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-recognized
consequences, including increasing the cost of infill development in urban
areas (where roadways are typically more congested at baseline, making
project-level transportation impacts more likely) and generally making the
built environment more auto-centric. And many planners and policymakers
viewed VMT as a more appropriate metric for achieving sustainability
goals, like reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improved public health
and safety, and more streamlined infill development amidst California’s
ongoing housing crisis. However, the LOS-to-VMT shift was also expected to
create numerous challenges for transportation analysts, given the
often-limited resources of local governments, the ingrained nature of LOS
in transportation impact analyses, and the perceived lack of established
practice with respect to VMT estimation, mitigation, and monitoring. With
those concerns in mind, we undertook this study to investigate how local
governments have been implementing the LOS-to-VMT shift for land
development projects. We first explored whether and how local governments
considered VMT impacts in CEQA analyses prior to the mandated change in
transportation impact analysis metrics. We then used document review,
direct outreach, and expert interviews to catalogue how each of
California’s 539 cities and counties have responded to SB 743, focusing on
jurisdictions’ acknowledgment of the policy shift, thresholds of VMT
impact significance, VMT impact estimation methods (and tools), VMT impact
mitigation guidance (and tools), VMT mitigation monitoring,
inter-jurisdictional collaboration, continued use of LOS, and perceived
effect of the LOS-to-VMT shift on land use development. The data set
stored here summarizes our inventory findings. [1] LOS is generally
assessed using six letter grades, from A (free flow) to F, which denote
different levels of vehicular delay for intersections and different
combinations of automobile speed, density, and capacity for roadway
sections.