The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is getting closer to creating indicators and measurements of greenhouse gases in response to SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008.
The legislation required CARB to build out the collection and use of data to assist in the coordination of transportation and land use planning groups. And there is a lot of data — information on housing, highway use, vehicle miles traveled and mass-transit popularity measurements, among others.
“By and large, we don’t have really good data other than commute to work,” Paul M. Ong said at a CARB Research Seminar on Monday. Ong, a research professor at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, presented research from a pilot monitoring system in Los Angeles County. Ong was joined by Gian-Claudia Sciara, assistant professor of Community and Regional Planning and Fellow of the Snell Endowed Chair in Transportation at the University of Texas at Austin.
The pilot found that there is no perfect data or set of indicators for tracking progress toward SB 375 goals, and because data is collected at the county level, there is little consistency.
Bus use is hard to track, and gathering data around travel and transit can be difficult and expensive.
The Los Angeles prototype had limitations, including needing a longer timeline to show an average in changes instead of spikes that followed the annual business cycle.
The Los Angeles County model showed how difficult scaling data gathering would be, since counties are usually in charge of land use planning. A cohesive, state-level data management system will be necessary to accurately track information.
Metro planning organizations (MPOs) offer one scaling option, though, because they share information among governments and transportation systems. Sciara suggested harnessing the monitoring systems already in use by MPOs, as they often act as a clearinghouse for intergovernmental land use planning.
“MPOs are hungry for more data,” Sciara said.
Since local governments do not always have GIS systems for land use and zoning maps, housing information can be hard to compare to transportation.
“Where an MPO has more overlapping functions,” Sciara said, citing such a specialized regional group as the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, “there tends to be more capacity for data gathering.”
Although MPOs collect a lot of data, they may not see it as their job to create report cards on whether local governments are doing their part in greenhouse gas reduction, Sciara said.
That leaves a lot of room for better data gathering and use. This could include project trackers and dashboards, interoperable management systems and even hardware to take measurements.
