From: Lada Adamic <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 3, 2025 6:44 AM
To: , Public Works <[email protected]>; Pacho, Ben <[email protected]>; Lo, Ria <[email protected]> Subject: public comment for CTC meeting March 4, 2025: 5.2 Citywide Transportation Demand Management Ordinance Update
Dear CTC,
Many of the trip reduction options in the proposed TDM ordinance are well-thought out and backed by research. However, I worry that the setup, involving annual trip counting, reporting and negotiation with city staff, will consume many resources from both the developers/companies and the city, in an inefficient way. The winners I imagine would primarily be the consultants hired to manage all the paperwork around this. What could be accomplished instead if those resources could be pooled via a direct fee collection scheme that would feed into better transit and active transportation infrastructure in the city/county? Imagine (a very imperfect) analogy: new development will create greater demand for education, so the city decides to enact an Education Demand Management ordinance, so that the arrival of additional children and their needs will not cause congestion in schools, which are already crowded. Developers are given a range of options: they can educate new residents about homeschooling, they can provide vouchers for private schools, or if a company is large enough, they can provide their own exclusive school, etc. Each year they have to report on how their efforts decreased demand for the local schools, and most will hire consultants to draft this report, which consumes time and money.
Would it not make more sense to collect money from new development that goes toward increasing educational capacity for all residents of the city? I think something like this is incorporated for education, at least I remember going to two school district offices and writing checks as a requirement of a remodel. What if something similar could be done for transportation demand? What if a developer pays in proportion to the number of parking spaces they have (this would automatically motivate them to implement some of the strategies to reduce that number). This money is paid into a fund managed by the Mountain View Transportation Management Association, or the VTA equitable VMT mitigation bank (once set up). The reporting requirement is minimal, and the funds can be allocated to optimally reduce VMT, city-wide and regionally (after all, people who live or work in Mountain View might be commuting to or from other cities). A bonus of VTA's equitable VMT program is the focus on equity: benefitting people to whom access to transit or infrastructure would matter most.
One instructive instance is that of the Guaranteed Ride Home program. The program allows employees who did not drive to work (they took transit or biked) to have their Uber/Lyft/Taxi ride home reimbursed in case they need to work late or leave early due to an emergency (up to some number of times/year). Some tech companies had implemented these programs individually, which took staffing, getting a website up, etc. Basically all that effort was duplicated over and over which to me seems inefficient. Now there is a county-wide Guaranteed Ride Home program, managed I think by the VTA. Anyone who works or is a student in the county can use the program. They can register without going through their employer/school. The employer/school doesn't have to run their own program, they just let their employees/students know about the county-wide one. This makes so much more sense to me.
We're not going to be able to increase throughput of single-occupancy vehicles indefinitely (nor would we want to, for climate/pollution/safety/livability reasons). So we need to increase other modes of getting around in order to allow our city to grow vibrantly. This seems like a collective problem, that requires pooling resources, rather than imposing the cost less effectively across each site.
For this reason, I encourage the City to set up the TDM Ordinance so that it aligns as closely as possible with a potential Countywide VMT Mitigation Program / Exchange, and also aligns with the work of the Mountain View TMA.
Thanks for reading and considering!
Lada Adamic
Resident, Mountain View