Your Livable Communities Newsletter |
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The 2021 State of the Region report helps us understand transportation barriers that impact Ventura County's growth as a truly livable community.
Sixteen years ago, when we pulled together our first Livable Communities Newsletter, we committed to build on The American Institute of Architects (AIA) 10 Principles for Livable Communities. Over the years we have worked to stay true to that commitment.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) 10 Principles for Livable Communities:
1. Design on a Human Scale
2. Provide Choices
3. Encourage Mixed-Use Development
4. Preserve Urban Centers
5. Vary Transportation Options
6. Build Vibrant Public Spaces
7. Create a Neighborhood Identity
8. Protect Environmental Resources
9. Conserve Landscapes
10. Design Matters
Use this link to get more details on all of the principles:
https://modestoartmuseum.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/liv_10principles_flyer-1.pdf
Even a modest skim of the principles will yield the importance of transportation in each principle. Some principles focus directly on transportation while others imply some level of transportation in place to have the principles play out as intended. Because of the importance of transportation, in the articles below we have gone to our 2021 State of the Region report to review the current and future assessments of how Ventura County will be able to deliver the type of transportation called for by the principles in order to make the County a true livable community.
Thanks,
Stacy Roscoe
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Ventura County is a collection of suburban communities and rural enclaves, many separated by greenbelts and natural borders like rivers and mountains. As such, its residents are highly dependent on private automobiles and freeways. Progress toward diversifying our transportation system has been slow. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic started, more than 78% of Ventura County residents commuted to work every weekday by driving alone. Ridership had been declining on our public transit systems even before the pandemic. Although our cities added miles of bicycle lanes in recent years, in most places, bicyclists still risk competing with cars for space on the roads. “In our county, there are a lot of incentives for driving,” said Darren Kettle, who served as executive director of the Ventura County Transportation Commission from 2007 through the summer of 2021, “We take great pride in our individual communities and the space between them and our open space, but those don’t necessarily translate to allowing for super-simple public transit.” In Ventura County, public transit is “mobility of last resort,” Kettle said. Our busiest bus routes offer service no more frequently than every 20 minutes, and a system that people would choose to rely on would need to run twice that often. That would take “a whole heck of a lot of money,” Kettle said.
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Driving alone on a daily basis — the most common way for generations of Americans to commute, at least when there’s not a pandemic raging — puts stress on the roads and the environment.
The most recent data available is from 2019, before the pandemic forced thousands of Ventura County residents to work from home. In 2019, 78.7% of employed county residents reported driving alone as their primary method of getting to work. That habit has been very resistant to change — the percentage of people driving alone actually grew slightly between 2017 and 2019, and between 2005 and 2019 it decreased by only 1.5 percentage points. Carpooling was the next most popular option after driving alone, with 11.1% of workers driving a private vehicle with one or more companions. Six percent of respondents in 2019 said they worked at home — a figure that obviously changed a great deal the following year — and only 3.3% got to work by walking, bicycling or on public transportation. The number of workers using public transportation to get to work dropped between 2017 and 2019, from 1.3% to 1.1%, which is less than those who walked to work. One possible reason for these shifts is that in the later years of the 2010s used cars and vehicle financing were plentiful and relatively cheap, which allowed more people to own and drive their own cars.
Unsurprisingly, miles driven on all of Ventura County’s highways dropped noticeably in 2020, when the pandemic kept many people home from workplaces and schools for months. The decline wasn’t as sharp as one might expect, though, given the empty roads in March and April of 2020. On Highway 101, which has the county’s highest vehicle counts, Caltrans estimated around 1.1 billion vehicle miles were traveled in 2020, a 17.2% decline from 2019. On Highway 118 through Simi Valley and Moorpark, 456 million miles were driven in 2020, a 21.8% drop from the year before. And on Highway 23 in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark, the 239 million miles in 2020 represented a 31.9% one-year decline. More surprising than the decline in 2020 is the fact vehicle miles on Highway 101 had been dropping for years before the pandemic. These declines were smaller — 2.3% in 2018 and 5.1% in 2019 — but they still amounted to millions fewer miles driven from year to year. With no pandemic or recession in those years to reduce the need for driving, and with our transit systems also seeing shrinking passenger counts, this trend bears watching.
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What is Expected in the Future? |
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As many people discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, commuting affects productivity and quality of life; every minute on the road is time not spent on work, leisure, exercise, sleep or with family. Long commutes, whether they result from living farther from work or encountering more congestion on the roads, worsen traffic and degrade the environment, as idling cars release more air pollution per mile than moving ones. Ventura County’s commutes appear to be getting longer — or at least they were before the pandemic started in 2020. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of Ventura County residents with commutes in every 5-minute range shorter than 25 minutes decreased, while the number of Ventura County residents with commutes in almost every 5-minute range above 25 minutes increased. For example, the number of people with commutes of 90 or more minutes increased by 15.9% in three years, while the number of people with commutes of 10 to 14 minutes dropped by 11.1% in that period.
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As seen in these three excerpts from our 2021 State of the Region report, Ventura County is making some progress getting to the transportation structure required to be a livable community, but there is much more that needs to be done. |
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Thank you for your Support!! |
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A Special Thank You Goes to Our State of the Region Sponsors:
Research Sponsor -
Ventura County Community Foundation
Title Sponsor -
Ventura County Community College District
Domain Sponsors -
AERA Energy
AT&T
California Lutheran University - Center for Economics of
Social Issues
California State University Channel Islands
County of Ventura
Limoneira
Supporting Sponsors -
Athens Services
EPIC Wealth Partners
California Lutheran University - CENTER
FOR NONPROFIT LEADERSHIP
Gold Coast Transit
Montecito Bank
Ventura County Office of Education
Ventura County P-20 COUNCIL
The Port of Hueneme
Ventura County Coastal Association of
REALTORS
Southern California Edison
VCTC - Ventura County Transportation
COMMISSION
Contributing Sponsors -
Coast Reprographics
The Law Firm of Hiepler & Hiepler
Musick, Peeler & Garrett, LLP
Sespe Consulting Inc.
SoCalGas
Ventura County Credit Union
Friend Sponsors -
Community Property Management
Dyer Sheehan Group, Inc.
United Way
David Maron
Kate McLean & Steve Stone
Stacy and Kerry Roscoe
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