until this rehab began, really falling apart. I’d guess it to be about 20,000 sq. feet it size, but it might be a bit more. A new “industrial sash” i.e., a window system composed of a grid of metal with small glass panes in between, is being installed, and the building appears as if it is being readied as a space for a design firm, but that’s just me surmising – it really doesn’t matter. 

What matters is that an abandoned hulk of a building is being brought back to life, and its effect will be to put more eyes on the street, and to bring a bit more humanity to an otherwise soulless boulevard.

However, because the building has been vacant for more than two years it would, under Proposition T, be considered new. So if this project were being undertaken under RIFT, the proposed renovation of this 20,000+/- sf. building would be in competition for the 75,000 sf. of allocable commercial space in a given year. If it succeeded in being selected (who knows how that will be done) only 55,000 sf. would still be available in the entire city for allocation in a given year. This is maybe enough for a viable medical office building (remember hospitals are exempt, but medical office space is not).

The renovation of Santa Monica Place is also most welcome. While in my opinion it doesn’t go far enough (it is still a mall after all) at least it will be better connected to the rest of the area. However, the old Robinsons-May department store has also been vacant for over two years. Its renovation and refilling as a Nordstrom would, if constructed under Proposition T, absorb at least a year’s worth of commercial development (probably more). The Wilshire Theater has been vacant, I’d guess about a year now, and assuming it stays that way for one more year, its renovation would suck up well over another year’s worth of commercial development, just to bring it back to life. And that’s assuming that these projects were “selected.” Nothing in Proposition T gives priority to renovations or rehabilitations or even the re-leasing existing space. These buildings, could simply sit waiting their turn, if in fact their turn ever came. Does this make any sense?

But I’ve heard a lot about how Proposition T, with its cap on new commercial development, will lead to a reduction in traffic increase, that it’s just “common sense.” Even Council Member Bobby Shriver, a man for whom I have great respect (but happen to disagree with on this issue) has written as much in his belated endorsement of the measure.

Well the world of planning is full of such “common sense” debacles. Whether it was the separation of uses, which led to so much traffic congestion to begin with – housing over here, shopping over there, workplaces over in this other area – a prescription referred to as “Euclidean Zoning” (after the supreme court decision involving the city of Euclid, OH), or the post-war penchant by traffic engineers to create nice and wide residential streets under the belief that wider was safer – a strategy that, as it happened, simply encouraged cars to go faster resulting in more pedestrian fatalities than had been the norm, our planning history is full of “common sense” approaches that were anything but sensical. I could go on. For example there’s the "common sense" approach to traffic planning that minimizes intersections in favor of unimpeded multi-lane arterials of the Cloverfield ilk that supposedly make traffic go faster and unencumbered, but which, in the end, lead to such pedestrian unfriendly travesties as the Water Garden.

Then there was the common sense approach of building urban shopping malls that were the rage in the 70’s that led to the destruction of blocks and blocks of good urban buildings, the privatization of the public realm, and concentration of one type of space in a very tight area, (causing massive traffic congestion) in order to construct such street-killing, soulless behemoths as Santa Monica Place.

So it may seem like common sense to limit commercial development as a way of reducing traffic, but only if:

1) Santa Monica itself were isolated, and could control what happened beyond its borders;
2) Santa Monica did not have a major interstate, and a collection of state highways and arterials bisecting its geography allowing traffic to move through the City on its way to other places;
3) The limitation imposed by Proposition T was not so transit-unsupportive;
4) The limitation would not reduce the effectiveness of Transportation Demand Management;
5) Proposition T provided incentives for re-using existing space and did not treat existing commercial space, vacant over two years, as if it were non-existent
6) The limitation imposed by the measure got at the root of the problem, which is not the quantity of space, but how people get to the space that exists;
7) The limitation had a realistic set of supportive policies that created priorities according to: geography, diversity and land use mix; among others and
8) There weren’t other, better measures that could and should be deployed.

So to those who say Proposition T is just “common sense,” I say, NOT.

Some FAQs about Proposition T and some that aren’t so frequently asked

Q: So, I don’t have time to read this whole blog, tell me again, why you’re against this?

A: Because it won’t solve the traffic problem, and it will cost this city and SMMUSD much needed net revenue.

Q. Whoaa!! The Yes on T folks say it won’t cost the City any money, and that the City Attorney’s own estimate says it will negligible.

A. Well the City’s independent analysis forecasts a 9.4 million dollar deficit in 2008 dollars to the City, close to one-half million to SMMUSD, and about 100,000 to SMC. I guess it’s a case of competing analyses. However, I put my money on the independent analysis, as that firm does this kind of analysis for a living. The City Attorney’s specialty is not making these estimates.

Q. Yes, but wasn’t that analysis done by a consultant that works for developers?

A. Yes, they also work for cities and states. Of course they work for developers, too. Everyone who does this kind of work, and who has any credibility, works for developers. These firms do not fudge the numbers if they want to stay in business. Their reports go to lending institutions, debt rating agencies, etc. If their numbers can’t be believed, they won't be around for long. Their professionalism, and absolute commitment to impartial analysis is their calling card.

Q. Okay, say I do believe their numbers. By 2023, the city’s budget will be close to 1 billion dollars. What’s 9 million compared to that number?

A. Well let’s compare apples and apples. I’m looking at today’s budget which is half that number. So if we want to adjust for inflation, then let’s do that across the board, in which case this number comes close to 20 million dollars, about 2% of the city’s budget. Still doesn’t sound like a lot, but given the amount of fixed costs the city has, this could be the money the city provides to SMMUSD for things like music and arts programs.

Q. Okay, enough about finances, I get it. It will have an impact. You say Prop T won’t work. What do you mean?

A. Well it won’t reduce traffic.

Q. Yes, but the Pro-T forces admit that. They just say it will slow the rate of traffic increase.

A. Okay. If you think the problem is bad now, and this measure offers a solution that makes it get worse slower, do you think that’s a solution?

Q. Well, no, but it’s better than nothing.

A. I’m not advocating doing nothing. Nor, is the city's own General Plan as reflected in the LUCE document. I’m advocating a comprehensive plan of Transportation Demand Management (TDM) solutions, which include “parking cash-outs,” car-pooling, taking public transportation, etc. For more on this you’re going to have to read the rest of the blog.

Q. Well why not both: TDM and Prop T?

A. Because part of TDM is creating land-use diversity, which ensures that the most residents can walk or bike or take public transit to jobs and retail services. When you bias the development playing field to a predominant housing mix you lose much of the potential for TDM.

Q. Okay, okay, but still, I’m so sick of the “over-development” of Santa Monica. Isn’t this a step in preventing that?

A. No. It’s a step in limiting commercial development only. Most of that will be replaced by housing development.

Q. Well, doesn’t housing generate less traffic?

A. Again, it goes back to the mix, I just spoke of. Nature abhors a mono-culture, as does urbanism. All housing, and no commercial, not only make a city a dull place, but it also makes the traffic worse.

Q. Still, I’m so sick of these out-of-town developers from Beverly Hills and San Francisco proposing these six-story buildings that are destroying what’s left of my little beach town.

A. Wow, a lot of anger, there. Let’s take this one step at a time. Prop T will do nothing to prevent six-story buildings, particularly if they are composed of residences. Second, if those six-story building are composed exclusively of affordable housing (which I would argue is not necessarily a good thing; creating another mono-culture), then the ground floor can still have commercial space that is exempt from the 75,000 square foot cap. Measure T won’t affect that. So if the issue is protecting what’s left of the beach town, why not look at LUCE, which is the city’s land use component of its new General Plan. It addresses the issue comprehensively, acknowledging, that Santa Monica, itself has many neighborhoods and districts (some beachy, some not) and plans for them accordingly.

Q. Well, I don’t know, the city hasn’t done anything about this problem. At least this is something.

A. From my own perspective, I’d argue that the city has been treading water for the last few years while LUCE was being developed. LUCE has hours upon hours of citizen input from across the political spectrum. It is an extraordinary document which everyone should read. It would be tragic if now when it is ready for implementation, it had its heart cut out.

Q. You have said that this measure will actually hurt the city’s efforts to combat global warming. Isn’t that an absurd statement, like Ronald Reagan saying, “trees cause pollution?”

A. Well you do have to read the post for the full explanation, but the gist of the argument is this: Prop T will not help the current traffic situation. Proponents claim the traffic will get worse slower than doing nothing. However, new businesses that wanted to be here will simply go to Venice, West LA or Marina Del Rey. Folks will simply go through S.M. to get to those businesses, and Santa Monicans themselves will drive farther to get to these destinations. The reduction in TDM that this measure allows further reduces the chance for overall trip reduction, thus increasing driving.

Q. Well, why should I believe you any of what you say? You’re an architect. You work for developers. It even says on your internet profile that you do “transit-oriented development and design.” Aren’t you just protecting your own interests?

A. Actually, I work about equally for cities and developers. One of the things I do for cities is to help to negotiate these very complex development issues between different resident constituencies as well as developers. I challenge both sides to arrive at creative win-win solutions. As a result, I actually know something about this issue. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I love what I do. That’s why I have gotten so active in this issue. Interestingly enough, a majority of developers I work with are housing developers, who would not be affected by Prop T at all. In fact, they might be helped by it. And yes, I do have a bias for transit-oriented development as I believe it is a key piece to achieve traffic reduction and reduce global warming.

Proposition T in Santa Monica is my Candidate for the Worst Urban Planning Idea of the Year.

I know you are thinking. This title demonstrates a wee bit of hyperbole, that it’s a tad exaggerated. Well let me explain my reasoning:

Last Spring, an earnest and eager young man approached me as I was walking out of my local Trader Joe’s, shopping bags in hand, and asked, “Would you like to fight traffic in Santa Monica? We’re gathering signatures to stop, ‘over-development’ by limiting commercial development in the future. It’s the Residents’ Initiative to Fight Traffic (RIFT).” Well none of us wants to be overwrought, overweight, or overtaxed, but those are so difficult to control, so, while I didn’t sign the petition, I imagine the prospect of not being ‘overdeveloped,’ sounded pretty good to most of my neighbors, because a measure has shown up on the ballot in Santa Monica, this November under the innocuous sounding name, Proposition T.

My biggest problem with the measure, which caps commercial development (retail and office combined) in the city to 75,000 square feet per year (about half of the current average), is that it wont’ work. Read the rest of this blog as to why I think why that's true.

Reason #1. Reducing commercial development to 75,000 square feet per year will not reduce traffic and may even increase it.

Actually, Proposition T don’t claim that RIFT will reduce traffic, only that it will slow the rate of traffic increase. So, of course, we’ll never know if it has worked or not, because there is no base line. How do we know how fast traffic would have increased if the measure hadn’t passed? How do we know if Proposition T reduced that rate of traffic growth by 10%, 50%, none at all, or even made matters worse?

Another way to frame their argument it seems to me, is that traffic in Santa Monica is terrible, and and that RIFT is a measure that will allow it to get worse slower than it would have otherwise gotten worse. Sounds amazingly half-baked. I think my six-year old framed it best when he said, “that’s just dumb.” I mean if you went to a doctor, with a chronic and debilitating disease, and she offered you a therapy that would slow your rate of decline, but you knew that other therapies existed that, over time, would actually allow you to see an improvement, wouldn’t you fire that doctor?

The Proposition T literature loudly proclaims, in bold type, “Our city's own traffic consultant says we can’t fit any more cars on our gridlocked streets,” How is a measure that acknowledges a problem, but then fails to provide anything resembling an adequate solution acceptable? (By the way the City uses a lot of traffic consultants, so I’d like to know which one made such an inane and unprofessional remark).

In other words, why doesn’t this measure attack the root cause of the problem, which is how people get around to work, to shop or to play? We know that there are cities with far greater density with less traffic burdens. The reason, this measure doesn’t attack the root cause, is that by doing so, the Prop-T advocates would acknowledge the value of appropriately designed mixed-use development to the long term health of the city. This measure uses the traffic as a Trojan horse to fight something more at the heart of every development issue in the city, which is that the Prop T backers simply do not want to see any more growth. Proposition T backers, would like to put a wall around this city and freeze it as is.

How do I know? Well again, look at the literature from a recent “Yes Prop T” mailing: “And more development is coming, Lots more. Our City Council just voted to INCREASE new building heights on all of our major boulevards from Wilshire to Pico to as high as six stories tall.”

So what does this have to do with Proposition T? Not one thing. Proposition T does not in any way affect the building heights in the city. This is just a scare tactic. It is intended to get the reader to distrust all developers, those interlopers “(some from San Francisco and Beverly Hills),” who would continue to do work in this city, and contribute to its evolution and its tax base.

Moreover, residential development, which is unaffected by Prop T, will probably increase as a result. So if you think voting for Proposition T will somehow change or overturn what the Council has just passed than you are in for a disappointment. All that will happen is that you will assure that this six-story development is almost exclusively residential. But you respond, well doesn’t residential development generate less traffic than commercial development? Not necessarily; it depends on the context.

“Okay, so maybe Prop T won’t affect traffic at all, where’s the harm?” you ask, “how could Prop T actually increase traffic (at least more so than not endorsing Prop T)?” Simply put, because it is fundamentally contrary to the smart growth principles that affect mobility and travel impacts that so many progressive cities, cities that are attempting to be as green as Santa Monica are incorporating. And please don’t take my word for it, go to:
http://www.smartgrowthplanning.org/ForecastMeasure.html, a web site put out by Fehr and Peers, one of the largest and most respected transportation planning firms in the nation.

The literature identifies five key measures:

1. Transit Proximity
2. Density of Development
3. Diversity of Development
4. Design of Development
5. Destination Accessibility of Development

Let’s highlight three of them:

Density of Development: Higher numbers of residents and jobs per acre are often a Smart Growth planning objective, and are effective at reducing travel and other impacts, especially when accompanied by high levels of regional accessibility, mix of uses, and quality urban design. Development density is a useful indicator of Smart Growth plans, and is usually measured in terms of total population and employment per acre. Density also reduces the need to convert exurban land to urban uses.

Diversity of Development: Land use mix measures the relative balances of jobs and housing as well as the mix of retail and non-retail jobs within walking/ biking distance or, secondarily, short driving distance. Diversity is correlated with reductions in vehicle trips and vehicle miles, and is therefore an indicator of a Smart Growth plan.

Design of Development: Smart Growth concepts often involve walkable neighborhoods. When measured in terms of connectivity and density of the street and pedestrian networks and sidewalk completeness, walkable urban designs are correlated with reduced vehicle travel, and represent a useful indicator of Smart Growth.

So if you think substituting residential development for commercial development is the right way to go because you think the former will generate less traffic than you are being duped for a second time. As I’ve said before, it all depends on context.

Reason #2. There are more effective ways to fight traffic congestion. This method is like using a chain saw to do heart surgery.

One of the things I learned in high school art class was that skilled craftsman know what tools to use for a particular task. The more tools in one's tool-box and the more skillful one is in using those tools, the more likely it is that one would consider a variety of ways to craft an object. By the same rule, "if the only tool in your box was a hammer, every problem would look like a nail."

It is pretty clear to me that if the well intentioned folks who crafted Proposition T had spent the time constructing a truly effective traffic reduction methodology, they would not have chosen such a blunt instrument. Their tool is the product of a methodology born in the 1960's and refined slightly, over the next several decades, until its ossification in publications put out by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), that have been, dare I say it, fundamentally discredited by contemporary practitioners of the art and practice of City and Town Planning.

The ITE's methodology, based on empirical data from the suburbs, required every 250 square feet of office space and every 200 square feet of retail space to require at least one parking space and to generate two or more car trips. As I've stated in previous posts, no mitigating factors were assumed (such as the fact that someone might walk between stores, or from home to work, etc). As a result, statistics like those displayed below, which are national averages were also assumed to apply to all areas equally. It also assumed that all parking would be free to the driver (at least seemingly free. See, The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup, for a complete disputation of that assumption).
Given the ITE's logic, it stands to reason that reducing the amount of commercial space would reduce car trips, no? Well, no, actually. It's not that simple. It wasn't then and it isn't now. Yet, so mindless was this characterization that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that was codified nearly identically in zoning manuals from Portland Maine, to Portland, Oregon. You'd think there would be regional differences, but no, there is a surprisingly similarity. The reality is that the amount of "internal capture" (a planner's term for those within a study area who stay in the area) within cities varies widely. For example, Annapolis, MD enjoys upwards of a 50% capture rate between jobs and housing. Having lived there one summer, I can tell you I saw lots of folks walking from home to work. (And you thought I was going to use New York as the example, didn't you?). To achieve that kind capture, you must have a very robust mix of uses within close proximity.

This obvious little fact is one of many tidbits of reality that transportation planners have learned (well I should say, relearned) over the last couple of decades. There are indeed a lot of things that affect "trip generation rates," not the least of which is density and land-use mix, among others. I would call such urban form-making strategies, "naturally occurring Transportation Demand Management Techniques." However, urban form (which not only includes such considerations as land use and density, but also walkability, block size, roadway width, and at least a couple of dozen other considerations), constitutes only one set of tools within the Transportation Demand Management (TDM) toolbox (an important set, to be sure, but not the only one). What are some of these other techniques? Simply put, TDM includes a variety of strategies that change travel behavior, for example by encouraging more efficient travel patterns, such as shifts from peak to off-peak periods and parking "cash-out" offers which encourage shifts from automobile to alternative modes (e.g., shifting from riding alone, to car-pooling, bicycling and/or walking). The Victoria Transport Policy Institute in Victoria, BC has an extraordinary website called the TDM encyclopedia that has more than you'll ever want to know about this subject http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm12.htm. From the website:

Many factors affect people’s transport decisions including the relative convenience and safety of travel modes (such as whether streets have sidewalks and bikepaths, and the quality of transit services available), prices (transit fares and the price of parking at destinations); and land use factors (such as whether or not schools, parks and shops are located close to residential neighborhoods).

There are numerous TDM strategies using various approaches to influence travel decisions. Some improve the transport options available; some provide incentives to change travel mode, time or destination [i.e. parking "cash-outs where employees are paid not to bring their car]; others improve land use accessibility; some involve transport policy reforms and new programs that provide a foundation for TDM.

Municipalities that have successfully utilized TDMs have done so by negotiating with developers prior to a project's approval. In such cases, the developer commits to a percentage of employees that will arrive in something other than a single-occupancy vehicle, and posts bonds to guarantee compliance, which is checked annually by the municipality. Jurisdictions have been able to achieve a reduction of 50 to 60% or more, of ride-alone commuters.

So now I hear you say, "Gee, utilizing TDM sounds like a good idea. Why not pass Prop-T and use TDMs," as many have written to me, privately? The simple answer is because RIFT's arbitrary and capricious cap on commercial development makes the the use of TDMs much more difficult. While LUCE does include a fairly strong set of recommendations for TDMs, it also assumes a certain amount of traffic reduction through that "naturally occurring Transportation Demand Management" that occurs as a result of land-use mix and density. RIFT represents a strategic and tactical blunder of the highest order by disregarding that careful balance. Put another way, if one utilizes a chain saw to perform heart surgery, regardless of how skillful the heart surgeon is, it will be very difficult to sew the patient back up again.

More on the Revenue Implications of RIFT

Mr. Robert Moskowitz has posted a comment on this blog, complaining that the reasons that I've cited for opposing RIFT are unfair and in some cases, wrong. Ouch!!

His biggest complaint with my reasoning seems to be that,

"Proposition T will not reduce revenues, merely limit the growth of revenues in the future by limiting development in the future."

And technically Mr. Moskowitz is correct, as indicated in the analysis done for the city. And if I wasn't completely clear in my explication of this fact in my posting under Reason #4, than I am sorry. Mr. Moskowitz wins that point. But this is a Pyrrhic victory, since the underlying objection I, and many opponents of the measure have on this point, is not that this will cause a decline in revenues per se, but that it will result in a net revenue loss. Under Proposition T, revenues will grow, as Mr. Moskowitz correctly points out, but not as fast as expenses, so the net result will be a loss of over five and one-half million dollars per year. How can this be you ask? Well, commercial uses pay the freight in this town, subsidizing those of us who live here. If you're looking at your property tax bill just now, you're probably thinking I'm out of my mind, but businesses pay even more taxes and utilize less services. That's the way it works in virtually every city in this nation, and though we may sometimes think otherwise, we are no different here in Santa Monica.

So not only will Proposition T not work relative to its stated intention, to reduce traffic (more on that tomorrow), it will have the added effect of damaging the City's fiscal health -- sort of akin to a good old fashioned bloodletting to fight disease.