Comment Log Display

Move San Diego is a non-profit organization working to create
convenient, on-time, healthy, sustainable transportation
throughout the San Diego region.  Currently, our major focus is
working with business, environmental, and government interests to
create a transit system which is competitive in every way with
private automobiles, and to reform land use planning to emphasize
compact development conducive to transit, bicycling and walking. 


Move San Diego has reviewed the Climate Change Draft Scoping Plan
and are pleased to submit the following comments.

First, we are pleased to see that the Air Resources Board takes
very seriously the ambitious timelines laid out in AB 32.  It
appears regulations and programs will be in place in a timely
manner as prescribed by the law.  We also commend ARB for due
consideration of co-benefits of GHG regulation and the need to
avoid disproportionately large impacts on underrepresented
populations.

Put Transit First
The Plan should make an unequivocal commitment to state transit
funding.  While ARB pursues GHG reductions on the one hand, the
governor and legislature continue to cut funding for transit
services.  The San Diego region, as elsewhere, is experience
dramatic increases in ridership, but is in a crisis mode
financially.  Services are being cut, managers at the transit
agencies are being laid off, and service disruptions have
increased.  Fuel prices have increased dramatically as well.  It
is hard to imagine a worse time to cut state transit funds.  

Now is the time to put transit on an equal footing with other
transportation funding. Eliminate the many biases in the CEQA and
Congestion Mitigation Plan programs that elevate LOS over transit
needs. Require mitigation to go for transit. 

Promote Global Best Practices in transit planning and
implementation for cities. Especially look at the high-performing
Bus Rapid Transit of Brisbane, Australia. 

In California, transit is currently a step-child of infrastructure
planning and funding, when in reality, you cannot achieve smart
growth without smart transit. Such transit must be designed to
attract choice riders and best serve our land use patterns which
have dispersed origin-destination patterns.

If you study the large cities of the world, no city can grow above
approx. 3-4 million while maintaining a high quality of life
without strategic transit investments. Our cities will either grow
more in the direction of Paris or more in the direction of Cairo
and it's transit that makes or breaks the kind of growth that will
happen.

Without transit systems designed to emphasize network
connectivity, time competitiveness with the car and customer
experience, we are doomed to experience increasing traffic and
pollution and decreasing quality of life.

We must overcome our "freeway-centric" and car-centric planning to
maintain our economic vitality and quality of life and make the
transit investments required to keep us moving and competitive
since everyone who uses transit fees up space for those who must
drive while also being necessary to reducing GHG since the
transport sector contributes almost half of GHG in California.