Message from the Executive Director

Region Poised to Make Transportation Improvements

After 17 months of the most comprehensive technical work and resident outreach SACOG has ever conducted in development of a Metropolitan Transportation Plan the Board of Directors is ready to begin its decision-making. The 31 member Board will adopt a plan that spends $40 billion to improve our region's quality of life over the next three decades. Quite a task!

The final plan will include thousands of projects, everything from better sidewalks so people can more easily get to schools and light rail stations, to multi-hundred million dollar improvements to roads, bridges and transit stations. This process has broken new ground in many ways. What have we learned? Here is my short list.

1. This region has a unique chance to improve the quality of life of the region's residents. With large improvements to the transportation sytem, the projected performance for the transportation projects recommended by the SACOG staff will essentially stop the seemingly irrepressible rise in congestion, reduce the amount of time people have to devote to travel in their daily lives, and provide cleaner air. We are not faced with simply making the best of a bad situation -- we can make it better.
2. The residents are smart. The thousands of residents who have participated in this process know a lot. They understand how smart growth land use patterns help the transportation system, and they understand how our travel behavior determines how dirty or clean our air is. They have many practical ideas for a wide range of investments in transit, roads, walking and biking facilities that can help. They 're pretty sure the price of gas is going up in the future, and most of them are willing to change their own travel patterns to reduce car travel if legitimate options exist to help them do that.
3. It will take the full bag of tricks to solve the problem. We have pushed our technical modeling work much further than we have in the past. We know that investments in roads alone will definitely not solve congestion, nor will investments in transit alone.
4. Strategies that improve passenger travel also improve movements of goods and freight . Most of the goods and freight in our region travel by truck. Investments in both roads and transit that improve mobility on our roads help to ensure goods get to market efficiently.

The key to a better future is to make smart land use decisions, and smart investments in both roads and transit. Smart land use means more growth in and around our existing developed areas, and no more growth of bedroom communities on the edges of our region, where people commute long distances to work in the center of the region. Smart road investments includes building "complete streets" -- arterials and collectors that work equally well for bicyclists, pedestrians, transit and adjacent neighborhoods as they do for cars. Smart transit investments means a much more diverse set of transit choices than we have today, with buses and trains running more frequently, longer hours and on more days.

It is an exciting time for our region. We trust that all of you will help us get this important process to the finish line.

Mike McKeever

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Regional Report for April - May 2007 (text-only version)
Sacramento Area Council of Governments