In 2018, pursuant to Senate Bill (SB) 743 (2013), the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) and the California NaturalResources Agency promulgated regulations and technical guidance that eliminated automobile level of service (LOS) as a transportation impact metric for land development projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and replaced it with Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). The authors investigated how local governments have been implementing the LOS-to-VMT shift for land development projects, and how that differs from past practice. They also explored whether local governments monitor the actual VMT impacts from completed land use developments and what methods are available to do so. Their findings indicate that all responding jurisdictions acknowledged the mandatory LOS-to-VMT shift, but were in varying stages of implementing the shift. For those jurisdictions that had adopted VMT impact significance thresholds, most adhered closely to OPR’s recommendations. They also mostly tried to use apples-to-apples methods of calculating baseline VMT levels (for setting thresholds) and estimating project-level VMT, often relying on travel demand model outputs for both. However, most jurisdictions gave short shrift to VMT monitoring. Another important aspect of SB 743 implementation is how LOS will continue to be used outside of CEQA. The authors found that jurisdictions uniformly continue to employ LOS outside of CEQA. However, those LOS analyses are not necessarily as comprehensive and expensive as they would have been for CEQA purposes. The authors found a consensus amongst their interviewees that swapping LOS for VMT could streamline development in urban areas.
