Draft MTP/SCS Comments Received - sacog

Sacramento Area Council of Governments January 9, 2012
SACOG Board of Directors
SACOG, MTP/SCS 2035
1415 L Street, Suite 300,
Sacramento, CA 95814
Re:
2035)
Draft Metropolitan Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Strategy 2035 (MTP/SCS
To the SACOG Board of Directors and Executive Director Mike McKeever:
We commend SACOG on the vision put forth in this MTP/SCS. It is clear that SACOG has incorporated
principles that public health representatives would agree with, such as prioritizing transit, bicycling, and
walking over driving, incorporating Safe Routes to Schools and Complete Streets as often as possible,
preserving agricultural lands and natural resources, preserving affordability of housing while
aggressively pursuing compact development, assessing air quality dangers of placing housing near
freeways, ameliorating greenhouse gas emissions, improving accessibility to needed destinations such
as jobs, schools, and parks, and supporting mitigations of motor vehicle collisions. However, after
reviewing the plan carefully and based on many of our organizations’ experience reviewing plans from
other regions and developing health and equity metrics, we believe there are a number of ways that this
plan could better reflect health and equity priorities.
As background to this letter, in the spring and summer of 2011, Human Impact Partners (HIP) worked
with over twenty organizations and agencies statewide to prioritize 13 indicators of health and equity
that could be incorporated into Sustainable Communities’ Strategies across California. We are attaching
our report (Appendix C), which supplies the evidence that connects these indicators to health outcomes
as well as suggested sources for methodology. Due to regional differences, we did not suggest
benchmarks as we felt that would be more appropriate for organizations and agencies in each region to
do so. HIP’s report, “Elevating Health and Equity into the Sustainable Communities Strategy Process”,
provides the basis for suggested measurements contained in this comment letter.
Throughout our comments, in most cases we recommend supplemental analyses, monitoring, and
reporting to more completely incorporate health outcomes and health determinants. However, there
are a few key areas in which we hope to push SACOG to more explicitly and fully incorporate health into
the MTP/SCS:
Affordability:
o Measure Housing + Transportation costs as a percentage of household income
for all modes of travel;
o Disaggregate the results by income level, race, EJ vs. non‐EJ community, TPA,
and community type.
Respiratory health:
o For development that is proposed near busy roadways, change the analysis
buffer from 500 to 1,000 feet to trigger a health analysis & potentially require
mitigations based on that analysis;
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