Equitable VMT Mitigation: An Interview with Robert Swierk
Recently SCC4Transit had the pleasure of talking with Robert Swierk from VTA. Rob leads the Equitable VMT Mitigation project, which we’ve written about in the past. Rob kindly sat down for an interview to discuss the project, it’s current state, and what it might look like when it’s implemented.
His answers to our questions show that the people at VTA care very deeply about the community they serve, and are thoughtful about how any changes impact that community.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ST: Thanks again, Rob, for talking with us tonight. How long have you worked at VTA and what was your path to get there?
RS: Sure, thanks so much for having me and for the opportunity to talk a little bit about what VTA is doing in this area. So I have been at VTA for just about sixteen years now. I came to VTA in a little bit of a roundabout way. I actually was offered a position in December of 1999 when I was just finishing up graduate school, and I turned it down at the time because it was a term limited position and it turns out that it was probably a good decision that I turned it down, because it was right before the dotcom bust. There's a good chance that if I had taken that position, I would have been laid off sometime either during it or at the end of the term. So I ended up deciding, out of graduate school, to work in transportation planning consulting and moved to the east coast, where I'm from. So I went back to the east coast and worked for about eight years in transportation planning consulting, and then my wife and I moved out here in 2008, and I took the position that I have now.
ST: Did you go to school or grad school with a focus on transit and civil engineering?
RS: I studied environmental sciences within the school of earth sciences at Stanford. Stanford doesn't have an urban planning or transportation planning major per se, so I just did the closest thing. I didn't know exactly that I wanted to work in transit and transportation planning right when I entered college, but as I went along it kind of started to feel like I was heading in that direction, so I took the courses that sort of made sense. I worked for a year before going to graduate school. I worked in GIS, computer mapping at a lab at Stanford. And then I went to graduate school and did a dual masters in city and regional planning and transportation engineering at Cal. So I'm one of those people who's done both sides of the Bay in terms of the rivalry. My wife went to Cal, so we don't actually own the house divided flag, but we're a household like that, with Stanford and Cal alums in the same house.
ST: And which one of the bus or light rail routes is your favorite, and why?
RS: I have two that come to mind when I think of the VTA system. The one that is probably the closest to my heart is the Orange line. I live in Mountain View and it was the line that was in my mind when my wife and I were moving back to California in 2008. We wanted to be close to Caltrain and the light rail in Mountain View, and the 522 and 22 [bus routes]; we live within walking distance of all of those. And I ride the Orange line every time I go into the office. I pretty much never drive to get to the office. I feel fortunate that we had the option to be able to tailor our location decision for the residential end, and then working at VTA, it just made sense to commute on light rail.
But the other line that I really think is a great one in the VTA system is the 60 bus. It's kind of like the Swiss Army knife of a bus route, you know? When you think of all the things that the 60 does, especially now that BART Phase I has opened, it goes to Santana Row and Valley Fair malls, and the airport, and then all the way up to the Milpitas BART station. I don't ride it that often, but when I do, it's often transferring from the 522 or 22 at Santa Clara Caltrain station, and in one direction you can hop over to either the airport or light rail, and then the other direction you can get down to Santana Row, Valley Fair or even points south. And it's one that at VTA we see a lot of potential for improvement, like even more ridership and maybe more ways to prioritize transit because it's a route that serves so many good destinations.
ST: Plus it's got an awesome bus wrap, with the planes on it.
RS: Yeah.
ST: You reminded me that there's also another VTA member, Greg Richardson [Assistant GM/CFO], who also lives car free. It's great that members of VTA are able to make so much use of the transit services that they work on.
RS: And actually, for the groundbreaking for the EBRC light rail extension a couple of Saturdays ago, I think you, Greg, and I all ended up on the same 522 heading to the event. As we went along, especially starting at about Santa Clara Caltrain station and eastward, it became like the caravan to the EBRC groundbreaking.
ST: Yes, and that was a fantastic ceremony! It was super cool that there were two huge groundbreaking ceremonies back-to-back, just a really exciting time for VTA and transit in the South Bay. I'm really excited now to dig into the reason for this interview, which is the Equitable VMT Mitigation Program that VTA is developing.
So for anyone who hasn't seen either the really great explainer videos or been to any of the community meetings: when someone asks you, ”What is this equitable VMT program?”, what's your elevator pitch?
RS: When I talk with people about it, I think what rings true is just that VTA is working with its cities and Santa Clara County to try to develop a program that would reduce the amount of driving from development projects. So for instance, when there are new office buildings, or larger retail and housing developments, they generate new car trips. And we're trying to reduce the amount of driving from that development, but do so in a way that provides more travel options to people, and especially to people and communities that need it the most. We deliberately took an equity-centered approach to this project because we want to make sure that if development is happening in one place, and some of the money and mitigation improvements might be happening elsewhere, that we're actually benefiting communities that might have been historically disadvantaged and not harming them.
ST: I’m curious to talk about the equity portion of that. In your mind, and for this project's definition, what does equity look like? How would you equitably mitigate the effects of VMT in certain parts of the county if new projects aren't being built there? Not to say that there's always a one-to-one, that the area where a project is being developed wouldn't see any kind of benefit from reduced VMT, because reduced VMT benefits everybody. But for this program, what does equity look like when you're mitigating VMT?
RS: Yeah, that's a great question. We've thought about it within the project team in a couple of ways. We think about equity in the process that we're going through in the study itself, and then equity in the actual outcome. So in the process, we think about making sure that we define what communities and populations are disadvantaged according to different metrics that are out there. We have a definition of an equity community that's been wrapped into our study efforts, as well as an equitable engagement approach, just to make sure that when we go out to the community that we're reaching a really wide cross-section of community members.
We’re trying to reach people that have historically not been so involved in the transportation and land use planning process. So making sure that the engagement materials that we produce are multilingual, and we've done our best to try and streamline and simplify the messaging so that it resonates with people of all different backgrounds, not just technical, wonky people. We're going to places where people gather, we're meeting people where they are, as well as hosting events ourselves.
In terms of the outcome we are thinking about, it goes back to the 30 second elevator pitch. It’s just making sure that any money that would be generated from development projects for VMT mitigation under a program like this would go towards mobility improvements, particularly in areas where people need it the most.
We, as transportation planners and engineers on the project team, can come up with ideas that we think will benefit equity communities, but the real test is going out and talking with people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and asking them, “Do you think this would actually be beneficial to you or the community that you serve?”
ST: There's been several phases to this project, and VTA has just wrapped up phase two, correct?
RS: Yeah, we're just wrapping it up as we speak. We held a lot of events in May that were for the general public, in-person in East San Jose and Gilroy, a Zoom workshop, and meetings with community organizations. Now we're continuing into the first half of the summer meeting with individual organizations, cities, and the county’s staff on request. If they're interested, we'll come to [their] meetings, so to speak.
ST: What has the community engagement been like? How has the public been reacting to the outreach for this program?
RS: It's been pretty positive overall, which is encouraging. I think what we're finding is that when you first approach people who are maybe not technical audiences and you present this, they might have different conceptions of what we're actually talking about.
When we had this Zoom community workshop at the end of May, we had some people from some local transportation and advocacy organizations, who actually said “This wasn't really what I thought the meeting would be like.” But as we talked about it they said, “Oh, I could see how this would be beneficial.”
ST: What would you say have been the biggest challenges so far for this program that you've solved, or which ones does it still face? Or is it still kind of unknown, because you're going through a lot of the feedback and trying to piece together what exactly a pilot might look like?
RS: I think that probably the biggest challenge to get from here to a working program is just that VTA can't do this alone. We don't believe that it's in our charter to require any jurisdiction to participate in a program like this; rather we're helping lead this effort to provide more options for cities and the county when they have development projects that come in higher than their own thresholds for VMT. We’re trying to just provide another option so that there's more feasible options to mitigate VMT. And so cities and the county would need to opt into a framework like this for it to move forward. So I think probably the biggest challenge is just getting a critical mass of local jurisdictions to say, “Yeah, this does seem like something that would be beneficial and we'd like to opt in to continue to move into an implementation stage” with VTA and other jurisdictions. That's probably the biggest challenge that we see, but it's not by any means insurmountable. I think it kind of loops back to what we were saying a few minutes ago: how when people first hear about this, it might be kind of unclear, but the more conversations you have about it the more people understand the general idea, the more support it seems to yield. So we're hopeful.
ST: So it was SB743 that required a change from using automobile delay to VMT as a measurement of driving over a given area. Does that law actually require that VMT be mitigated? Or is this simply just a change in how it's measured, and it's left up to all the different localities to determine what to do with that information?
RS: What I'd say is that SB743 changed the way any Lead Agency, which in this case would be the city or the county in which the development project is happening, it changed the way they need to do their CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] review for development projects; to shift from focusing on auto delay and level of service to reducing vehicle miles traveled. So the main change is the metric. CEQA itself has always asked for disclosure of effects on the environment, and then mitigation, if feasible.
I'm not an absolute CEQA expert, but I think what CEQA requires is that a Lead Agency make a good faith effort to disclose the impacts that a project would have in different categories of the environment. So in this case, transportation, and to mitigate adverse impacts to the greatest extent possible. They're not required to implement any specific type of mitigation, and it is possible to approve a project even if the impact is not fully mitigated. But the Lead Agency does have to go through some steps to do that. So, for instance, if they were to evaluate a development project, find that it's going to generate more VMT than the threshold that they've established under CEQA, they would have to disclose that, they'd have to work with the the developer and make a good faith effort to reduce that amount of driving with mitigation. If it can't be mitigated, then they have to disclose that as a “significant and unavoidable impact” under CEQA. And then they'd have to do a “statement of overriding considerations”, explaining why it's important for the agency to still approve this project despite this impact.
So that's where this program could come into play, as it could help a city or the county find more ways to mitigate VMT impacts, and classify a VMT impact down from “significant and unavoidable” to “less than significant”.
Let's say [we’re] thinking about housing development. We all know that there's still a great need for more housing production in California and in the Bay Area. You could potentially have a project that is getting hung up over a VMT impact. Maybe it's just above a threshold, but it's otherwise a good project providing much needed housing. It [VMT mitigation] could actually help streamline that process, reduce the amount of time and the cost involved with the environmental process for that development.
ST: Well that's really fantastic news to hear, that this could potentially help get some housing projects just past the finish line with CEQA. The state law is only about measurement [of VMT], so was it an original idea to include equity in this project?
RS: We applied for a CalTrans planning grant to do this project in 2021, and at the time we were aware that there was starting to be a growing body of research in the transportation world about VMT mitigation in response to the change in state law. There was actually a great paper put out by San Jose State’s Mineta Transportation Institute in 2021 by Dr. Serena Alexander that looked specifically at equity and off-site VMT mitigation. VTA was interviewed for that particular research project. I was connected with Dr. Alexander that way, and we ended up including her and SJSU Mineta on the team for this project. So it's a long way of saying that we didn't just come up with the idea, “Hey, let's think about and focus on equity in this program.”; it was already something that was bubbling up through the transportation planning world. But we believe we are one of the first projects like this around the state where we've taken an equity centered approach, and made sure to be doing a lot of engagement directly with the community. Some of the previous studies like this around California took an approach of mostly engaging with technical stakeholders; with planners and engineers from jurisdictions, as well as decision makers, developers, and so forth. We really thought it important to also be talking with community members and community organizations.
ST: Do you know of any other transit authority or operator that's creating a program like this in the state or country, or world? I will say, if I do a quick internet search for “equitable VMT”, VTA’s is really the only thing that comes up.
RS: We think that there may only be a few agencies that are doing something quite like this.
A little bit of that is a combination of how new it is. SB743 passed in 2013, but it only became mandatory in 2020. So cities and counties have only been required to be doing this VMT analysis and mitigation for a couple of years. And California is really the only state in the United States that's explicitly focusing on this. In most of the rest of the country, if you're doing a transportation study of a development project, you're focusing on car delay.
So it's a new thing. California is at the forefront, not surprisingly, like we often are.
And VTA is also a little unusual. We're one of only a couple of agencies around the state where we're the transit provider for the county, we’re the congestion management agency, and then we also are the countywide transportation sales tax authority. There's only a few agencies like that around the state. LA Metro is another one. And LA Metro is actually working on a VMT mitigation program at the county wide level, but it's focused more on VMT from transportation capital projects, like roadway expansions. So another long way of saying we do think that it's pretty unique. We may be one of only a few out there that are doing this right now.
ST: In the documents and in the intro post about this on VTA’s website, you mentioned a VMT exchange or a bank; could you explain a little bit about how that would look?
RS: A VMT exchange is a little bit of a simpler structure. A developer that has a project that has a significant VMT impact, they would go to this program and they would see there's a list of pre-vetted improvements that reduce VMT and improve travel options. So they might be speed improvements, vanpool incentives, e-bike vouchers, they could be other things that the community is suggesting along the way. They would basically just pick a project off the list and do it, or they would pay an implementer to do it.
So if it's the e-bikes, perhaps they could just pay to purchase them, or they could maybe pay into a fund that VTA would have to do transit speed improvements, but it's basically picking a project from a pre-vetted list and doing that.
A VMT bank establishes an actual price per VMT reduced, and then a central entity aggregates funds from multiple developments, and when you have enough funds available to do a VMT reduction measure, then you go ahead and implement that. So you can have different development projects contributing towards a single VMT reducing measure. So it allows the developer to really fine tune; they can purchase enough credits for just exactly the VMT impact that they have, but the downside of a VMT bank is it’s more complex to set up and administer over time.
And we're thinking still about both as options for a program in Santa Clara County. I think right now the project team is leaning towards the exchange because it's a little bit simpler to set up and administer, but it's possible we could still move towards a bank, or it could evolve; start as an exchange and then over time turn into a bank.
ST: Great, thank you for those details, and thank you so much for sitting down and talking with me today. I’m very much looking forward to seeing more details about this project in the future.
RS: Awesome, thank you.