UCLA Housing Voice

Ep. 115: Road Scholars on Major Transit Stops with Jacob Wasserman and Aaron Barrall

• UCLA Housing Voice Podcast • Season 5 • Episode 19

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 52:15

California created a definition for major transit stops in state code and ties this definition to a lot of housing policies. Jacob Wasserman and Aaron Barrall explore the different ways this definition could be interpreted and how different approaches could mean more or less land available for increased development. 

Show notes:

Madeline Brozen 00:00:05
Hello, this is the Housing Voice podcast and I'm Madeline Brozen, your host today on another limited edition episode of Road Scholars. 

Road Scholars is brought to you by the generous support of Transfers Magazine, a research publication of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center. In addition to their podcast support, Transfers Magazine is back with new articles on the new and old robots and informal car sharing. You can find their work at transfersmagazine.org. 

In today's Road Scholars episode, we are talking with Jacob Wasserman and Aaron Barrall about how California defines major transit stops and why getting consistency on this definition matters so much for housing policy. As we dig into the nerdy spatial weeds, what is a simple definition on paper turns out to be not as simple as it seems. And it's in this messy complexity that a lot more or less land can become available for higher density development. We're going to talk a little GIS, a little controversy and hopefully bring you a lot of insight. 

As always, the Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, Shane Phillips and Tiffany Lieu. Please send any of your feedback for Road Scholars to me at mbrozen@ucla.edu. And with that, let's get to our conversation with UCLA's Jacob Wasserman and Aaron Barrall. Jacob Wasserman is a Research Program Manager for the Public Transit Program at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and Aaron Barrall is a Housing Data Analyst at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. Aaron has been a guest on Housing Voice before and Jacob is new to our podcast enterprise, but welcome to you both.

Jacob Wasserman 00:02:04
Thanks for having me.

Aaron Barrall 00:02:05
Thanks for having me.

Madeline Brozen 00:02:07
I'm also joined by my co-host, Juan Matute, and now that we have a host and a guest from each of the Lewis Center and ITS, we've got even teams. So that's good. Hey, Juan, how's it going?

Juan Matute 00:02:18
Hey, good to be here.

Madeline Brozen 00:02:19
So we ask our guests on Road Scholars to provide a transportation introduction by sharing a memorable transportation experience. Aaron's been here before. Jacob, as our new guest, you get the honors, so we're going to ask you to take us on a ride down memory lane. And what do you want to share?

Jacob Wasserman 00:02:37
Yes, the ride that comes to mind is one that people on this podcast hosting right now have heard before or were perhaps there, for ITS had a summer field trip to ATSAC, which is the city of Los Angeles' traffic control center, where they control all the signals for the city. You may know it from the Italian Job. And I got on a train from where I live in Santa Monica, took the Expo Line downtown and we get in the regional connector tunnel, which at the time was just about a month open, and then I hear a loud bang, some flashing from up above, and it turned out the pantograph that connects the overhead wire to the train had blown a fuse or something like that, and so the train kind of lurches to a halt. We're sitting there in this tunnel, felt like hours, probably was only 10 minutes, but then I hear over the radio from the driver's cab some garbled messages. And at one point it says evacuation. And I guess that was the cue because the car behind me they start to mutiny. They open the doors, force them open and start walking along the tunnel. And I look out and there's Juan with a group of mutineers walking down the tunnel trying to get out. And the train driver has to say: no, no, no, no, no, oh, we're waiting for the fire crew. You have to get back. So I open our doors, I join them in the car behind. It turns out Sam Speroni and Brian Taylor from ITS are also there. Finally, fire crews arrive and they kind of link arms along the edge of the tunnel, one every five feet. I can't imagine that they had other, better things to do, but there they were, keeping us from falling on to the tracks. And we got to our tour, probably only about a half hour late, but we might have been the first civilians to walk in the regional connector tunnel and the whole time I was thinking, you know, like on an airplane, the cliche is they ask: is there a doctor on the plane? Well, I was hoping that the driver was going to ask: is anybody here a transportation researcher? But it did not come to pass.

Juan Matute 00:04:42
Well, maybe they did. We just couldn't hear anything that the operator was saying.

Madeline Brozen 00:04:48
I feel like the lesson in that one was: you know, Juan's going to take the word evacuation very seriously, if he at all maybe hears it. But glad everyone got to actually where they were going reasonably on time. So today we're going to be talking about research between our two guests, Jacob and Aaron, that was done along with our previous guest, Amy Lee, and UCLA ITS director Adam Millard-Ball, called Stop and Think About It: How the different interpretations of what counts as a major transit stop in California make a difference. Our guests, along with their co-authors, get deep in the data weeds to look at some of the difficulties interpreting the definition of a major transit stop. This term is codified in California state law and is increasingly referenced in different legislation, largely relating to housing policy. In this work they explore the implications of how this definition gets interpreted and operationalized and really what it means in terms of how much land is subject to these different state laws. So today we're going to talk through this definition, how it applies in law, the major sticking points, the data decisions, and think ahead about what people should do with this information and conflicts, as this work finds that there's a really wide range of outcomes that could happen. So, to kick off our conversation, let's set the stage a little bit. How is a major transit stop defined in California law?

Jacob Wasserman 00:06:16
So if you're binging the Housing Voice podcast, you probably heard about this last week, last episode from Amy Lee. But there are three buckets in state law of quote major transit stop unquote, and these are rail and ferry stations, bus rapid transit stops, and I can get into what defines bus rapid transit. And then the third is where two bus routes, two or more bus routes with good service in the morning and afternoon peaks, intersect. It used to be until 2024 that it was buses that came every 15 minutes. Now it's buses that come every 20 minutes and these three groups cover most of the transit that in California you might think of as quote high quality unquote. That's the term in state law. And on top of that in some sections of the code they also add planned transit. So that's transit that is in a long-range 20-year transportation plan that each region of the state defines and it's transit that isn't built yet but is at least identified and told to the feds and in public documents that we're going to build at some point in the next 20 years. So you take all that together. The problem is each of those buckets has wrinkles to it. You could define, say, bus rapid transit really, really strictly. There's one part of state code that says that bus rapid transit has to be 24-7 bus lanes. You have to be able to pay your fare off the vehicle at the station. You have to be able to board from any door. Or you could just say: anything that a transit agency calls bus rapid transit is bus rapid transit, and that is a lot looser. There are a lot of things across the country where a transit agency will call something bus rapid transit that just has a few of those features. And the final fun wrinkle is that the word public does not appear in this definition for public transit. So in theory you could consider private employer shuttles like the Google bus to count, tourist railways like Angels Flight in Los Angeles and even like the Disneyland monorail and the trolley at the Grove. In theory they come every 15 minutes. They have great rate service. Those could count as major transit stops. We didn't do this in our report, but it just goes to show that with a creative enough read of the words on the page you could get those to count as well. And from that set of transit stops most of the state laws have a radius of a half mile. If you're within a half a mile of these stops you get certain incentives, and those areas covered within a half mile are the downtowns of the major cities in California, a lot of the built up areas of the suburbs, and then even Amtrak stops out in the middle of nowhere. There's even a request stop at a state historic park in the middle of the Central Valley, but that's technically a major transit stop too. And so from all of these we made a minimal definition, which is kind of the most conservative read of the state law, and a maximal definition, the most liberal read of the state law within kind of the limits of the data we had, and a plausible reading of the state law either way, and we analyzed what areas was covered by each.

Juan Matute 00:09:26
So there's been a lot of legislation in California and various states that considers proximity to transit and gives transit a superpower. So what is that superpower when it comes to land use?

Aaron Barrall 00:09:40
Speaking for California, there are quite a few laws that use the definition of major transit stop in order to enable more affordable housing or that otherwise change different zoning regulations. But for this research, we really focused on California's statewide density bonus program. So this density bonus program has been on the books now for decades, but in 2019, the legislature passed a law that completely eliminated density limits for affordable housing projects, at least in the form of units per acre, within half a mile of these major transit stops, and this density bonus also grants additional height. I'm not sure who invented this term, but often the land use nerds in California refer to this provision as the super density bonus. It's a huge change that has actually helped enable a lot of units of affordable housing get off the ground near transit. There are a number of other laws, like the removal of parking minimums for specified projects, and this definition is used in a bill that streamlined environmental review for zone changes for small, missing middle projects. Essentially, under this new framework, cities are allowed to change their zoning to allow projects up to 10 units without needing to do the previously required environmental review. There are a few other laws that I'm skipping here, but I think these are among the most impactful, in my opinion.

Madeline Brozen 00:10:52
I think part of why you could make the case as to why the state is allowing people to have streamlined environmental review or skip environmental review is that trying to put housing in the place that it makes most sense, kind of, as you tie it to transit projects themselves and transit service. And I think this really represents kind of an evolution in California's like 20-year project now to try to align land use and transportation in an effort to achieve state climate goals. And I think we've seen this roll out not just in California but other places where we're trying to kind of regionally coordinate land use and transportation. The way they were doing it in California started with what was called the sustainable community strategies and these regional plans. We tied this to kind of allocating different housing amounts in the regional housing needs assessments. But a lot of these things weren't really working as well as they intended to. Like, it was a lot of we should do these things. But really I think some of the first decade of this coordination just wasn't getting the outcomes in terms of this coordination, in terms of this housing in areas where we're making transit investments or where transit service existed. So now what we're seeing, I think, in this kind of really being specific about defining a transit stop and putting that definition into our housing law is coordinating at a local level, because part of what we saw in not making progress was you'd have these regional goals and then just kind of falling on local efforts. And so, Aaron, what else do you think our listeners should know about these more localized efforts to define where new infill housing is best suited to meet climate goals?

Aaron Barrall 00:12:44
I think, to put a finer point on it, this framework is sort of the evolution of something that California has been trying for about 15 years, which is to legalize and focus more infill housing near transit and shift our growth patterns from the more greenfield developments that we've historically seen in California's past and instead use land use as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve access to opportunity.

Madeline Brozen 00:13:14
So in doing this work you found that there's a lot of challenges when operationalizing the definition of a major transit stop. So let's just start with a pretty basic one, which is the difference between a single point on a map, which is like how map nerds might do it, right? It's like here's the station point, when in reality stations are bigger spaces, right? They're on a parcel or multiple parcels of land. So this kind of a station area is how people might experience it. But you need to figure out this half mile from a point or a polygon. So just walk us through this first little point of like how big is half a mile?

Jacob Wasserman 00:13:56
What is a stop? It's kind of the question you might meditate on a zen koan: what is a stop? And the first question we had to answer was: is a stop, like you said, a single point? And if you open up like Google Maps or the transit app, you'll see like a little pin and that's your station? Or is it the whole parcel, the whole lot of land that the station sits on, which includes, importantly, all of the station parking lots? And at some of these suburban stations outlying commuter rail stations or subway stations in the suburbs they're designed as park-and-ride. So there are huge surface parking lots or garages that collect cars from people driving from the whole surrounding area and this creates a big difference. If you just use a point, we took the example of Irvine Station. It's where commuter rail and long-distance Amtrak stop in Orange County. Just the point is about 500 acres within a half mile radius, the parcels 2,000 acres, so four times as big. And some of the reason for that is these parcels date back to when these were private railroad companies. They haven't been updated, but the state law is pretty clear that you should be using parcels. Another example: Antioch in the Bay Area. It's kind of the end of one of their subway lines, BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit. A half a mile will — we'll barely get you beyond the end of the parking lots. There's literally a half mile of parking there, and the difference then between just taking the single point on the platform and those whole parking lots matters a lot, for how far out from the station you can count to get these benefits like eligibility for more affordable housing, no parking requirements, things like that.

Aaron Barrall 00:15:42
And to speak on Antioch a little bit, that one hits home to me because when I was commuting to Berkeley in the Bay Area I would park at that station and it often took 10-12 minutes to walk from one end of the parking lot just to the station entrance, as we would typically define it.

Madeline Brozen 00:15:57
So it seems kind of almost silly that there's pretty big differences in interpretations, but to my knowledge there's not actually a single source of truth that the state has created, like codifying this into language that says: but essentially it sounds like more or less people are just using the transit feed, the GTFS. But, as you're kind of saying, is that like if you use a point versus the actual polygon out of the station, like the land that is actually developable changes widely? So am I crazy that, like that, someone should have come up with just the single source of truth of whether they're polygons or points? And is this just never been part of the discussion?

Jacob Wasserman 00:16:40
Some of this comes down to who the decision makers are. So there's the State Department of Housing and Community Development, HCD. They say to use parcels and guidance that they've put out, at least for certain of these laws, but no one's actually doing it. For the most part, from our survey of different regions of the state, and some of the decisions, especially some I'll talk about later, are political decisions, very intentional, what to count and what not to count. But some of them are just data issues. There isn't a data set that says these parcels, which are county by county. We had to go and collect every single county's parcel data and check if it was public or private, oftentimes using Google Street View. That's just a staff capacity issue and a data issue. And each region doesn't necessarily have the ability to do that, perhaps not the desire to do that, and so then you get differences by region or you just get parts of the law that are essentially ignored.

Aaron Barrall 00:17:37
And to speak on this from a developer perspective, oftentimes you'll see developers doing the legwork for this themselves, at least, for taking advantage of these different laws like unlimited density bonus or reductions or removal of parking requirements, where the developer will create a map saying, hey, our parcel is within half a mile of the station parcel. So that has a lot of work for developers. I'll also say that there is sort of a motivation for cities to not publish these maps because many of them don't want what some of these laws allow, like unlimited density, and so instead of saying out there in the open and publishing an easy map of where these laws apply, they would rather have somebody work hard to get it.

Madeline Brozen 00:18:19
I mean, it seems like it would be easiest if, like if this is what a state level approach is taking, that we try to avoid some of these localized fights by just trying to have transparency about this. But I think Jacob brings up a really good point. It's like: is this a California Department of Transportation issue? Is this a housing department issue? Should the state assembly or legislative analyst's office — like, there's a little bit of a kind of a first mover problem that is happening here. Although I do think it makes the case that someone should be the map cop. Like, it would just bring a lot of clarity and probably avoid fights on both the private and public side.

Juan Matute 00:19:01
So we've been talking about the spatial component, where things are on a map. There's also a temporal component: how often the service comes and what times of day. And so peak period, which I believe is in many of these bills, that phrase seems like it can have many definitions. I know what it means when it's used in travel models or air quality regulations. It's sometimes on signs that restrict parking on major boulevards. What did your team do to interpret the peak period applicability of certain transit services in order to trigger these bonuses?

Jacob Wasserman 00:19:37
The state guidance on this, interestingly, is to defer to each region. So each region has their metropolitan planning organization whose job it is to allocate money and do some amount of coordination across the different transit agencies in their region. They have their own travel models and they each have a different peak period. It's different in LA, Sacramento and the Central Valley, and perhaps that does reflect differences in travel patterns. I'm not sure. But the state washed their hands of it and said each region followed the definitions of peak period that they're already using for their modeling. We took a different approach where we said the peak is simply the time when there are the most trips. So we said any 60-minute rolling window if there are three trips in it, that counts as having 20-minute headways. Now the problem with that is, you know, you could have a trip at 8.01, 8.30 and 8.59. That's three trips within 60 minutes, but it's actually closer to a half hour between trips than it really is 20 minutes. So any approach you're going to take is going to have some problems, not necessarily relate to the experience of riding the bus on the ground. We're going to do some follow-up research, but I suspect that the biggest difference in what counts and what doesn't, is these peak period definitions.

Aaron Barrall 00:20:52
And just to illustrate why this matters a little more, we can say: okay, peak period is between 3 and 6 p.m. in one region or between 4 and 8 p.m. in another region. Now, depending on how you define that peak period window, certain stops can be included or excluded based off their frequency. So there's some interpretation here that there's cities and MPOs have flexibility for interpretation, and this really does affect whether a stop will be included under this definition.

Madeline Brozen 00:21:20
So we've gone through space, we've gone through time. The probably thorniest one, or most complicated, is about the intersection of two or more high frequency routes. We're going to kind of get into the weeds a little bit, although I'm going to try to keep us somewhere in the grass tops and not just get into super GIS nerd land which we could all probably live for a while. But you can make an argument to actually just make this definition more simple, like: do it as rail stops, do it as buses that come a lot. But why do you think that the definition also covers intersecting bus routes? Why make it more complicated?

Jacob Wasserman 00:22:00
Part of that is because buses are the workhorses of transit in California and in most of the country. So in California 73% of transit boardings are on a bus. That's going to be roughly the case most places except New York and built up cities on the East Coast. And even in LA, where we're expanding rail a ton, most riders are taking the bus. And so I don't know what the legislative debate was at the time when they first established this definition, but I think the idea was compromise between only counting rail or strict bus rapid transit — and that's actually the approach that SB 79 took — or a far more liberal approach would be to just do whole corridors. And there are actually other states that do this, where you don't need an intersection. You just have one single high-frequency bus line and the whole stretch counts toward these upzoning incentives. And so the intersections was kind of a compromise, but it's a messy compromise.

Madeline Brozen 00:22:56
So we'll get into this mess a little bit. What are just some of the most common issues with intersecting and overlapping routes that you found in your work?

Jacob Wasserman 00:23:07
To try to keep this as simple as possible. There's a few questions. One is: what counts as an intersection? Do they have to have two routes that just cross each other directly like an X? Or can you have routes that share a street for a block or two and then they diverge later? Can they share a route for a while and diverge later? And on those overlaps, there's the other question of can you add up the frequencies of those routes? And so, let's say, one bus comes every 30 minutes, another bus comes every 30 minutes. If you add them together they come every 15 minutes and they meet the threshold. But if you treat them separately, then it's not going to count. And you could have local and express routes. You could have routes that have totally different numbers. They just happen to share a corridor for a while, and so all these wrinkles come together to complicate and add discretion. So I think the one example we found was in Davis, California, which is home of UC Davis. There's a big loop of their bus system, their Unitrans. One direction is called the P and one direction is called the Q. If it was just labeled as the P clockwise and the P counterclockwise, then it would be one route. But for whatever reason they chose to classify them as two routes. And because they're two routes then they can intersect with each other. And so these classifications, the way that they name lines — are you doing the 29 or the 29 A or the 29 Rapid — affects whether an area is eligible for affordable housing, which in some ways is kind of crazy. And the last wrinkle is: what does it mean to transfer between buses? So the law in theory doesn't say anything about that, it just says where two bus routes cross. And you don't even technically need a stop if you're just reading the text of the law. But every jurisdiction we looked at had some sort of distance where you had to qualify to transfer between them. But some jurisdictions said 150 foot walk, some said up to 500 feet walk. And that's a pretty big difference. There are some stops that are 500 feet from each other at a major intersection where there's wide roads and a ton of traffic, and those still count as a transfer in those jurisdictions and people will still make that transfer between those two bus routes. But it's a pretty far walk and in other places those aren't going to count as major transit stops.

Juan Matute 00:25:31
So it sounds like in Davis they have to mind their P's and Q's. It also sounds like there's some ambiguity here in what points or shapes have applicable density bonuses and the applicable area that these density bonuses apply to. So there's a minimum and a maximum area. What's the difference between these areas?

Aaron Barrall 00:25:52
We found that there was a huge difference in the raw acreage covered under these different interpretations of state law. Our maximal with planned stops covered roughly 1,900,000 acres across the state, compared with about 600,000 acres under the more conservative minimal definition. Maximal without planned transit is about 1,700,000 acres. There's quite a lot of potential added just through those planned transit stops too. And when we consider large multi-family zone parcels that are likely eligible for the state density bonus program, we see a similar picture. The maximal approach roughly doubles the number of parcels and acres that are eligible for this super density bonus program compared to the minimal scenario. And it's really important to recognize that these different interpretations have dramatic effects on the regulations that a developer or a project faces. Whether a small project needs to include parking or whether an affordable housing project can build three times as many units as allowed under the base zonings can, in some cases, completely depend on how you interpret the frequency, intersection and half mile buffer provisions of this law. And so, while these numbers and interpretations are a bit abstract and esoteric, as we just got into a little bit, they really are quite important and directly impact the state's and other state's abilities to respond to our housing crisis by building more affordable housing, by building it in more places and hopefully at lower per unit costs, through economies of scale.

Jacob Wasserman 00:27:18
A member of our research team, Chloe Ingley. She's an undergrad here at UCLA. She just looked at the points versus parcels issue for rail and ferry stops, let alone all the other things we've raised. Just looking at that, the number of actual annual housing projects permitted goes up by 45% based on parcels versus the radius based on points. 45% more housing projects, just depending on which definition you're using.

Madeline Brozen 00:27:45
And you know, we know, that not every piece of land that could be developed into a high density place is going to be actually developed, right? So we kind of want as much land as possible, given that only a certain amount of this land is going to actually turn into housing units. So you could say that you know 45% more land could be developed, but that doesn't mean all of it will. And in a state that's just so far behind housing unit goals, it seems like it's in the interest of trying to maximize this definition as much as possible, to try to slowly get us to kind of meeting the goals.

Aaron Barrall 00:28:27
I think that's a fair assessment, and so I would imagine there are sort of two aspects that the legislatures were thinking of when they were writing this. The first is: okay, let's just expand that pool of land, like what you were saying, Maddy. Let's make sure we can build in more places that are efficient and close to high quality transit. And then the second is: let's make sure those projects get off the ground and we really get our value out of them. You can imagine in a situation where maybe under the existing zoning code of a city, you can build 10 units on a parcel and it's close to a train station. Well, that might be pretty good, but perhaps this parcel has the infrastructure, it's large enough to accommodate 50 and somebody wants to come in and do that. Why not build 50 instead of 10? It makes sense from an affordable housing perspective. It also makes sense from a transit perspective because you can add additional riders within that immediate transit shed for the station. So it really checks a lot of different boxes all at once.

Madeline Brozen 00:29:24
I was really having a hard time not hysterically laughing at this image. Did you AI this Paul Blart Map Cop situation?

Juan Matute 00:29:33
When I saw Map Cop, I thought of Mall Cop, and then I was like Paul Blart Map Cop, coming out of Sacramento with the proposed density bonus. I need to drain some lakes in order to create that image. So, with how contentious development is in California, it seems like those who control streets and where transit service goes may have an incentive to reduce or eliminate transit service in order to avoid these density bonuses. Do you have any evidence of this?

Jacob Wasserman 00:30:08
Good news, bad news. The good news is that we went back in the historical archives and we found what transit service was in 2014 and 2020, right on the eve of the pandemic. And if you take the definition today, the definition has changed a little over time in state law. But if you take the definition today, using those past transit service, we've actually added more land that's eligible for these incentives than we've removed. Gains outpacing losses by about 1.3 to 1.6 times, depending on which definition you're using. This is reflecting an overall expansion of transit service, new rail lines that have opened new routes and increased frequency. And that's a good thing for transit riders, but it also means that these laws are covering more of the state. I think the big counterexample — and Amy mentioned this last episode — is Atherton, California. It's a well-off suburb in Silicon Valley. It's the closest thing we have to a smoking gun. There was a rail station there, Caltrain commuter rail. It was a stop that had fairly low ridership, was only served on weekends anyway. The platform in the middle was too narrow and so only one train could stop at a time. So there were other reasons to close it, but in public meetings the leadership of the city was incredibly explicit that they wanted to close it because they wanted to avoid state zoning mandates. And so the vice mayor was in one of the meetings, said there's a serious risk with the potential for state-driven housing mandates that override local zoning, as his rationale for voting to close it. So that's an example, and there may be a few more coming down the pike, unfortunately. I think the bigger worry, though, is unintentional consequences where, let's say, you're a transit planner, you have a shortage of operators to run your buses, so you change frequencies on a route from every 18 minutes to every 21 minutes. You may not even know about these zoning laws, when you're doing that, you have unintentionally taken areas out of eligibility for affordable housing. And the situation even applies to rail. There was a rail spur, a light rail spur in San Jose, the purple line, that was closed. It was pretty low ridership, and they closed it, and so now those stations aren't eligible either. So we have decisions about housing being made totally unintentionally by transit planners, which, if I'm a staff person at a transit agency, is not what I want to be doing or what I want to be thinking about. I want to be trying to plan the best service for my riders and tying it to upzoning has created these conundrums and these perverse incentives.

Madeline Brozen 00:32:43
So if you're a developer and you want to see whether a piece of land fits the 20 minute headway, is it headways at the exact time of application or kind of like when? When is the service window that someone's supposed to look at?

Jacob Wasserman 00:32:56
So with most zoning issues in the state, it is when you apply, and there were some state laws around this to prevent cities from post facto changing their zoning after they got an application they didn't like. But it does raise the issue that you might want to get rid of the perverse incentive to cut transit in some way. So an idea I had — I don't know if anybody else is rolling with it, but — is to create kind of a five-year vesting period. So if a transit stop qualifies now, even if it closes, you get five years to continue to take those incentives for being within a half mile of it. On the plus side, that means that there's less of a reason for a city that doesn't want housing to cut their transit to avoid it. On the downside, you are de-linking housing and transit. The whole purpose of this was to build housing near transit service. And now you're saying you can build near where transit used to be. So you're starting to slip in the direct connection between housing and transit.

Madeline Brozen 00:33:56
But I think you could argue that slippage just isn't that important. When a rail or bus service goes from 18 to 21 minutes, like, that's still a rail station. That's still in the scheme of transit, like, that's still pretty good. And so I'd actually give it, go further than what you suggested, and just, why not have it be like a three-year rolling average or something that's, like, predictable? Because I think actually what you're talking about just shows how complicated it really is to decide in this moment. Because if a developer is looking at a piece of land, they're not able to file their application right after they find the land or are thinking about it, and so if the conditions change, you have to kind of redo your whole project. And it seems like if a bus changes from being applicable to being slightly off the cliff, that shouldn't really force people to redesign their whole project. So I guess I'm pitching to you all that were in the weeds of this, like: do you think about, just, like, some type of rolling average or some easier way to look at headways?

Aaron Barrall 00:35:05
I think that this really represents sort of a shift towards more performance-based zoning, which is: what you're allowed to build is conditional on some type of external factor, be it transit proximity or transit frequency or some other benchmark, like in the city of Los Angeles, which uses opportunity areas. And I think that this does create some type of misaligned incentive. And what Jacob suggested: it's better to do a vesting period that maybe you can take the highest point over the last three years, maybe a rolling average or some type of moving window that covers at least a substantial enough time in the past that developers don't face any uncertainty. They know that they can move forward with the project even if there's a small change in the future. This would help address some of these problems.

Jacob Wasserman 00:35:53
And this speaks to a tension that Aaron brought up earlier, of what the point of these laws are. Are they to build housing where the people who live in it use transit, or are they to open up as much land to housing as possible, which we desperately need, and ideally in areas where you can not just take transit but walk and bike and carpool? And if it's the latter, then yeah, maybe we shouldn't be so focused on these nitty gritty definitions and do something around vehicle travel instead, or density that already exists there. If you really are focused on transit, there's still reworking to be done, but maybe you continue to tie it to transit. And this goes to the fact that the state legislature is trying to do a lot of things with these laws at the same time, not necessarily recognizing or compromising over the fact that sometimes these goals are in tension.

Aaron Barrall 00:36:49
And one thing we really need to mention here is that the state legislature did address some of these problems through a bill in 2022. So, at least for state density bonus law, affordable housing developers are able to use the unlimited density provisions if they are located in what's called a low vehicle travel area, which essentially means a low vehicle miles traveled neighborhood. So I don't want to get all the way into what VMT is or how this is measured, but this provision helps address the incentive to cut transit, but it also has some other important benefits. So the first is that many areas that are near major transit stops are also VMT efficient. Not all, but a lot of them are. So cutting transit in these neighborhoods to get around state law, or even if transit is inadvertently cut, wouldn't necessarily remove the ability of a developer or a housing project to participate in these density bonus programs, because they would still qualify under this second pathway. And then the other benefit is that the low vehicle travel area dramatically expands the total land eligible for this density bonus program. We found that the low VTA or vehicle travel area inclusion more than doubled the amount of large likely eligible multi-family zone parcels for the super density bonus. And this is because the way the law was written means that most medium-sized cities that have any reasonable variance within their neighborhood VMT patterns will always have at least one neighborhood that meets the definition under the law. Another part of the pathway is that you're comparing these transit area zones to the entire region, which means that, at least for most neighborhoods in central cities, they'll nearly all be eligible under this pathway. For example, under the program in the city of Los Angeles, nearly the entire city is eligible under this low VTA provision. Only a few that are in, and even the more rural or suburban parts of the San Fernando Valley or Sun Valley are not eligible. The low vehicle travel pathway also has its own problems. So our friends up at the Terner Center, Rachel Strangeway and Zach Subin, have written an excellent policy brief about the details, but they basically find that there are vast differences in the neighborhoods flagged as VMT efficient depending on the different data source and model. So, as Maddie was alluding to earlier, there really isn't a single source of truth for VMT either. For this project we used a tool called VMT Index by Fehr & Peers, who were really gracious enough to share their data with us for this research, but it's possible that our results would be different if we used a different VMT data set.

Madeline Brozen 00:39:24
So just as we were gearing up to get into maybe the hottest or most controversial part, which is, how does this conversation around more housing and transit go in the future, and talking about SB 79 or kind of the newest California law, maybe the most hot topic, literally my computer melted down. So everything just felt real ready to get into this part of the conversation. But let's just kind of quickly, for our listeners, talk about how this newest housing law is actually different from what we've been talking about. Because we have this major transit stop and then different bills in California reference it, but that we have this new way of doing it. How is that different than what we've already been talking about?

Jacob Wasserman 00:40:08
SB 79 is a little different. It's a more limited set of stops. So it still uses that major transit stop base but it says only rail, only certain bus rapid transit stations and only in certain counties. The counties that had more powerful legislators to get out of it got out of it. And it uses a new definition of what a stop is, not points, not parcels, but pedestrian entrances. So kind of strikes a middle ground there. And the other thing it does is it does appoint a map cop just for SB 79, but it says that these metropolitan planning organizations, the regional level, they can produce a map that has a rebuttable presumption of validity, meaning that still not definitive, but you're probably gonna have to go to court if you disagree with them all. That said, the kind of logic and the debates around SB 79 are similar to the pre-existing major transit stop issue. There's the perverse incentive to cut transit to avoid housing, and that's a huge thing with 79 right now, as we record tomorrow. So it will have already happened by the time you're listening. The city of Burbank is debating what elements to put in a proposed bus rapid transit project that Metro, the county transit agency, is proposing to run through their city and the debate is less from what I've seen online and in the agenda, less about you know what type of service improvements like full-time versus part-time, dedicated lanes, are going to help the transit run better. It's less even about grievances from drivers about their lanes being taken away. It's all about SB 79. It's all about: is this going to meet the threshold? That's going to upzone minorly parts of our city around these stops — and I say minorly, it's like six to nine stories. But this debate is coming to a head. It's not just the Atherton Caltrain Station anymore. And there was this cleanup bill this session, Senate Bill 1361, where LA County basically just tried to exempt themselves. They said: because we're doing a good job, we have this program to use publicly owned parcels around our stations to create housing, which they are doing, we should get an exemption from SB 79. And that went to committee and the committee actually flipped it on its head and they said no, no, no, LA County still counts. And instead we're going to say that a local city can't use housing reasons, SB 79 reasons, in order to deny transit projects. And so that bill now became something that's trying to cut down on these perverse incentives. We'll see if it passes. We'll see if the language is where it needs to be to rein in these kinds of discussions. But SB 79 is the boogeyman of California planning right now. And it's all about fighting about what elements are in transit projects and when they're going to be built.

Aaron Barrall 00:43:03
And putting all my cards on the table here as somebody who is really excited about the potential for SB 79 to help address our housing crisis here in California. This is a nuanced situation. Let's not pretend like we can't understand why Metro is a little bit afraid of SB 79 as a new source of community opposition for service expansion, for new rail, for BRT. I mean, we're actually seeing it on the ground here. And so I think that there is a lot of potential with this new cleanup law. But, like Jacob said, this is probably going to need to be an iterative process where every year, the state legislators come back and they say: okay, do we need to close any loopholes? How can we ensure that SB 79 is not being used as a cudgel against transit expansion and so we can really build out both of our transit network and capacity while we're building affordable and market rate housing?

Madeline Brozen 00:43:55
I have to say that I have a hard time trying to parse out: like, really, is this opposition to new housing? Is this opposition to transit? It just feels like it's all kind of opposition to change. It's just got different flavor of a similar argument. And so it's heartening to hear that there's going to be iterations to try to close these loopholes, because, yeah, we don't want implementation whack-a-mole, right? Which is kind of what we're seeing play out. So the goal of your work is to not just have us researchers dig in the data and come up with all these different policy problems, but to actually kind of go to where we started is to think about how transportation and land use can be aligned, to do this transparently, to do it easily, so that new developers can see what type of incentives they're eligible for. Are there other examples, whether it's in different sectors of California or just from other places, that have just been done easier than how we're doing it with this major transit stop definition?

Jacob Wasserman 00:45:00
I think it's important to question why we have ambiguity in law. To take a political science hat for a second: you're never going to write legislative code that gets rid of all ambiguities. And a fun example is there's one of these sections of law that says: if you're near a major transit stop or a car share. And I saw an application from a developer where they listed their personal car on Turo, which is like an app where you can rent people's cars, and they said: my car is a car share. Now it counts. And it actually got through. And so you're always going to have loopholes one direction or another. The purpose of the ambiguity is one, strategic compromise. We ask as researchers: oh, why didn't they make it clearer? Well, maybe it was intentional that it wasn't clear so that it could get through the legislative process. And then two is that we work with this data day in, day out. Staff at transit agencies and regional planners do too. The lawmakers and their staff don't necessarily know the limits of the data, or they think that the law shouldn't be bound by the limits of those data. So when we talk about parcels, there isn't a great data set, but maybe there should be, and maybe that's where the law is aiming. So I think, with all that in mind, we could move toward something that is less variable — 18 minutes versus 21 minutes of service, all these wrinkles — and instead have something, like Aaron said, performance-based, where you could say, instead of service, let's do it based on ridership, high ridership transit lines. You could have something based on existing density. Other states are kind of feeling this out. I know that Illinois and New York are either considering or adopting incentives for building around transit. The other thing to step back is that the state defines high-quality transit as a bus every 20 minutes. Let's not lose the fact that's terrible service. If you're waiting 19 minutes for a bus, you're standing outside for a long time in the sun or in the cold in other parts of the country. And if you're a European or someone from South America and you see that we're calling high quality transit every 20 minutes, you'd be aghast. So it's important to step back from the technical definitions and think: what are we really considering good transit? How are we really focusing our housing around transit that's gonna work for the people who are gonna use it?

Madeline Brozen 00:47:27
So I guess you're kind of trying to inspire us to think beyond just this codified definition that is trying to be a compromise, right, where it's trying to cover an amount of land that's reasonable, that's not trying to grab everything, but that, you know, if you're a transit rider you are expecting something a little bit better. But in a way this is kind of just trying to nudge us forward. And I think that the evidence hopefully will show that this is the next evolution, that it's better than where we're coming from, these just regional sustainability plans. We are getting more localized action, but that we're going to need to just keep iterating to find a way to do better, to deliver more housing in the right places that are making it so that there's a better coordination between housing and transportation.

Jacob Wasserman 00:48:23
That's fair. And I think that speaks to the inclusion of planned transit. So some of Amy Lee's work has looked at their planned transit stops that are kind of just pencil marks on a map. They're not going to really be built for 20 years, if that. And so someone in the community might legitimately say, why should a development get upzoning for being close to this line that is never going to exist or is going to exist generations from now? On the other hand, to your point about the coordination you can see in other countries and even some examples in the U.S., where if you build housing at the same time you're building transit. You can create a planned mixed-use community around a transit hub that works really well, and so there is a point to this future transit being part of the definition. It just requires careful integrated planning across transportation and housing sectors that, at the moment in California, doesn't exist outside of a few examples.

Aaron Barrall 00:49:23
It's the classic chicken or egg problem. I mean, I've been to a lot of community meetings where people say, oh well, it sounds great to have more housing here or raise densities or something like that, but there's just not enough transit there yet. Okay, so if you plan the transit first, then you can get this type of density that makes transit successful over time — not all at once, but maybe over a 20-year build-out — and then by the time that this new transit line is open or bus stop or frequencies or services added, you really have the residential support there, the residential density. Once you have the build-out, you'll have the density that's needed to make these transit lines successful.

Madeline Brozen 00:50:02
It's a great point. These things don't just happen overnight. You know, in Los Angeles, outside of downtown, the places where we have most transit and the most density are the places we have the most ridership, right? Like, these things do naturally come together when they're planned really well. And I think that what this idea is trying to advance is just starting somewhere, right? Like, we have to start with the plans that we're making and trying to guide our housing investments towards those. It's not going to be perfect. You've highlighted so much of the mess that people are wading through and interpretation, but whether it's the chicken or the egg, we got to start on one side of it, right. And so I think what this work is doing and what the intent of doing is towards coordination. And I guess kind of time will tell a little bit how well it really worked.

Juan Matute 00:50:56
So, on Road Scholar 30-year edition, we can re-evaluate what's happened here and what worked, what didn't. Stay tuned.

Madeline Brozen 00:51:05
We can go back to the — what was the BART stop?

Jacob Wasserman 00:51:09
Antioch.

Juan Matute 00:51:10
Antioch, BART. It's an eBART stop actually, because it doesn't actually go through to the BART system. You have to go to Antioch and then get on a little thing to get on the bigger thing.

Madeline Brozen 00:51:20
Well, in 30 years, in our anniversary of this show, we can take a field trip out to Antioch and kind of see if the housing has really developed outside of that parking lot and kind of created this positive cycle of housing and transportation out there. Well, with that, thank you both for joining and for getting into the weeds of the data and what this means, and have a good rest of your day.

Jacob Wasserman 00:51:45
Thanks so much.

Aaron Barrall 00:51:47
Thanks for having me.

Madeline Brozen 00:51:51
You can read more about Jacob and Aaron's work on our website. lewis.ucla.edu, where the show notes and transcript can be found. Thanks again to Transfers Magazine for their support. You can find them at transfersmagazine.org. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Bluesky and LinkedIn. Thanks for listening.

Contributor

Michael Lens

Host
Contributor

Michael Manville

Host
Contributor

Paavo Monkkonen

Host
Contributor

Shane Phillips

Host