AUDIO:

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JEN KALT:

Welcome to the EcoNews Report. I'm your host this week, Jen Kalt with Humboldt Baykeeper, and I'm joined by my friends and colleagues, Matt Simmons with the Environmental Protection Information Center and Colin Fiske with the Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities. How are you doing, Colin?

COLIN FISKE:

Pretty good. Thanks, Jen.

KALT:

So I want to start this episode talking about a project that we got some major improvements on last week at the Board of Supervisors hearing. And that is a subdivision in the Cutten area around the Redwood Fields, if people know where that is. It's called the North McKay Ranch subdivision. Colin, why don't you start off talking a little bit about this project, what it is and how the environmental groups were able to get some good improvements on that project?

FISKE:

Yeah, so it's a very large subdivision and various versions of this project have gone back decades. But just sticking to this latest current project, it would be mostly single-family homes. It's, as you said, at the edge of Cutten. It does also include some apartments and some commercial retail-type space. And that, frankly, is an improvement over a lot of previous subdivisions that have been just straight single-family tract homes. But about a year ago, when this latest project came to the Board of Supervisors, a coalition of environmental groups, including I think all of us here, came forward and pointed out that some additional mitigations were required to this project to make it sort of compatible with CEQA and to address the greenhouse gas impacts and the transportation impacts. And those included making it an all-electric project, so we weren't going to extend fossil fuel natural gas infrastructure to the new subdivision, and also devoting some more money to bike and pedestrian and transit improvements so that it's not just served by cars. It took a long time, but long story short, as of last week, the county and the developer did agree to an all-electric development. They also agreed to devoting some money to bike and pedestrian improvements, although what those are exactly has not yet been determined. And they did also not agree to some other transportation improvements, which would have made the project a lot better, like providing bus passes to apartment dwellers and providing less parking or less of a subsidy for parking. But all in all, we did get some major wins out of it.

KALT:

So we don't know what kind of bicycle and pedestrian improvements they'll be making, but suffice to say that the original plan was to put in two new traffic lights and call that some kind of a traffic improvement.

FISKE:

Right. They did. The county did promise at the hearing last week to work with the City of Eureka to have a somewhat public process to determine what those improvements will be, so stay tuned for that. So…

MATT SIMMONS:

I don't know that it's obvious to all of our listeners like what the transportation impacts are of a new subdivision, right? Like what are we talking about when we talk about those kind of environmental impacts and why is the developer required to mitigate them under CEQA?

FISKE:

Yeah, so I think this is a project which in my mind is basically what you would call sprawl. It's at the edge of an established community. It is relatively low density. It's extending out into former, currently forested areas. Because Eureka is not that big of a community, it's not that far from downtown Eureka and from other services and so forth, but it is not well served by public transit and far enough from most destinations, from most jobs and shopping and so forth, that it's going to be difficult to get most folks to walk or bike or use other low carbon modes of transportation. So these types of developments typically result in a lot more driving. That comes with big climate impacts because of course, driving vehicles is our biggest source of climate pollution locally and also across the country now. It also comes with safety impacts from more vehicles on the road and all sorts of other knock-on effects of that. And so those transportation impacts, what they call in CEQA lingo, an increase in vehicle miles traveled, have to be mitigated somehow. And so we think that they did not do all of the feasible mitigation measures, but one of the things that they will be doing is putting in some additional bike and pedestrian improvements somewhere.

KALT:

Well, basically, there's some retail or commercial space going into the subdivision, but not very much. Generally, the people who live here are going to be driving or somehow getting to their jobs and to school, and they're more likely to ride a bike or walk to the bus stop if it's not unpleasant or unsafe. But basically putting a lot more cars on the roads in that neighborhood and also in Eureka, where a lot of people go to work. And we know Eureka is one of the most dangerous places to be walking or biking. Deadly. Another person was unfortunately killed recently walking in a crosswalk. That is never considered, is it, in these kind of subdivision plans, putting more traffic on dangerous roads?

FISKE:

Unfortunately, that is not well handled by CEQA. And so typically, yeah, those safety arguments, CEQA views safety, road safety, through a very narrow lens. Yeah, I would say that that's a big gap, even in a place like Eureka, where the city council and everybody sort of recognizes there's a huge traffic safety problem. Of course, this project is not actually in city limits, but it's part of the Eureka micro metro area, if you will, that even there, this safety issue just doesn't really come up as much as it should in the planning of these projects.

KALT:

Right. We think in terms of making improvements to the roads where people are actually getting hit by cars rather than trying to improve development patterns so that people are driving less.

FISKE:

Right. Yep. And that's a huge problem from just a broader structural perspective that the way that I would say most Americans and certainly most policy makers seem to think about how we're going to address, say, the climate impacts of transportation is we're just going to replace all of our vehicles with electric vehicles and everything else will stay exactly the same. And that is a recipe for disaster, I think, in a lot of ways.

KALT:

Do tell. Why do you think it's a recipe for disaster?

FISKE:

So we were just discussing safety. Of course, just replacing existing vehicles with new vehicles does nothing for the safety problem. In fact, it arguably could be worse because equivalent electric vehicles are heavier than gas-powered vehicles, and so that makes them in some ways more dangerous, especially to pedestrians. Also, vehicles in general, both gas-powered and electric vehicles in the U.S. are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. That creates more of a safety hazard, especially for folks who are walking or biking or rolling, but it also creates more of a demand for resources. So a bigger vehicle, even if it's an electric vehicle, it's still using more energy. That's just energy in the form of electricity that has to be generated somewhere. It also is using a lot more minerals and resources that have to be mined for the, particularly for the battery. So the main component of most of these batteries is lithium, and that's a substance that's pretty toxic and has to be mined. And that most places that it's currently being mined, there's resistance from local communities because of the health impacts and the impacts to wildlife and wildlands. And our lithium production will have to increase dramatically worldwide if we just were to go all electric without changing our transportation patterns at all. And that's sort of a huge problem from an environmental perspective itself.

KALT:

Do we know much about where some of these mines are or where some mines are being proposed to extract more lithium for this new EV world that we're supposedly turning towards? Yes.

FISKE:

So lithium production currently is concentrated in a few places, including in South America and places like Chile. But lithium is actually pretty widely distributed, so we're seeing new mines being proposed all over the place, including here in the U.S. And that is basically all in response to new demand for electric vehicles. So there's a new report that came out recently that said that if we do nothing else but replace gas-powered vehicles with electric vehicles, just the U.S. car market alone will require three times more lithium than the entire world currently produces. So just think about that. That's not looking at vehicles anywhere else in the world or any other uses of lithium. Just think about the amount of new mining that that will entail, and you get an idea. On.

SIMMONS:

On that note, Colin, one of these lithium projects is in Nevada. It's called the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and it is being opposed by local indigenous tribes and environmentalists, some folks imposing it with direct action, even because of all the negative local impacts to this. And I think that when we're, when we're thinking about these impacts, every, every new big car that you build that needs more lithium, that's, that's more mining, that's another new mine that you need somewhere. And so it's not about no lithium anywhere or all lithium everywhere. It's about trying to mitigate and keep to as small extent as possible, the footprint of this transition. And that's going to require rethinking transportation and actually a lot of other industries as well, but transportation is a big part of it.

FISKE:

Yeah, and you know, on that point, this report that I just referenced, published very recently by the Climate and Community Project, which is associated with UC Davis, I believe, they showed that the trend towards larger vehicles has a huge impact on future lithium demand, so that if we stopped building bigger and bigger cars and SUVs and trucks, and started just building more moderately sized vehicles, we could cut future lithium demand for the electric vehicle market by as much as 42%, just by building modestly sized cars instead of the enormous monsters that we're building now. And then, you know, getting back to the land use issue, if we did that and also started building more connected land use and invested in public transit, made it safer to walk and bike everywhere, and started really shifting more travel to these more efficient modes of transportation, we could actually cut future lithium demand by as much as 92%. So, you know, the choices that we're making now, going all EV is certainly necessary, but just doing that and doing nothing else is not a solution to the environmental and human rights problems that the transportation industry is part of. So, yeah.

SIMMONS:

You talked about the cards getting bigger and bigger, and I know that there's some reasons for that, and I'm sure you can elucidate all of us on what those are.

FISKE:

Yeah. Nowadays, this gets talked about a lot as just the American demand for huge vehicles. Like, that's just what people want. But of course, the quote-unquote demand for big trucks and SUVs is not just a natural phenomenon. It's the result of choices that have been made by Congress, by the auto industry, by other policy makers over several decades. So, for example, I think it was back in the '90s when a loophole was carved out of the fuel economy standards that the federal government sets for automakers so that SUVs basically don't count towards the overall fuel economy requirements. So while they're required to increase the efficiency of their fleets, automakers basically ignore SUVs in doing that calculation, which means they can produce SUVs that have extremely inefficient low mileage or, well, I guess low mileage, whether it's coming from gas or electricity, and it doesn't count against the efficiency requirements. So that is part of what led to the initial boom in SUV production by American automakers. They also are just more profitable for the automakers. They sell them for more money. And so they've marketed the heck out of them for a long time. And I think you can't ignore that just pervasive marketing that often explicitly associates big vehicles with masculinity and dominance and all of these things that the American psyche apparently likes and has generated this situation. And when you listen to the marketers and the vehicle designers, they explicitly will talk about how they design these big, tall grills for trucks and SUVs to look intimidating and to look fierce and to look dangerous. And they are dangerous. They're really, really dangerous, especially for people who are not in a vehicle. So that's a brief take on it.

KALT:

I always kind of crack up about the fact that people who are buying these big giant gas guzzling vehicles are paying more taxes than people with smaller, more efficient vehicles. How do you feel about that? But is it true that in the United States, there's no safety requirements for vehicles as concerns people who are outside the vehicle? I think I was reading this somewhere that in Europe, there's actually safety standards that make cars less deadly when they run into pedestrians and bicyclists, but we don't have those kinds of safety standards in this country. Right.

FISKE:

It's true, yes. And not only are there not standards and rules until I think maybe last year, that it wasn't even considered in the voluntary safety rankings that the federal government does of vehicles. Those just considered the vehicle occupants. And even now that they've proposed including some consideration of, of, of non-vehicle occupants in the safety rankings, it's nothing like making your vehicle less deadly, it's all tech oriented solutions like cameras and radar and things so that even though you can't see anybody for 20 feet in front of your high hood vehicle, maybe the camera will pick it up and give you a warning, which has all sorts of potential issues with it. But there's no sign of certainly the federal government cracking down on the vehicle bloat that we've seen over the last couple of decades, which I think also is another reason that people keep buying bigger vehicles is because everyone else keeps buying bigger vehicles. And it's this, it's not only like the keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing, it's also like an arms race. People, I think understandably see enormous trucks and SUVs out there on the road and are afraid of what would happen to them if they were in a smaller vehicle, let alone on a bike or walking or whatever. Well, it's true.

KALT:

If you're just joining us, this is the EcoNews Report. My name's Jen Kalt with Humboldt Baykeeper, and I am talking with Matt Simmons of Epic and Colin Fisk of CRTP, and we're talking about basically how the car industry is making money at the expense of lots of people who are paying lots of money for these cars and getting into horrible accidents when they're not in the vehicle. You know, we all have to walk once we get wherever we're going, even if we drive a car, so we're all pedestrians. But let's talk now a little bit about the land use aspect of this, because this subdivision, the North McKay Ranch subdivision is, as you said, it's another auto-dependent type of subdivision, kind of like the one I live in in McKinleyville, where unless you have a lot of time on your hands and you're able to walk and bike quite a distance to get to a bus stop, and there may not even be safe access to a bus stop and so on and so forth, it's really left to the most dedicated or the poorest people who don't have the funding, the money to buy a car, to be using public transit and driving less. So how do we make these choices easier and more pleasant for people to make? I mean, I personally would love to live in a neighborhood where I didn't have to drive everywhere, but those neighborhoods tend to be the more expensive neighborhoods. So let's talk a little bit about housing. We talk a lot about how there's an affordable housing crisis, not only in the whole state of California, but also in Humboldt County. But we see a subdivision like this one, people saying, well, there's a housing crisis, we need all this housing. And let's talk about what kind of housing we would prefer to see and what would enable people to bike and walk more.

SIMMONS:

All of the nice things that you just described, right? Walkability, public transit, being able to go to a nice shop and walk there instead of driving a car. All of that requires density. And I think for a lot of people, this is a hard pill to swallow. But if you think about it, it makes sense, right? For a bus to be coming frequently enough to work, to make economic sense, there has to be people there trying to ride the bus, right? And for a business to stay open, that's just going to have walk-in customers. There have to be enough people within walking distance. And honestly, for walkability, right, you need to have fewer wide-open parking lots and more businesses and homes close together. So part of making all that possible is building more housing on fewer lots, right? And going up instead of out, right? I think it's very easy to always push our problems to the periphery of our cities and say, oh, we'll just sprawl that way and it'll be fine. But I think anyone who's ever traveled to Southern California can see what happens when you do that for decades. You just end up with a maze of freeways and subdivisions that go on as far as the eye can see. A smarter way to develop our cities would be to densify where we already have built, do infill housing with some commercial as well. And that will both help the climate by reducing driving, it'll help the environment by not impacting green fields, and it'll just make all these places a nicer place to live, right? Because you can walk and bike and not have to rely on a car so much. Those neighborhoods that you want to live in, Jen, they're so expensive because a lot of people want to live there. It's a popular way to be if you can afford it and get one of the few places that we allow to develop that way, right? Because that's the whole other frame of this is that our entire land use pattern is baked in by decades of zoning that required low density sprawl. And it would segregate land uses and different kinds of people, right? It would say renters go here, single family homeowners go here. And I think part of what I think we should all be doing is correcting those past mistakes in any future development.

FISKE:

I want to also pick up on what you said earlier, Jen, about sort of the equity implications of it. One is that owning a car, as you mentioned, is extremely expensive, owning and operating a vehicle. And, you know, I have people tell me all the time that no one in Humboldt County doesn't have a car, but that's not true. There are thousands of households in Humboldt County that have no access to a vehicle, primarily because they can't afford it. And there's also many more, although this is harder to quantify, who have a vehicle because they essentially have to to get to their job or whatever, but also really can't afford it. And, you know, they're kind of one vehicle malfunction or missed payment away from not being able to get around. In Humboldt County, transportation is a pretty close second to housing in terms of expenses for household budgets. So making sure that we have housing that allows people to not incur that expense, to not own a vehicle, to get around by other means is an important equity issue. To your point, too, Matt, about preserving green space, I hear that a lot also, that people like living here because of the green space. I think it's not just about not like paving over our forests and fields, but it's also about access to those things. We have this sort of single family home model is like, well, we're all going to get some relatively low quality private open space if we can afford it in a form of our yards. But then nobody is going to be able to easily access high quality open space because you have to. It's too far away because we've built this low density, huge sprawling environment. The city of Arcata has done a great job with preserving the community forest and Eureka and McKinleyville are also working on similar types of projects. But in order to preserve those things, in order to preserve real access to high quality open space and all of the benefits that that gives to people, you can't sprawl.

KALT:

Yeah, you too have probably heard me say this many times and so have lots of my friends. But the reason I got involved in the Humboldt County General Plan update many years ago was that I wanted to know how could Humboldt County have an open space district like one of the many in the San Francisco Bay Area, which are just amazing, protected areas that are great for hiking and protecting water quality and wildlife habitat and so on. And I very quickly learned that the flip side of that is doing better development in the existing towns and cities. And the Healthy Humboldt Coalition had just done a study looking at what extent do would we have to develop from McKinleyville up the hill over to Fieldbrook to accommodate the next 20 years worth of housing needs if we do it at the usual rate of six houses or so per acre. And it was up and over the hill to Fieldbrook, solid suburbia all the way over to Fieldbrook, which nobody here wants. And so that's when I realized, oh, we have to build more dense towns and cities and do more apartment type development or, you know, townhouses, that kind of thing. And a lot of people balk at that around here. But honestly, there's really not a lot of choices. If you want to buy a home, your choices are mostly single family home, even if you're a single person, which is just crazy. You know, then you get stuck with a yard. You want to spend every weekend mowing your lawn because that's what you get. Well, not everybody wants to live like that. And there's nothing wrong with that. You know, there's tons and tons of people who grow up, raise their children in apartments, and we could use a lot more choices around here in all of our communities.

SIMMONS:

I absolutely agree with your sit box. It doesn't have to just be rentals too, right? It could be condos. It could be, there's co-op housing, right? There's other ways to organize denser multifamily housing than sort of just the like renter model that we're all very familiar with. Arcata and Eureka strike me as places where we could be experimenting with those sort of other models, right? We were talking about all the marketing and sort of psychological signals being sent to buy a larger car, right? The same thing has been happening with single-family detached homes and a lawn since like the '40s, I think, right? It's like Levittown. Everyone gets a lawn that they have to take care of. It's built into the fabric of the United States, but it's having negative consequences on both our environment and our social fabric to some extent. It's high time that we looked at it critically and thought about why we want those things, right? Why they're so valued. My fun fact about lawns is that they were originally a way to show off your wealth. The like French nobility would keep an area of their land on not growing anything of value. It was like, look at how wealthy I am. I don't have to grow anything of value on this land. It's just grass. Somehow that idea got imported into the United States where we continue to do that same idea even in like desert regions, right? Which obviously isn't as big of a problem here, but somehow we ended up with lawns in Nevada and Southern California and Arizona just because of weird French nobility way of showing off. We can rethink some of these ideas that we all have.

KALT:

I never heard that before. That's really interesting. In McKinleyville, it's a great place to live if you do like to grow food because it's all prime agricultural soils. It's fantastic for growing things, but it also means it grows weeds and grass like crazy. And if I had a dime for every time someone said, oh, I can't go on a hike because I have to move my lawn. Speaking of McKinleyville, Colin, I think you have been the most up to date of anyone I know on the McKinleyville Town Center. What's the latest on that? Because that's hopefully going to be some diverse housing types and maybe some walkability. Yeah.

FISKE:

Yeah, so this process, I should say this, this latest process of trying to develop an ordinance to implement McKinleyville's community vision for a town center has been going on for several years now. It appears to be, oh, I think, I think the end is finally in sight. They're preparing to start the environmental review process. Although the ordinance itself, the draft is not completely finished. But the latest news that's exciting to folks like me is that there was, I think, last year, the McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee started discussing the idea of reducing the number of lanes on Central Avenue, along with the sort of redesign to allow it to be safer and more comforting, welcoming for people who are not in vehicles. Because right now it's kind of big, dangerous, uncomfortable barrier in the middle of the town center for people trying to get from one side to the other. And that's been somewhat contentious. But this lane reduction concept is now going to be part of the environmental review. They have not completely committed to it, but it's moving on to the next step. And so that's a really exciting thing. And we think it's really necessary for there to be a functioning town center. You know, there's a bunch of other good and exciting things in there in the plan. And it's explicitly supposed to encourage walkability. So that would be a big and much, much needed shift for McKinleyville. Yes.

KALT:

That would be huge and this is something that people in McKinleyville have been talking about and which has been adopted in our community plan I think in the year 2002. So we're talking two decades now that we've been talking about a town center. So thanks to CRTP and all of the other folks who've been following this and increasing the potential for walkability in McKinleyville. It's really lacking and it would be fantastic. Any other thoughts we should cover before we wrap up?

FISKE:

Well, I think it's good to remember and I think we've covered the highs and the lows a little bit in this episode. We're making some progress on some of these land use issues. At the same time, we've got a long way to go and we've got a long way to go certainly with the vehicles that we rely on. So I hope that folks, listeners have learned a little something about the problems, but also maybe a little inspiration for some of the solutions that we're making progress towards.

KALT:

Yes, and we would be remiss if we didn't let people know how they can find out more about CRTP and sign up for fantastic email newsletter.

FISKE:

Oh, thanks. Yeah, you can go to transportationpriorities.org. You can sign up for our weekly transportation news roundup, which I think is pretty useful. And sign up for other emails. We occasionally will send out an action alert or other informative emails to you. So you can also just read up on past resources and get informed.

KALT:

Sounds good. All right. Thanks, you two so much for being on another episode of the Econews.

SIMMONS:

Yeah, thank you, Jen, for hosting. We really appreciated you.