Features

Kudos to Mayor Tom Bates for his forthright criticism of UC Berkeley’s environmental impact report. 

Mayor Bates has made substantial efforts to improve relations with UC, but UC has offered little in return. 

The city staff did an excellent job of prese nting the city’s concerns about UC expansion during the EIR process. But the final EIR largely ignores the city’s concerns and input.  

The two biggest impacts that UC has on the city are traffic impacts and fiscal impacts.  

LRDP Means More Traffic 

UC is the largest single generator of automobile traffic in Berkeley. Its plan to add 690 spaces at the Underhill parking lot near College Avenue and the 1800-2300 additional spaces called for in the LRDP will make traffic problems worse. 

The city’s General Plan calls on UC to cap its parking supply at current levels based on a recognition that increasing parking will increase traffic and encourage driving rather than use of public transit and other alternatives to driving. 

UC’s LRDP EIR is a very arrogant document. The phrase “continuing best practice” appears frequently. Yet what UC is doing now in the area of transportation planning, construction mitigation, and housing production could hardly be described as “best practice.” 

When it comes to transporta tion planning, UC Berkeley has never been a leader. It was one of the last UC campuses to provide students with passes to ride local buses for free, lagging behind UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. 

It still has not followed the lead of UCLA, Stanford and other universities in California and around the country who provide all faculty and staff with free rides on local transit.  

UC is refusing to take any responsibility for avoiding or substantially reducing the negative environmental impacts associated with mo re traffic. Growth does not have to mean more traffic. 

UC is willing to reduce the new parking it plans to build if other people do things, specifically if AC Transit goes forward with Bus Rapid Transit service on Telegraph with the support of the cities of Berkeley and Oakland. But what is UC committing itself to do? 

What Should UC Be Doing? 

It should have included in the LRDP a goal of ensuring that there is no increase in traffic associated with its expansion plans; specifically the goal should be n o net increase in single-occupancy vehicle (SOV) automobile trips to campus. 

This is a realistic goal. Universities that have taken the lead and made serious efforts to encourage transit use, along with bicycling and walking, have been successful.  

At U CLA, “BruinGo” allows faculty staff and students to board some area buses lines for free with their university IDs. Since implementation of this program on a trial basis, the percentage of faculty and staff living within the Blue Bus service area who comm ute by bus increased from 9 percent to 20 percent. Among students, it increased from 17 percent to 24 percent. A study of the impact of BruinGo found that it reduced parking demand. 

At the University of Washington, Seattle, despite a 22 percent increase in the campus population since 1989, peak hour traffic remains below 1990 levels. Parking lot utilization has dropped and fewer faculty, staff and students are buying parking permits. The UW Transportation Office estimates that the University has saved o ver $100 million in avoided construction costs for new parking and prevented the emission of 3,300 tons of carbon dioxide annually.  

This is all due to UW’s Eco Pass program called U-Pass. For a small quarterly fee, faculty, staff and students ride local transit for free. While Seattle’s transit system is not as good as what is available to UC Berkeley employees, the U-Pass program has achieved impressive results.  

Transit ridership has increased from 11 percent to 24 percent for faculty and from 25 per cent to 36 percent for staff. Drive alone rates have fallen to 43 percent and 38 percent respectively, much lower than the drive alone rate for UC faculty and staff. 

In fact, UC faculty and staff are somewhat more likely than other non-UC commuters to Be rkeley’s downtown and Southside to commute to work by driving along. UC is not a leader in promoting alternative modes of transportation in Berkeley. 

UC claims to be taking steps to encourage faculty and staff to use transit and touts its recently create d Bear Pass. But the Bear Pass is further evidence of the weakness and inadequacy of UC’s efforts. 

Bear Pass is much more expensive than Eco Passes provided by other universities, which are typically free (UCLA, Stanford) or low cost (UW Seattle). And Bear Pass is not universal; its an opt-in program.  

A 2001 survey of 35 university transit pass programs found that programs with universal coverage, where all students, staff and faculty can use the campus IDs to ride transit for free, work best. Partial coverage, opt-in programs like Bear Pass don’t increase transit use very much. 

But can UC afford to provide passes to everyone for free? Of course. A primary reason for offering passes is to reduce demand for parking and avoid construction costs for new parking.  

A portion of parking revenues can be used to pay transit agencies for the passes, which are sold at very deep discounts when they purchased for all students, faculty and staff. Both UCLA and UW Seattle used parking revenues to help fund their p asses. 

Improving Transit 

It’s also important for the city to continue actively supporting AC Transit’s Bus Rapid Transit that is planned for Telegraph Avenue. With dedicated lanes for buses, travel time and waiting time will be reduced when BRT is implemented. More people will travel by bus when service improves. 

Both improved transit service and incentives to use transit, such as Eco Pass, are needed to ensure that UC expansion and population growth in Berkeley don’t lead to higher volumes of traffic and more traffic congestion. 

But UC has to do its part. By failing to do enough to encourage alternatives to driving, UC has not only contributed to the city’s traffic problems, but has made itself part of the global warming problem, when it should be pa rt of the solution. 

Traffic impacts are not the only impacts, though. UC needs to make substantial in-lieu-of-taxes payments to the city to cover the fiscal impacts of UC growth. The city is facing a budget crisis and cannot afford to provide more servic es for a growing university without substantial contributions from UC to cover the cost. 

There are also construction impacts. UC does not do an adequate job of monitoring its construction contractors. There are too many instances of neighbors being awake ned by construction-related noise before the legal starting time for construction. And more needs to be done to ensure that construction workers don’t take up available on-street parking in neighborhoods near campus. 

As a mitigation, UC should help pay for improved Residential Permit Parking enforcement in near campus neighborhoods. And UC should consider following the lead of Harvard and create a construction ombudsman to deal with construction-related problems and impacts that will inevitably occur. 

Rob Wrenn is chair of the Transportation Commission.