BONUS: Sizing up California's freeway budget

AB: Hey listeners, before I bring you this next bonus episode, I have a very exciting announcement… mainly for listeners in San Diego. On August 31, I'm going to be joining the San Diego Urbanist meetup group for a Freeway Exit communal listening experience. We're going to meet at the Balboa Park trail entrance at Vermont and Cypress in Hillcrest at 11 a.m. We'll pop in our headphones and listen to the first two episodes of Freeway Exit as we hike alongside the 163. We'll finish with drinks at Panama 66 for a very casual hangout and discussion. Again that's August 31, 11 a.m., trailhead at Vermont and Cypress in Hillcrest. And I highly recommend wearing noise canceling headphones if possible. The freeway will be very noisy and I don't want your listening experience to be compromised.

I will also have a handful of Freeway Exit t-shirts to give away. So don't miss it, I'll see you there. And if you're not in San Diego… maybe consider organizing one of these group listening experiences yourself. Even with just a friend or two. Alright, here's the show.

____________________________________________________________________________

CR: The wrinkle for transportation is that transportation funding was actually as high as it's ever been.

Music in

CR: The disappointing thing is that all of this funding coming in from Congress, which the state has a ton of leeway to spend according to how the state wants, basically protected a bunch of highway maintenance and expansion programs rather than doubling down on our successful investments in active transportation.

AB: From KPBS in San Diego, this is Freeway Exit. I'm Andrew Bowen. Today we're talking with Carter Rubin. He's the director of state transportation advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It's an environmental nonprofit that recently sued Caltrans over a freeway widening project west of Sacramento. Rubin is the co-author of a report released last fall that sought to quantify just how much money California is spending on infrastructure projects that will increase car travel… and greenhouse gas emissions. And as you'll hear, it was not easy. The report is called Closing the Climate Investment Gap. So I asked Carter… what is the Climate Investment Gap?

CR: The Climate Investment Gap is the gap between our climate ambitions and our goals for California and how we are actually spending our money. The difference between the goals that we're reaching for in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the fact that the way we are investing our transportation funding is not fully reaching those lofty goals.

AB: I think it's worth stating or restating, we've spoken about this on the podcast before, vehicle travel, car travel is really the linchpin to California's climate goals. We have a pretty clear path to achieving more renewable energy, so zeroing out our emissions from power plants and from the electricity grid. But it's really car travel is like the key to actually closing that delta where we can reduce emissions to a certain point, but until we start driving a lot less, we're still going to plateau in our emissions reductions. Is that right?

CR: That's right. And because California has made a lot of progress on the power sector, reducing emissions from power plants by bringing more clean energy online. Transportation has emerged and stayed at this place of being the largest source of climate pollution in the state. Right now, almost 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in California come from the transportation sector. So that's cars, trucks, trains, boats, and planes. And of all of that, passenger vehicles is the largest chunk. So one of the ways that we are addressing pollution from passenger vehicles is by bringing on cleaner vehicles. But we know that the speed at which we need to reduce climate pollution is so great that we can't just rely on cleaner vehicles. To get us all the way there, we need to bring online more clean mobility choices for Californians, like safe bike paths and more frequent bus service and clean electric rail systems to help Californians get around without having to get in their car. Or for Californians that don't have a car at all, just make it easier for them to get around and enjoy all the great things there are to do in our state.

AB: Let's dig into the details of this report. You look at 10 buckets of transportation funding in the state budget, and you assess which of those funding buckets are moving us closer to our climate goals and which ones are moving us further away from our climate goals. So break down for me how you did that analysis.

CR: We really did it one project at a time. And part of what inspired this analysis was my experience advocating for clean transportation at the state level. And year after year seeing the state approving lists of projects and you'd go through dozens of different PDFs with hundreds of pages of projects. And it was really hard to get a 20,000-foot level if the projects that we're funding were actually helping us reach our state's goals. And that's what inspired us to look through 4,824 projects to actually get a sense of whether we were moving the needle in the right direction. We looked at those projects spanning appropriations starting in 2019, all the way through some out perspective years up to 2027, to get a sense. Project by project, are the dollars going towards projects that decrease vehicle miles traveled, have no impact either way, or increase vehicle miles traveled? You might expect the projects that decrease vehicle miles traveled to be investments in new rail lines or bike paths or sidewalks or pedestrian safety improvements. Projects that would have no impact might be, reconstructing a bridge as it is or repaving a highway. And projects that increase vehicle miles traveled are those that primarily expand highways with new lanes or substantially increase the footprint of highway interchanges.

At a 20,000-foot level, what we found is that about 20% of the state's investments were going to projects that help us achieve our climate goals. That's good. About 10% were working in the opposite direction. We're counterproductively expanding highways in a way that's going to increase driving when we know need to help Californians get around in cleaner ways. And then 70%, the biggest chunk of what we looked at, were maintenance projects. And so that both reflects, we've already built out this massive highway system. It costs a lot to maintain, and that's where most of our investment is going. And it shows that there is an opportunity to leverage those maintenance investments, to put in upgrades for people biking or walking or taking transit on these state highways so that they can be not just a maintenance project, but also help align with our climate goals.

AB: The worst funding program that you found in this report in terms of its climate impacts is the State Highway and Operations Protection Program, or SHOP. Tell me more about this program. What is its purpose and what makes it so climate unfriendly?

CR: The shop is this really significant program, and this is the largest chunk of money that the state is investing. It goes towards basically maintaining and upgrading the state highway system, the corridors owned and operated by Caltrans. According to our scoring, we gave positive weight to projects that reduce VMT, and we gave negative weight to projects that increase VMT. We also gave some negative weight to maintenance projects that didn't also help invest in bike, pedestrian, transit projects because that's a missed opportunity. The need of investment in those types of projects is so great. We can't afford to spend billions and billions of dollars without actually trying to retrofit our existing system to make it support clean mobility. So we graded shop the most harshly for that reason because it's just so big and it spends so much money without actually creating complete streets for all road users. And Caltrans has had on the books some policies to support complete streets, but we're not all the way there in terms of implementation. And this shop has a lot of work to do. And one thing that we noticed in going through the shop program is while it is supposed to be just about maintaining the system we have, we did find a number of projects that are expanding highways in a way that we think is not aligned with how that program is supposed to work.

AB: And the best program that you found in terms of climate and reducing car travel is the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program. Can you tell me more about that one?

CR: Yeah, this is a program that was created a few years ago that I think could be a model for the investment the state needs to make. I think This program is indicative that in a lot of places, the state is doing really good things, but we just need to do it more consistently across the board. That is a program that helps fund the linkage of affordable housing and transportation projects. We've seen great examples of projects where local governments and nonprofit affordable housing developers work together so that when we're bringing online new affordable housing units, we're not just plopping that down in the middle of a place where the residents can't connect to jobs or education. At the same time, that program is funding improvements to build out bike networks and improve safe pedestrian crossings so that we have this comprehensive approach to land use and transportation.

AB: You mentioned about 20% of the funds that you analyzed were decreasing vehicle miles traveled. Vmt, about 10% were increasing it. Did that surprise you at all that the state is actually still spending more money on climate friendly projects than it is on climate unfriendly projects? I mean, it struck me as a little surprising, frankly.

CR: I think what it emphasized for me is that the state plays a really critical role as a leader in encouraging the right kinds of projects, and there's still a gap in terms of where we need to be investing our money to actually match the state's goals on climate. I think what it also points us to is a next area of research that we need to get into is the important role local funding in these projects. A lot of the funding that the state was allocating to highway expansions are projects that are coming out of county or regional governments. I think that points to me that there's still a this alignment between what the state says we need to be doing with our transportation investments and where many of the counties and regions are at. And those counties and regions do generate a significant amount of transportation funding through local sales taxes or local property taxes. And those plans are not always in line with the state's climate goals. And so that's where we need the state to be using its transportation funding to encourage and incentivize the regions to be coming to the table with the right kinds of projects.

AB: I've made some attempts in the past to try and trace funding in the state budget that goes to freeways and freeway expansions. As you indicated, it's really hard. Freeway projects often have multiple funding sources from the state, local, and federal governments. You're dealing with very confusing technical documents that aren't even easy to find online sometimes. The cynic in me wonders whether this system that we have developed for paying for transportation infrastructure is opaque by design. It's intended to mask just how much of our tax dollars are still being spent on things that dig us deeper into this hole of car dependence. Any thoughts on that.

CR: That was exactly the impetus for writing this report, the sense that it was really hard to follow the money. We literally went through all these PDFs, project lists, and then pulled the data out and cleaned it up the best we could and tried to centralize it in one place. And that's a recommendation that we had coming out of our report, to have the state create more of a transparent clearinghouse of information about transportation projects. There's a bill in the legislature this year, AB 2086 from Assembly member Schiavo called the Transportation Transparency and Accountability Act. That would require Caltrans to transparently track and report to the legislature and the public on how their transportation investments are advancing California's goals. So that's the thing that I think we really need, is to level the playing field so the public can really understand where its tax dollars are going and take the power back to the people, because I would agree that those within Caltran's headquarters, they understand how this all works and the fact that it's hard to parse from the outside gives them a certain amount of power and leverage to control the process.

AB: What are some of the other recommendations in your report?

CR: It's pretty straightforward. We need to stop funding VMT increasing projects. We just don't have any time or money to based on projects that not only undermine our climate goals, but increase local air pollution, maybe claim to help reduce congestion, but in many cases, just put more cars on the roads by encouraging more driving. The next is that we need to help convert projects that are your maintenance projects to ones that are actively helping enable more biking, walking, and transit ridership. So that would mean if Caltrans is doing a major maintenance overhaul of one of its state highways, and Caltrans owns a lot of streets that look like urban boulevards, like Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles or El Camino Real in the Bay Area. They're actually state highways. And so when they come and lay a bunch of new asphalt, they should be putting in bike lanes or transit improvements so that they're leveraging the capital project where they can, at a pretty small incremental cost, really make it a more multimodal corridor. I think we also need to build a better pipeline of VMT-reducing projects. I think we find that a lot of the project lists, the wish lists that have been on the books for decades, are really the most out of step with where our state needs to be going.

One of the ways we can do that is build up a better pipeline of ideas and basically shovel-ready projects. And we've seen how the state can help enable that. And one of the really high-scoring programs that we studied was the Active Transportation program. And that is one of the most oversubscribed programs in the state, where there are dozens and dozens of cities waiting on the state and putting together really compelling and competitive projects, but there's just not enough money in that program. We have this long backlog of bike and pedestrian projects waiting in the queue that we need to get funded. Then the last recommendation is that data transparency and tracking so that instead of having to go through 10 different lists of projects and track down different PDFs, all the data is in one place where you can look at it and come to your own conclusions.

AB: After a short break, we'll talk about how freeways fared in the recent budget negotiations in Sacramento. And what Carter calls the most important state agency that hardly anyone talks about. Stay tuned.

BREAK

AB: We're back… and here's more of my interview with Carter Rubin, director of state transportation advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

AB: The state of California had to close a very massive budget deficit for the fiscal year that just started on July first. What are some of the budget cuts that you were unhappy with?

CR: I think a lot of folks who were following the budget saw those top-line numbers where the budget deficit was in the tens of billions of dollars After many years of pretty flush budgets, in previous years, there was a lot of COVID relief funding coming in from the federal government that led to even budget surpluses in the tens of billions. And that was a shock to this year, where we were looking at budget deficits in the tens of billions. The wrinkle for transportation is that transportation funding was actually as high as it's ever been. And that is thanks to, at the state level, the gas tax increase that was passed by the voters and indexed to inflation so that it keeps up with inflation. And then the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Congress passed in 2021 is bringing historic levels of funding to California for transportation. So whereas a lot of other parts of the state budget were going through really painful trade offs, we shouldn't have had to make such painful cuts and trade offs in the transportation side. But in many cases, we did, and we had to fight to protect and restore investment in some of those key programs.

Active Transportation program was one of them. That was a program that saw its annual budget budget go up to, I believe, a billion dollars, and the governor's budget proposed cutting it by about 600 million. Some of that was restored so that we're getting an additional 100 million back of those cuts this coming fiscal year, and another promise of 100 million in the following fiscal year, and then potential for more funding coming in in future years. The disappointing thing is that all of this funding coming in from Congress, which the state has a ton of leeway to spend according to how the state wants, basically protected a of highway and maintenance and expansion programs rather than doubling down on our successful investments in active transportation.

AB: That brings me to my next question, which was, how about the areas of the budget that you wish had been cut, but were not, that actually were protected?

CR: I don't know that we're trying to cut anything, but I think in a lot of cases, we were advocating for more responsible use of our transportation investments. So programs like the SHOP, the State Highway Operations and Protection program, that program was not reduced at all, but it could have been better focused on addressing bike and pedestrian and transit projects. So we weren't really in a position where we thought we needed to pursue specific cuts, but I think we're just advocating that the governor and the legislature really focus on increasing investment in programs that are doing the most to help the state with its climate and clean air objectives.

AB: Have you found, in general, that the governor and state lawmakers are more protective of freeway funding in the state budget than they are of transit or bike and pedestrian funding?

CR: I think that there's a real muscle memory for funding highway projects, and a built-up institutional support for that. That's going to take some time to unwind. There's a lot of support for pouring asphalt in California, and some of that comes from within agencies like Caltrans, where that's what they know how to do and they can stick to that. Then there are advocates in the capital lobbying for highway expansion, basically like the highway industrial complex made up of major industrial contractors, suburban sprawl builders, and literally big asphalt that are pushing very hard in the capital for continued and increased investment in highway expansion. We absolutely need to make big, big moves on infrastructure. We need to be building major new systems of transportation for how Californians are going to get around. So it's not a question of are we going to build or not, but it's making sure that we're building the right kinds of projects. The opportunity for improving inner city and regional rail in California is massive. And that's one particular area that I think the state could be doing a lot more in. Certainly, folks are aware of California high-speed rail, which is continuing to move forward and will be tremendous when it's open.

But you look at the corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego. It's one of the busiest Amtrak corridors in the country, and it's having a hard time even staying open due to climate-related weather and erosion along the Coast. When we talk about needing to question whether another highway expansion is really what the state needs. You can look at hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars worth of need just to bring our rail systems up to the level of, I would say, where Europe or Japan was 30 years ago, let alone build out what would be a real world-class system.

AB: There's an agency at the center of a lot of these debates over freeway expansions in California called the California Transportation Commission. I think a lot of people probably have never heard of it, the CTC. They may have heard of Caltrans, but not the CTC. What is the CTC and how does it differ from Caltrans?

CR: The CTC is probably the most important agency that hardly anyone talks about. So this is a commission made up of 11 voting members nine of which are appointed by the governor and two are appointed by the legislature. They allocate probably between four and $5 billion in transportation funding per year. The CTC meets every month different parts of the state to discuss various different programs and agreements. Their main role is really to be cutting massive checks to local governments and to Caltrans to support different projects. The CTC is an agency where a lot of advocates have started paying a lot more attention, realizing the influence they have, not just over the projects and decisions that the state makes, but also what the local governments and regional transportation agencies are doing, because you can use that power of the purse to influence the kinds of projects that are bubbling up from the local governments. Because if you start saying, Our priorities now are funding investments in rail or transit, the local governments over time will start to react to that and adjust their plans to match what they can get funding for. We've been tracking the CTC.

That's connected to our research and our study, and we've been working more forcefully there to really hold them accountable to the goals that the state has set out via the legislature and the governor in terms of shifting our transportation priorities.

AB: So the CTC CTC is meant to be truly independent from Caltrans. They have their own staff. They do their own analysis of what projects should be funded, how they should look in order to get that funding. Caltrans has to go to the CTC to ask for money. In practice, though, how independent is the CTC, really?

CR: I think the CTC and Caltrans work very closely together. The projects that CTC funds in their board agendas These agendas can be upwards of 500 pages long per month. And so there's a lot of work done in advance of a meeting between CTC and the local and state agencies, its funding, to really hash out the project details. Then when it comes up for a vote at the board, at that stage, it's pretty hard to change the outcome. We've tried in a couple of instances to prevail on the CTC at their meetings to reconsider projects that we think are really harmful, but it's an uphill fight. I think, historically, the CTC has not had much of a spotlight on it. I think we're starting to see that shift with some greater coverage of their board meetings and the projects that they're funding.

AB: I want to talk about some of those projects that you've advocated against at the CTC. The first one is the widening of Interstate 15 in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. This project would add HOV/toll lanes to the freeway, and it was primarily pitched as a project for a goods movement, freight trucks, mostly. Tell me more about this project and why you did not like it.

CR: Well, I think it's important to start with this understanding of the Inland Empire, where the project was located in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. This is one of the regions with the most polluted air across the entire country, which is a feature of both its geography, but also its economy. It is a huge hub for goods movement, with thousands of trucks going from warehouses and distribution centers, rail yards, crisscrossing the region, and then often heading to urban centers or leaving California. It was a real red flag that this region would be applying for funding for major highway expansions, where the funding source at the CTC was a program called the Tradecourt or Enhancement Program. The project was pitched to the CTC as significantly enhancing and expanding the amount of trucks and goods movement that was happening in the region. That's a red flag because the communities that are living in the region, and especially right next to these highways, are breathing some of the worst air in the entire country. Heavy amounts of particulate matter and ozone pollution that is directly linked to diesel trucks. One of the commissioners spoke up at a January meeting raising a bunch of concerns, specifically about the fact that the project proponents were basically making certain claims about truck traffic in their environmental impact report that seemed out of sync with what they were claiming to the CTC.

Specifically, they seemed to be downplaying that the projects would increase truck traffic when it suited them talking to air quality regulators. But then lifting up the benefits of increasing more truck traffic to the CTC when it suited applying for funding that was about increasing goods movement.

AB: Yeah, so they were talking out of two sides of their mouth. I actually have a clip from that meeting, and the Commissioner that you referenced, his name is Joe Lou, spoke up as this item came up on the CTC agenda and said he had essentially had enough that this project would increase vehicle travel and that that alone should be enough to say, No, don't build it. So here is what he said.

CLIP — JOE LYOU 

JL: So one thing I've learned for four years on this commission is that these projects are going to keep coming, and we're going to keep making exceptions. And it's very troubling that despite knowing better, We continue to approve project after project after project. So I wanted to get that out and on the record and let people know that I really have reached the end of my patience. 

AB: So After those remarks, the CTC actually deadlocked on this project at their meeting in December. A few of the commissioners, I believe, had left the meeting, and they couldn't get a majority to actually vote yes on the funding, so it was stalled. Then the project came back to the CTC in January, and it came with this army of supporters. There were the transportation officials from the two counties that the project would go through speaking in support. There were dozens of union laborers who were going to be building this project, Speaking in support, and they ultimately won. The CTC approved the project, and that freeway widening got another $200 million from the state coffers that it had sought, and it's going to be built. Carter, What do you make of this drama? What should we learn from the starts and stops and the ultimate approval of this freeway widening?

CR: First off, I have so much appreciation for Joe Lou, who was a Commissioner on the CTC at the time, and raising these concerns, really helping clarify for the public what the stakes were and drawing a firm line on how we should be voting with our values. The particular circumstances of I-15 were tricky because basically the CTC had already promised to fund this project a few years ago, and now it was coming to the CTC for a vote to move the money. In some ways, it wasn't the perfect test case because the local project sponsors had been moving this project along and had been promised this funding, and all of a sudden the rug was being pulled out. So on one hand, sometimes you need to make those courageous decisions to really stop when you need to stop. I think what is particularly alarming is that the CTC, since that vote, had an opportunity to reconsider these types of decisions and has failed to do so. And that brings me to the expansion of I-80 in the Sacramento area, which is another project that came to CTC just five months later. We're seeking an infusion of funding from the Trade Corp or Enhancement Program for a major highway expansion of something like 30 new lane miles of highway on I-80.

AB: We'll talk more about that in a second, but sticking with I-15 for a moment. As you mentioned, one of the reasons that the commissioners latched onto to justify approving this widening was that the CTC staff had been telling these county transportation officials, Okay, you want money for this freeway project. Here Here's what you need to do. Here's how you need to craft the project in order to win our support. The counties did exactly what was asked of them. So the commissioners felt, Well, it would be dishonest and in bad faith to vote no on funding this freeway expansion when it was essentially already promised to them. But hearing those remarks from those commissioners made me wonder, Well, what is the point of having the CTC at all? Why have commissioners that are appointed by our elected government that are supposed to be independent from the staff and independent from Caltrans, if ultimately they don't have a choice in the matters that are presented to them, that it's just supposed to be a rubber stamp? Do you have any thoughts on that?

CR: Yeah, I think we really need the CTC commissioners to be exercising their independent judgment. When they have a chance to vote, really considering that power and authority that they do have. They are there because they are experts in the transportation field, and we really need them to bring their own independent judgment and look clear-eyed at the facts and really address those concerns that Commissioner Lou raised, that we have seemingly two totally incompatible sets of data and projections as this project project is going to, on one hand, not cause truck traffic, and on the other hand, it's going to cause truck traffic. And we need the CTC to really scrutinize that. Going forward, we need the CTC to telegraph to its local partners and to Caltrans. Stop bringing us projects that are going to put more cars on the road and not fix congestion. Stop bringing us projects that are going to put more pollution in our air. When there are so many things that we need to invest in that will improve mobility for Californians and create jobs and support the environment.

AB: Still ahead… the lawsuit that Carter Rubin's employer has filed to try and block a freeway expansion near Sacramento. I'm Andrew Bowen and this is Freeway Exit.

BREAK

AB: We're back with the rest of my interview with Carter Rubin.

AB: The second freeway widening I want to talk with you about is the I-80 in Yolo County. Regular listeners of this podcast will recall this was the freeway project that was the subject of a whistleblower complaint filed by Jeanie Ward-Waller, who was on this podcast in November. We spoke about it. I recommend listeners go back and check out that episode if they want to learn more about the I-80 widening. But, Carter, describe this project. What is it and what do you see wrong with it?

CR: Caltrans has proposed to widen a stretch of interstate 80 between Davis and Sacramento. It's a stretch that is currently three lanes in each direction and traverses the Yellow Causeway, which goes over a wildlife refuge in an area that is a flood plain that fills up with water seasonally. It is one of these main corridors connecting the Bay Area to Sacramento and the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe and the mountains. It's a major corridor that's traveled by huge numbers of the public. We started paying attention to this project because it seemed like it was one of the first projects that was going to have to incorporate new Caltrans planning rules that are supported by a key state law from 2013 called SB 743, which really required Caltrans to look at how much additional driving is their highway expansion going to cause and make sure that it is doing everything it can to mitigate and offset those impacts. And what Caltrans did as they started to analyze this project is they considered a range of different alternatives, as you do with any environmental impact report. But almost all of them were different flavors of highway expansion. Some Some considered carpool lanes, some considered towed lanes.

Frankly, it was disappointing that out of the gate, they weren't even really considering transit alternatives in this analysis. And this is, of course, a corridor that is immediately paralleled by the Amtrak capital corridor which is a really busy and popular rail line that runs from Sacramento down to basically Oakland and San Jose. So it's a natural place where you'd say, Okay, well, we've got some congestion, got some bottlenecks. If we widen the highway, all of our research Every Californian's lived experience is you're just going to kick the can down the road. You'll open up some new lanes. Maybe that makes congestion a little better in the short term, but then people respond by driving more frequently, by driving more rush hour, by driving instead of taking the train or the bus. And so those lanes fill up again, and you're back to square one in terms of congestion within just a couple of years. Instead of taking that approach, Caltrans could have supported a major investment in the capital corridor to run service more frequently and reliably and fast to really make that a premium transportation service. But instead, they went forward and they advanced their preferred alternative, adding a high occupancy toll lane in each direction.

And that means it's a carpool lane, but solo drivers can pay a fee to opt in. We took a really close look at their environmental impact report, and we found some really glaring issues that we are advocating that need to be addressed. First is the project is to cause about 100 million additional vehicle miles of travel per year, and they're only planning to offset about half of that. Frankly, that's just not good enough. Caltrans has had 11 years since SB 743 was passed. We shouldn't be using excuses to justify only mitigating half of those impacts. Basically, they said in their EIR, Our budget for mitigation was only so many dollars, and we don't have any more money, so we can't do it. That's just not an excuse that will fly, because the mitigation is just going to What cost what it costs, and you need to make those investments. And the mitigations are all really great things that people like. It's funding for more frequent trains, additional bus service in the corridor, upgrades to bike and pedestrian paths. These are things that are probably the most popular thing about the project, and Caltrans is short-changing them.

And then another issue that we saw in the environmental impact report was that on one hand, they do make a good faith effort, we think, to measure vehicle miles traveled impacts and how much more driving the project is going to cause in one part of the EIR. But then when they talk about the impacts to air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, they don't incorporate all of that additional driving. They use a different analytical approach with a different set of assumptions that produces totally incompatible results. So the project's EIR says, on one hand, this is going to increase driving a lot, but on the other hand, it's going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And so part of our concerns have to do with we need to reconcile those two things. We should have one version of reality that we are projecting in the future. We can't have two that say diametrically opposed things. We raised all these issues in our comment letters on the environmental impact report back in January, and then they finalized their Environmental Impact Report this spring. Shortly thereafter, we filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Court challenging the approval.

AB: So this CEQA lawsuit, the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA — lawsuits under this law can take a really long time to work their way through the courts. Is this project going to be on hold while this lawsuit is litigated? Is it full steam ahead? What's the status of the actual shovels in the ground moment?

CR: One of the really interesting things about this project, and that was raised by the Caltrans whistleblower, is that in a very real sense, the shovels are in the ground. In fact, much earlier than they should have been. That's because right now, under the guise of a maintenance and rehabilitation project, Caltrans is actively preparing the highway to carry additional traffic on additional lanes. We're recording this close to rush hour on Thursday afternoon, and commuters driving on the I-80 right now are seeing K-Rail up and new concrete being poured and are diverting around a big construction site because Caltrans is actively building and paving the way for new lanes. They have claimed that this is a separate project that they cleared with an exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act. But we argue they are really inseparable, and that's one of the claims that we made in our lawsuit, that the nature of the construction they're doing clearly indicates that they were planning all along to add new lanes to this corridor because they are building these new structures and paving the new road in a way that you'd only do if you wanted that asphalt and that concrete to carry heavy truck traffic and vehicle traffic.

What comes next is that we will have settlement conference with Caltrans in August. They can move forward with it at their own risk. And so that is up to Caltrans to decide if they want to proceed with further construction on this project. Basically, that would entail striping the new express lanes in installing the overhead tolling equipment, doing some of the additional components related to on-ramps and off-ramps that are in the project scope. We will see what the courts decide or what we can agree to in a settlement. And if Caltrans has to undo any of that work, they would have to do so and proceed at their own risk.

AB: Is there a possibility that, say, Caltrans just plows ahead with this project? They install all the infrastructure, the cameras, to make sure folks are paying their tolls in these high occupancy toll lanes. Then the courts side with you and decide, Well, this project was never lawful to begin with, and they would order Caltrans to remove all that infrastructure. Is that a possibility?

CR: I think it's possible. I'm not an attorney, so I defer to the excellent attorneys that work in my organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council. We are working with two great organizations on this lawsuit, the Planning and Conservation League and the Center for Biological Diversity. And so exactly what Caltrans is compelled to do is going to be a conversation amongst our organizations and Caltrans, or if it goes to trial, it'll be hashed out there. Usually, what happens in a sequel lawsuit is that the agency in charge is told to go back to the drawing board and start their analysis over. And so that's one scenario. I think other scenarios could include requiring additional mitigation or other commitments that Caltrans would make. But I think it's a little too early to say exactly what the outcome would be.

AB: Carter, I have to imagine this type of advocacy must be pretty tough. It must be taxing. I mean, the car culture in California is very deeply entrenched. The freeway lobby in California is very powerful. They usually win, as we've been discussing. What keeps you going?

CR: I think it comes from just this well of inspiration I have. I think that comes in part from living almost my entire 37 years in California. And on one hand, this work can be really wonky and filled with acronyms. But at the end of the day, I think what we're talking about really resonates with Californians. Californians, and especially those driving or riding the bus, have just spent so much time stuck in traffic and have been promised time and time again, no, this one more highway expansion. This is the one that's going to finally fix traffic. And we've just lived through it, and we lived through the construction and the construction delays, only for projects to open and see that the benefits don't materialize, that the congestion doesn't go away. It's just gotten more drivers to use the road. So to me, it can be wonky and convoluted at times, but I think at its core, we're just talking about a lived experience that a lot of Californians have. And so to me, I just wake up and the problems don't really go away, and I get to experience at the same time a major transformation in my community when I get to see the positive side of things, too.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the '80s and '90s, right before the dawn of the new rail system build out. In the course of my life, we've now built out over miles of transit in Los Angeles. I recently had a child, and he will never know a Los Angeles that didn't have a rail system. So you can see the positives and the upside. And that is what keeps me excited and motivated to do this work, connecting with my fellow Californians, talking about what excites us. And rarely do I hear people in my community say, You know what we just need is one more lane of traffic. That's really going to set this off. We lived through the 405 widening at the cost of a billion dollars. Traffic study right thereafter showed that traffic was worse than beforehand. So we know it works. We know it doesn't work. I think things are changing for the better, but not at the rate we need. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm not pushing a Boulder up a hill as much as I am trying to help spin our wheels in the right direction so that we can move even faster, building out the climate and equitable transportation system that California deserves.

AB: That's it for this bonus episode. That settlement conference on the I-80 lawsuit has taken place, but Carter says there's no news to report. I reached out to Caltrans to offer them the chance to respond to Carter's comments about the widening of I-80. Spokesperson Edward Barrera wrote back saying the project has been thoroughly vetted by multiple agencies, and it includes bike, pedestrian and transit improvements in the area. He said QUOTE: "The new tolled express lanes are expected to reduce delays for motorists and improve goods and freight movement as some passenger vehicles and buses switch from the general-purpose lanes to the express lanes. … Caltrans’ work to mitigate vehicle miles traveled – in collaboration with project partners – will continue to evolve as the project progresses.” UNQUOTE. A brief note about HOV toll lanes. These have been studied by researchers at UC Berkeley, who found they're no better at fixing congestion than general purpose lanes. And they're just as likely to increase car travel. I dropped a link to the study in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening! Of course I gotta remind you to rate this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. Leave us a happy review. And most importantly, tell your friends about this podcast. Tell your family. Tell your dog. Be that annoying person who won't shut up about freeways, because I need to know I'm not alone in this world. Come join the San Diego urbanist meetup on August 31. And please, pretty please, support local journalism. Donate to KPBS.