Summary of SB 743 implementation efforts by California's 539 cities and counties

In 2013, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill (SB 743) into law. Pursuant to that direction, the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) and the California Natural Resources Agency promulgated regulations and technical guidance that eliminated automobile level of service (LOS) – a measure of automobile delay – as a transportation impact metric for land development projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and replaced it with Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) – a measure of the amount of vehicular travel. Actual implementation of the LOS-to-VMT shift was left up to lead agencies—the agencies with primary approval authority over a given project, which for land development projects is usually leading a local government (city or county). Agencies were required to start using a VMT-based metric by July 1, 2020.
Using LOS as the guiding metric for transportation impacts prioritizes vehicular flows and speed. As a result, it has had increasingly well-recogniz..., ,