California transit agencies are ready and willing to move forward with over three dozen green transportation projects. These ranges from bus rapid transit lines, to bike lanes, to bicycle lanes. If the Legislature does not act, these projects could be stalled by years of costly, time-consuming analysis as well as lawsuits based on the fact that they are detrimental to the environment.
These are the key findings in a new report. ReportSPUR, an urban planning think tank, provides yet another data point in the discussion around the California Environmental Quality Act. California was a leader in environmentalist activism when it required disclosure of the environmental effects of every proposed urban development project and provided mitigation measures. But it’s facing growing criticism for enabling lawsuits unrelated to the environment, like the one that Nearly cause UC Berkeley to rescind thousands more undergraduate applications earlier this academic year.
The SPUR report assesses the impact of a 2020 bill, SB 288, that temporarily exempted certain green transportation projects from CEQA, preventing head-scratchers like San Francisco’s four-year pause on bike lane installation as it navigated environmental lawsuits. With SB 288 set to expire at the end of this year, transit agencies across the state are worried they’ll once again be subject to such lawsuits.
Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco-based senator, has proposed an extension of SB 288, which he also spearheaded. His new bill, SB922, has passed the Senate environment committee and is now up for hearing before the full Senate.
SB 922 would allow for the CEQA exemption to light-rail, bus and walking projects until 2030. It would require labor standards, as well as antidisplacement analysis, for large projects that exceed $100 million. It would not apply to heavy rail projects, such as subways and high speed rail, or any project that would increase vehicle travel.
“We’ve now tested it out and it’s been very successful,” Wiener said of SB 288. “It would be a tragedy if it expired at the end of this year.”
The SPUR report lists 15 projects that received SB 288, seven in San Francisco. They include the transit-only lanes on Seventh and Eighth streets in SoMa, the Evans and Williams bike lanes in the Bayview and the “road diet” to improve safety on South Van Ness Avenue. The bill also helps Culver City to build bike and bus lanes and Monterey County to build a bus rapid transit line.
These projects would not have been possible without CEQA streamlining. However, they could have taken months, if not years, to complete with corresponding increases in staff time or cost.
The report identifies an additional 38 projects whose planners are considering using SB 288, but are unable to because of the bill’s sunset date at the end of this year. These include bus priority signs in Tahoe, a 47-mile bike route in Napa, and bus-only lanes along San Pablo and Grand avenues. In San Francisco, extending the bill would continue to bolster San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s “quick build” program, benefiting transit improvement projects on Bryant, Polk and other streets.
More than half of all projects seeking CEQA streamlining are electric or hydrogen-bus charging infrastructure. These include many in heavily polluted inland cities such as Riverside and Fresno. Last year, California ramped up emissions reductions goals for transit agencies, and they’re now racing to meet those thresholds.
Wiener claims that CEQA is an impediment right now. “There are a lot of environmental goals that are going to be hard to meet if we don’t have streamlining,” he said.
Laura Tolkoff, transportation policy director for SPUR and the lead author of the report, said the bill would “make it possible to align our resources and our goals and get these projects in the ground.”
SB 922 is cosponsored and supported by the Mayor London Breed and SFMTA.
The Sierra Club California was the only known opponent when the bill came before the Senate environmental committee. In a letter to the Legislature, the group wrote that SB 922 includes CEQA exemptions for “a broad range of projects that could have significant environmental impacts,” adding that the bill is “unnecessary and potentially harmful.”
The group dropped opposition to the bill on Tuesday thanks to amendments that added a sunset date to it, prevented taxis from using transit only lanes, and clarified the definition for pedestrian improvements. Sierra Club California declined to comment.
While few transportation projects actually face CEQA lawsuits — fewer than 1%, according to a Caltrans study from 2017 — many are crafted specifically to head off the possibility of litigation or appeal.
“It’s not about how many lawsuits are filed,” Wiener said. “It’s about the fact that the constant fear and threat of lawsuits triggers more and more expensive and time-consuming CEQA processes so that it takes much longer and is more expensive than it would have been otherwise.”
Wiener calls CEQA “a very, very important law when it comes to assessing the impacts of projects that have the real potential to be environmentally harmful.” But, he said, “the idea that we don’t distinguish between expanding a highway and expanding bus service … that’s a problem.”
As California tries to get people out of their cars — the state’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions — cities will need to rapidly remake their transportation systems, Tolkoff said.
“We can’t just tell people to stop driving so much without actually giving them better ways to get around.” If SB 922 fails, Tolkoff added, “We’re going to continue having really strong aspirations to reduce our climate pollution, but not a lot of tools to actually change it.”
According to a report, 15 projects including bus transit-only lanes on Seventh and Eighth Streets benefited from SB 288. SB 922 aims at expanding it. (Craig Lee/The Examiner)
