Californians have long debated the environmental value of public transit, from the state’s bullet train to Los Angeles’ ongoing subway tunneling to San Diego’s envisioned commuter rail expansion.
Proponents have repeatedly argued that trains and buses are a crucial part of curbing planet-warming emissions, while opponents have countered that electric vehicles will address such environmental concerns.
When San Diego transportation officials sought approval a year ago for a roughly $160 billion blueprint to expand the region’s rail system, for example, local conservatives questioned whether the vision would actually help address climate change.
“The future of transportation is almost certainly going to be autonomous, clean vehicles, and that’s already at our doorstep,” Coronado Mayor Richard Bailey said during a public hearing on the issue. “This plan largely ignores them.”
However, the debate over the future of transit is, in many ways, rooted in a fundamental disagreement about something else: housing. Specifically, should sprawling residential neighborhoods be transformed into densely populated communities akin to San Francisco or West Hollywood?
Researchers contend that if California wants to lower its soaring cost of housing while simultaneously slashing its carbon footprint, cities must focus on urbanizing communities — density that will need to be serviced by public transit to avoid rush-hour gridlock.
To address the threat of blackouts, elected leaders from Sacramento to San Diego are pushing developers to build multi-family housing in coastal areas where there’s lower demand for power-hungry heating and cooling systems.
“An apartment building has much lower energy and water use than a detached single-family house,” said Juan Matute, deputy director of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies. “Buildings are going to get cleaner, but the state is counting on substantial reductions in (per-capita) energy use to accommodate electric vehicles.”
Without such changes in land use, just expanding public transit won’t significantly reduce greenhouse gases, experts warn. For example, sprawling L.A. has invested heavily in rail projects without significant increases in density over the last decade, only to see ridership decline.
At the same time, building significantly more single-family housing serviced by cars and freeways could undermine the state’s ability to meet its climate goals.
“If you don’t change development patterns, you end up having more power generation, including delaying retiring existing natural gas plants to accommodate the switch to electric vehicles,” Matute said.
Even with more densely packed housing, the state projects that electricity demand will nearly double by 2045, as vehicles and home appliances switch over from fossil fuels. That’s also when the state aims to zero out its carbon footprint.
Zero-emission vehicles accounted for nearly 18 percent of all sales so far this year, up from less than 7 percent in 2019, according to the California Energy Commission.
Another advantage of urbanizing places such as sprawling Southern California could include not only cheaper housing but significantly lower transportation costs for commuters, according to experts.
“The real point is cars are hugely expensive whether they’re electric or gasoline,” said Dan Sperling, a member of the California Air Resources Board and founding director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. “We have probably the most inefficient and resource-intensive transportation system imaginable.”
Boosting public transit could also have the added environmental benefit of limiting the production of new electric vehicles, said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment.
“Cars take a lot of energy to manufacture and dispose of, and while electricity is a much cleaner fuel than petroleum, it’s far better to avoid buying a car in the first place,” he said. “But this is only possible for people if we develop enough walkable, bikeable and affordable neighborhoods.”
So far, such urban communities are rare in California. Many parts of the state were built after World War II when auto-centric suburbia was in vogue. For example, San Diego County, which today is home to nearly 3.3 million people, had less than 300,000 residents in 1940.
Pinnacle on the Park apartments look over San Diego’s East Village, shown here on Jan.13, 2020.
(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
It’s not clear if new housing construction will significantly pick up anytime soon. While the threat of wildfire and habitat loss have increasingly stifled sprawling residential developments, many communities across the state have repeatedly blocked new multi-family housing projects that would promote urbanization.
At the same time, transit ridership had been declining over the last decade before plummeting during the pandemic. Nationwide transit use last year was less than half what it was in 2014 at its peak, according to the American Public Transportation Association.
Now many agencies face the prospect of having to cut service as emergency federal funding runs out, most notably Bay Area Rapid Transit. The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System has said it has enough stimulus cash to last at least through 2027, with ridership down by roughly 40 percent since its high-water mark in 2015.
“Transit systems are in dire shape and facing a fiscal cliff in the next few years,” said Sperling of UC Davis.
Given the situation, some elected officials are skeptical about pouring more money into costly rail systems, especially when population growth in the state has flat-lined.
“I used to joke, you want to be safe from the pandemic, go hang out on a bus or a trolley because there ain’t nobody there,” said El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells.
Many Southern Californians balk at idea of sharing walls with neighbors or carrying grocery bags down a crowded sidewalk, Wells suggested.
“Americans don’t want to be told what to do,” he said. “People are going to resist, even if it’s going to cost them more money or if it’s not as good for the environment.”
