Q&A with Susan Handy, Director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at UC Davis

Portrait courtesy of Susan Handy

Where did you grow up, and what’s your earliest memory of thinking about transportation and how it works? 

I grew up in Palo Alto before it was Silicon Valley—when Palo Alto was a town a lot like Davis, in fact. As kids, we were walking and biking ourselves around. Most of the time our parents weren’t driving us to school or to our after-school activities.

This was an era in the late ’50s into the ’70s when there was massive freeway building going on in the state. Interstate 280  on the peninsula—I was around for the opening of that. That changed how we got around and how  things flowed.

In the intro to Shifting Gears [which was published on Oct. 31 by MIT Press],  you write that you’ll “present evidence of the significant societal costs of our car-oriented transportation system.” What are some things that we as a society should consider to help offset those costs?

A lot of the work I’ve been doing is around California’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s so much else that goes along with that in terms of how cars impact our lives. It’s not just what comes out of the tailpipe, but the roads we need to build to support those cars and what those roads do to our communities.

And then there’s the fact that [a car-centric approach] really doesn’t work for everybody. There are a lot of people who don’t drive for reasons of age, physical or mental ability, or income. How are we providing them with the accessibility they need to the places they need to go? We provide some specialized public transit services, particularly for people with disabilities, and there are some elder care transportation services. Sometimes we provide school buses, but lot of times we don’t. Sometimes we give kids free passes on the transit system. Sometimes we don’t. All of that provides some minimal level of accessibility for this segment of the population. But we could be doing more.

You use Houston and Austin to explain the fundamental difference in the ways that cities think about transportation and how those two ways are mirrored elsewhere in the United States. What exactly are those ways of thinking? And with which way of thinking do you think Sacramento is more aligned?

One way of thinking is, “We’ve got a lot of traffic congestion, so we’ve got to expand the freeways to accommodate all of that demand for driving.” That’s what’s going on in Houston. And what’s especially surprising about that is that it will involve taking out homes and destroying a neighborhood, like what happened back in the ’50s to the ’70s. We thought we were beyond that, but no—the importance of widening the highway is seen to outweigh the destruction to the neighborhood, [even though] that approach has failed us. We’ve widened and widened and widened the freeways, and we still have traffic congestion.

So Austin had a very ambitious plan of investing in public transit, building out the bicycle network, and promoting higher [residential] densities that make transit work better and make biking work better.

But part of the [problem] is the state highway department versus the cities. In Austin, the city’s pushing this [bike and public transit| vision, but the state’s department of transportation is pushing highway widening. We see this in almost every city. I think Sacramento falls more into the Austin camp in that there is a lot of thinking about how we can rein [freeways] in. At least within the city of Sacramento. They’re trying to build a community that is less car-dependent. They may not have made as much progress as you’d like to see, but they’re working on it. Still, we see this pressure to widen the highways, like this incredible construction that’s going on Highway 50 from downtown. To me, that’s just painful to watch. All the money that’s going into that freeway widening? If it were to be invested in a new approach, just think about how much that could do.

A new approach like what?

There’s an integrated transportation plan for the core [Sacramento] area called the Grid 3.0. There’s a lot of thinking about how we build out a bicycle network as a part of that. [Think about] all the effort to bring more housing and more economic activity to the core area. That’s about making Sacramento less car-dependent, and that’s about enabling more people to live in close proximity to work so that they don’t need to drive so much. It’s not about getting rid of the car. It’s about giving people options.

This rendering shows a 2012 proposal for decking I-5, which currently separates downtown from the waterfront. “If we were able to cap the freeway and reconnect old town and the river to downtown, I think that would benefit the community in lots of ways,” Susan Handy says. (Rendering courtesy of the city of Sacramento)

How do you feel about zigging when conventional wisdom says to zag?

It’s always worth questioning the conventional wisdom. It’s good to take a closer look at it and say, “Is this really right? Is this really what we should be doing? Let’s think about this other perspective. Maybe that makes more sense.”

So, to make that a little more concrete: Freeway building, right? We have a policy in California that says we need to reduce how much people are driving—we need to reduce vehicle miles of travel. But we continue to expand freeways. We have very robust research that shows that when you expand a freeway, that’s going to generate more driving and increase the total amount of vehicle miles of travel.

So why are we still building freeways in California, [especially] now that we have population projections that say that California’s population is not going to be growing for a few decades? And why are we still expanding freeways when we’re also putting money into high-speed rail and other rail investments that are designed to give people alternatives to driving? I think the public can make it clear that they are open to other approaches. I think that’s partly about voting, but it’s also about getting out there at the public meetings when these projects are being proposed. It’s getting out there when the long-range plan is being developed to make sure that the right sort of vision is built into that long-range plan.

There’s a plan to widen I-80 from Dixon to Sacramento through Davis and there’s federal money designated for that. There’s a lot of selling of that project as a way to fix the congestion problem. And it’s those kinds of decisions where we really need to step back and ask ourselves, “Does this really make sense?”

My thinking is that if we treated the Yolo Causeway like we treat the bridges in the Bay Area, we could put a toll on it. Then you’re pricing the driving, and you’re raising money to invest in improving the alternatives. [Adding dedicated bus rapid transit to the causeway] would mean that whatever new lane gets added would be solely for these buses. 

Now, we already do have a pretty high-quality transit option heading west of Sacramento: It’s called the Capitol Corridor [train service] that serves Davis, Vacaville, Fairfield and so on. Is it better to invest more money in that to increase frequency and reduce fares? I’ve also always thought maybe there’s some possibility of a lighter sort of rail, using those rail tracks for the shorter distance between Davis to West Sacramento to Sacramento. You want to work with what you’ve got and try to do it as cost-effectively as you can. 

I was struck also, but not necessarily surprised, to read how after years of U.S. transportation planning influencing other countries, we’re starting to see a reversal of that dynamic. What are one or two international concepts that have arrived here? 

Well, I think there’s been an intermixing of ideas all along. For example, freeways are clearly a very American thing, but the original idea was inspired by the autobahns built during Nazi Germany. Some Americans went over there and saw this system and thought, “Hey, this works pretty well. Maybe we need to do something like that here.” But we certainly took it to a whole new level. So that spread around the world not just the freeway design, but the extensiveness of a freeway network. We’ve also exported the suburban development that goes along with those freeway systems. Those are the big [ideas] flowing out.

I would say that flowing back in from other countries are a lot of the more traditional ideas, like the importance of the central business district, which is the heart and the soul of the community, preserving historic parts of the city, and making better use of waterfronts. We’ve seen a number of U.S. cities take out freeways to make better use of their waterfronts, including San Francisco, Portland and others.

And you know about Davis being the site of the very first bike lane in the U.S. back in the late 1960s, right? That was because of a family from Davis who went to the Netherlands and saw all of the biking that went on there as a part of daily life. It’s taken many decades to really get to the point where cities everywhere are now investing in bicycle infrastructure and trying to build up that bicycle network. But I think these ideas we’ve imported have only made our cities better.

READ MORE: Can Electric Bikes Help Save The Planet? – Susan Handy and other experts discuss the rise of e-bikes

In your book, you address the importance of MPOs—metropolitan planning organizations—which are agencies that mediate transportation issues. Who does that in our region, and how are they doing?

The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) is our metropolitan planning organization, and I would say they’re one of the more progressive ones. They’re trying to shift some of these traditional practices. They were one of the first to do “visioning” processes that laid out some different scenarios for how the region could grow in the future, and then analyzed the different scenarios with respect to what this will mean for driving and emissions and other aspects of quality of life.

And that led to the adoption of a plan that really tried to rein in the outward development and focus growth more inward and on investments in [transportation] modes other than just freeways and cars, like investing in bicycle infrastructure and building out a more complete bicycle network. It’s thinking about public transit and how to improve that network to make it more viable for more people in the region. Bringing in bike share [like Jump and Lime bikes] provided another alternative. They’re doing a lot of the right things for the right reasons.

The challenge is that SACOG has no power over land-use decisions. They are solely about transportation investments. So that gets complicated, because they may be planning for a more compact city that is less dependent on freeways, but if the counties are approving large [housing and commercial] developments at the fringe of the region that are very low density that are not going to support much in the way of public transit service, then that works against what SACOG is trying to do.

Another issue you talk about in Shifting Gears is the concept of freeway removal. More and more cities are doing this. And as you note in the book, the organization Congress for the New Urbanism regularly puts out a list of “freeways without futures.” Would you put Interstate 5 through downtown on that list?

Ah, good question. That freeway was a big mistake. That’d be a hard one to take out, though, because it’s a link in an interstate as opposed to kind of a stub freeway coming into a city that isn’t quite so essential. But there is the possibility of capping it, right? Make it a tunnel. The waterfront is a huge asset to the city from the standpoint of economic development, tourism and quality of life for residents. By separating Old Sacramento from downtown, we’ve really lost something important to the community.

So if we were able to cap the freeway and reconnect Old Town and the river to downtown, I think that would benefit the community in lots of ways—if you had easy connections to Old Sacramento, you’d just see this flow of people. There has also been talk about a trolley between Sacramento and West Sacramento, and I think that would feed nicely into that.

You also write about the conflation of mobility and freedom. In America, “mobility” usually means “car.” But cars are actually anything but free.

Right. Once you’ve bought your car and the tank’s full, then yeah—it feels free. But it’s not. We have invested so much in supporting cars and enabling cars that most of us don’t really have much other alternative but to drive to where we’re going. I’m lucky to live in Davis where I can take care of most of my daily needs on a bike. But most people don’t realistically have that option. So another way to think about freedom is freedom from the car. Maybe that’s what we should be providing to people: the freedom to choose how you get from point A to point B.

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