Preliminary Evaluation of the Coastal Transportation Corridor Ordinance in Los Angeles

The Coastal Transportation Corridor Ordinance attempts to regulate traffic congestion in a busy Los Angeles community by requiring new real estate developments to mitigate their trips and to contribute to a trust fund to be used to improve traffic flow within the affected area. In order to conduct a preliminary evaluation of the trip reduction portion of the ordinance, a sample of eight buildings housing 117 firms was selected. Three buildings housing 44 firms were subject to the ordinance, and a control group of five buildings housing 73 firms were not affected by the ordinance. Differences in ridesharing facilities, services, and subsidies were observed, and 1,216 workers in the two groups of buildings were surveyed to determine their travel patterns. The results show that developers affected by the ordinance are significantly more likely to include preferential parking for carpoolers in their projects, and to include some bicycle parking facilities as well. The buildings affected by the ordinance offer a substantially smaller proportion of their employees free parking at work and, among those who pay to park, those in the buildings covered by the ordinance pay higher rates. The provision of these facilities, and the combination of parking fees and other promotional efforts, have had a very small initial effect on workers’ decisions to drive to work alone. The proportion of workers driving to work alone is similar in the experimental and control groups. Though twice as many workers in buildings affected by the ordinance reported carpooling to work, they were a small fraction of the workforce. A sizable proportion of workers in the study area generally depart from work outside the peak period, probably in order to avoid late afternoon congestion. 2 INTRODUCTION American attitudes toward transportation planning have recently undergone significant change. For three decades after the end of World War II, public policy emphasized the construction of new highway and transit facilities to remove the backlog of needs which resulted from the combined effects of depression, a war economy, continued urban growth, and accelerating automobile ownership. For the most part, there was consensus among transportation policymakers that their primary goal was to accommodate growth by constructing facilities which would have adequate capacity to handle future demand. It was understood that land use patterns and economic development were the sources of traffic, yet there was general agreement that transportation policy should aim to accommodate forecast land use and economic growth rather than to regulate them in order to control traffic. Views of transportation policymakers have been changing under pressure from increasing growth and traffic congestion, coupled with growing limits on transportation budgets, and increasing opposition to highway construction by environmental coalitions and community groups. Now, policymakers frequently argue that "we can’t build our way out of our problems," and that attempts to accommodate growth solely by increasing transportation system capacity impose greater costs on communities than are warranted by their benefits. In the seventies, this shift in emphasis gave rise to "transportation system management," the augmentation of capacity through low-capital-cost approaches such as traffic signal synchronization and reserved lanes for high occupancy vehicles. In the early eighties, "transportation demand management" was also emphasized, including efforts to promote ridesharing and transit use by workers through a variety of subsidy and incentive programs. In the late eighties this growing movement oward management rather than facility construction has emphasized changes in land use policy and the spatial redirection of economic growth to control traffic at its source (1). In Los Angeles there have been several regulatory programs, ballot initiatives, and municipal ordinances directed toward limiting traffic by controlling land use and real estate development. They have all been enacted so recently that relatively few evaluative studies have yet taken place. It is important to track progress under these programs and to learn from them, so that new programs and amendments to older ones are informed by past successes and mistakes. This paper is a preliminary evaluation of one of the recent Los Angeles programs.