A report issued by the California Center for Jobs & the Economy, sponsored by the California Business Roundtable, using numbers from the census and the American Community Survey, indicates that despite efforts to change attitudes about transportation the old stereotype holds true – Californians love their cars.

“The substantial investments in public transit, bike lanes and other alternative modes have not produced major gains in commuter use,” the report stated.

“Combined, public transit, carpooling and ‘other’ modes dropped from 30.3 percent of total commuters in 1980 to 21.5 percent in 2013 and to 21.1 percent in 2014. In total numbers, use of these three modes increased only 430,000 workers by 2014, while use of single occupant vehicles increased by 5.5 million workers.”

More cars on the road means those roads take a beating, which has led Gov. Jerry Brown to call a special session to deal with funding to fix the roads. While Brown wants tax increases to fix the roads, Republicans in the Legislature are seeking to make sure that money collected for transportation purposes is spent on the roads and not siphoned off for other purposes.

Yesterday, Assemblyman Mathew Harper, R-Huntington Beach, introduced a bill that would give the voters a say in whether gas taxes are increased for the roads. Harking back to the governor’s pledge, made when he began his third term, to seek a vote of the people before taxes are raised, Harper said in a release, “I am proposing we do exactly the same thing here. Letting the people decide what they think about new taxes before we force new taxes upon them is not a revolutionary idea.”

It’s an interesting gambit, moving the tax decision away from the legislators but perhaps breathing life into the gas tax choice given that Republicans seem determined not to give a gas tax measure the necessary votes it needs to pass. When Gov. Brown wanted to put a tax on the ballot for voters to decide soon after he took office in 2011, Republicans would not go along. Are Republicans willing to let voters decide this time? However, a gas tax increase never scores well in polling.

While the issue of funding roads dominates the transportation discussion, the Center’s report argued that the increase in auto travel is tied to another major policy issue in California — the cost of housing.

“The continued growth of single occupant vehicles is fully consistent with the all-too familiar need in California to broaden the geographic search region in order to find housing commensurate with workers’ incomes,” the study stated. “In California, the growing body of land use, energy, CEQA and other regulations affecting housing cost and supply has put both the cost of housing ownership and rents within traditional employment centers out of the reach of many households.”

The solution offered in the report: “Regulatory reform to make housing in the urban centers more affordable for a broader swath of California’s workers.”

While officials try to figure a way to deal with increased volume on the roads, new technology may add to the burden.

Driverless cars might increase the ride-alone phenomenon. If some of the public transit users enjoy the ability to relax or read as they commute, driverless cars would give the same opportunity with the convenience of door-to-door service.

In both San Francisco and L.A., the political leadership harbors a strong interest in moving away from car-first living and working. The similarities and differences between the two cities, however, have set up an important contrast between the policies officeholders wish to use to get there.

Public transportation is already central for many San Franciscans; Angelenos typically rely far more on automobiles. San Francisco is notoriously dense; L.A., famously sprawling. Partly because of those different growth patterns, and partly because of tradition, although San Francisco neighborhoods have their own distinct identity, L.A.’s neighborhoods are bigger, more autonomous, and more self-contained. Residents often choose to spend much of their time near their homes, not shuttling from one side of town to the other unless their work requires it.

Los Angeles, in other words, is relatively distinct among America’s largest cities. Rather than an industrial-age city planned out block by block, constrained by geography, contemporary L.A. is a post-modern patchwork — a veritable network of villages that lacks a single core where residents routinely cluster on foot.

Back to basics for Los Angeles

That’s why many have taken notice of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Great Streets” initiative, which is billed specifically as a natural outgrowth of L.A.’s special urban geography and culture. In a speech debuting the program, Garcetti took pains to include “car, bike, foot and transit” among the forms of transportation he hoped to encourage in focusing on revitalizing key L.A. boulevards.

Garcetti has framed the initiative as a showcase of some of his biggest goals as mayor: beefing up both L.A.’s mass transit and its city streets. In describing his would-be legacy, Garcetti told The Washington Post he envisioned Los Angeles as “a place that has a great public transportation system, a world-class airport, that has made a huge dent and is on the way to ending homelessness, that paved its streets and that built up great neighborhoods.”

Relative to San Francisco, augmenting L.A.’s transit system is low-hanging fruit. Garcetti’s most substantial rail project would include improvements to LAX, in particular a new metro line extension. Those plans were recently approved by the board of directors of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which expects to fund the work with over $300 million raised through sales taxes voted in five years ago under Measure R.

Garcetti has found himself in an unusual political position. In taking over from Antonio Villaraigosa’s largely disappointing tenure, he has been able to focus on smaller, more practical measures than his predecessor. Critics have expressed boredom over his approach, but Garcetti has shown an understanding of its advantages. Having run on a “back to basics” pledge, Garcetti now has the ability to advance projects favored by Democrats, like mass transit, on a scale modest enough to avoid the kind of widespread backlash that Gov. Jerry Brown’s cherished high-speed rail project has attracted statewide.

Red tape for San Francisco

New transportation projects face a different fate in San Francisco. There, a planned bus system upgrade spanning just two miles has racked up an expected cost of $126 million, including associated street modifications. The so-called Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit plan was approved back in 2003 through the city’s Proposition K. The scheme anticipated a 2009 build date. But San Francisco’s bureaucratic hurdles wound up consuming six years and over $7 million; only now has the project received its required environmental impact report, which exceeds several thousand pages in volumes and supplements.

Ironically, the Van Ness project triggered the city’s most demanding level of reportage because arcane rules factor a project’s impact on drive times into the definition of environmental impact. That has environmentalists frustrated — but an upcoming change to California regulations will substitute the drive-time criterion with a so-called “vehicle miles traveled” metric. Environmentalists believe the change will shift the regulatory agenda away from reducing drive delays and toward reducing driving altogether.

It’s a development that could embolden the kinds of urban planners who embrace the currently fashionable vision of cities as centralized, high-density places dependent on mass transit. That, in turn, would likely bring Los Angeles to the fore as proof that cities need not conform to top-down, idea-driven planning in order to update and expand their infrastructure.

This worldview is driving current proposals in Sacramento to divert cap-and-trade funds to the bullet-train debacle and light-rail. But what’s both strange and unsurprising is how all the pols — and all the reporters covering them — ignore the fact that we could be on the verge of a transportation revolution because of driverless cars.

This is strange because so much has been written about driverless cars’ vast potential to change modern life. This essay just came out Friday. This Google boast came out last month. This Forbes analysis came out last year. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, an Orange County resident, had this to say:

“I think that genuine self-driving cars will be available within a decade and that they’ll be big game changers. When you’re not actually driving a car yourself, for example, you don’t care much about how powerful it is. So you’ll be happy to chug along in a super-efficient car, reading a book or playing on your phone. You’ll be more willing to share a car, since automated systems will be able to quickly put together carpools with guaranteed maximums on wait time. And of course, driverless cars will be fundamentally more fuel-efficient since computers can drive cars better than humans can.”

Oh, yeah, light rail can compete with this.

Beat reporters stuck in narrative ruts

So why is it unsurprising that the Sacramento beat reporters don’t incorporate this into their stories about mass transit, the bullet train or anything involving transportation?

Because they rarely directly challenge politicians’ long-established narratives and rarely take on conventional wisdom.

For example, I’ve never seen a single story in the Sac Bee or L.A. Times that ponders why the CTA and the CFT were so quick to go along with the governor’s Local Control Funding Formula change in how school funds are allocated.

The obvious answer is that they think it will be good for them — that they can manipulate the rules so that the extra funds supposed to go to struggling students instead go to teachers’ compensation.

But this is too obvious to write about, evidently.

So while excitement builds outside the Capitol as people contemplate a bold new world of driverless cars, inside the Capitol, the pols think it’s still the 1980s, and that light-rail is the bomb, and the journos don’t think that’s crazy.

Sigh.

“Yet despite transit’s importance, most metropolitan transit systems are inadequate. In no major metropolitan area, for example, are more than 12.6% of jobs accessible within a 45-minute, one-way commute via transit. This is particularly problematic for poorer metropolitan-area residents, who are most likely to be transit-dependent.

“Why is transit so inadequate? One reason is that while many metropolitan areas maintain  ‘radial’ transit networks designed to transport workers to and from a traditional central business district, patterns of economic activity have actually become increasingly decentralized. Research shows that nearly half the jobs in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are located more than 10 miles from the edge of the central business district, while only 20% of jobs are located within three miles of downtown. In this context, ‘grid’ transit networks—which do a much better job of connecting suburbs with one another—are more effective than radial ones.

‘Supposed to be the future of public transportation’

Fixed-rail mass transit just can’t compare with small bus fleets in getting people from where they live to where they work. So one would think that as a matter of social justice, bus rapid transit would be hugely popular in liberal communities?

Nope. Not even close. A San Francisco Chronicle story shows that in the Bay Area, the transit approach has been stalled:

“Bus rapid transit was supposed to be the future of public transportation.

“A technology combining more efficient buses and relatively simple improvements to streets, BRT, as it’s known, has been heralded as a fairly cheap high-capacity transit system — a subway on tires — that can be put on the streets quickly.

“But in the Bay Area, the introduction of bus rapid transit is advancing at a pace akin to that of a Muni bus stuck in rush-hour traffic. More than a dozen years after the region started talking about the speedy buses, the Bay Area is still waiting for its first one.

“Bus rapid transit projects in San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay are still in the works, but they have stalled after running into community skepticism and opposition to the removal of traffic lanes and parking spaces. The opposition from merchants and residents has caused some cities, even progressive bastions like Berkeley, to refuse to allow transit-only lanes or to drop out of BRT projects altogether.”

The Chronicle article ignores two crucial issues. The first is that the Bay Area loves the mass transit program whose main ridership is middle-class and upper-middle-class — the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. The second is that historically one of the reasons bus rapid transit has been so opposed is because it involves vehicles. Even if they’re vehicles that don’t have internal combustion engines, liberals don’t like vehicles — outside of their own.

Poor sued over rail-favoring transit policies in L.A.

In the early 1990s, this attitude led to a social-justice lawsuit in Los Angeles. This story is from the Dec. 31, 1996, Los Angeles Times:

“When it began in 1992 as the brainchild of labor and environmental activist Eric Mann, the Bus Riders Union was seen by some as a gadfly group whose members had been escorted out of MTA meetings by transit police.

“Now, the group has won official recognition and a place at the decision-making table. With the October settlement of its lawsuit against the MTA, the Bus Riders Union is included in a joint working group with MTA officials that will oversee the implementation of future bus improvements.

“But the group’s recent success is just one part of its broader goals.

“‘Building a first-class bus system is part of building a social movement,’ organizer Kikanza Ramsey said. To the Bus Riders Union, better buses are an important improvement–along with better wages and working conditions and a cleaner environment–to the quality of life of poor and minority Los Angeles residents.

“The union contends that improving the bus system is a civil rights issue because most bus riders are minorities and have low incomes. Forty-seven percent of bus riders are Latinos, 23% are African American, 19% are white and 8% are Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders.

“Its suit alleged that massive spending on rail projects diverted funds from poor and minority bus riders.”

Bingo.