So we're going to get going. If everyone could please sign in onto your computer.
We now have the password is go scag, all in lower case.
So if you can select your name and then the password in lower case, go scag.
Go scag. Go scag. Yes.
So you select your name and then you can sign in and we can go ahead and...
I will call the meeting to order at, it's 9.59. Any minute now? Okay. We'll call the meeting
to order. And with that, Vice-Chair Pollock, will you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance?
I'd be honored to. Place your right hand over your heart. Ready, begin. I pledge allegiance
to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands,
One Nation under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All.
Thank you.
And at this time, we have one public comments card, and that is with Leon Alpern.
Are you here?
Hi, good morning.
There we go.
Good morning.
Madam Chair, members of the committee, Leon Alpern, South Coast Air Quality Management District.
And I just have a few quick announcements.
Next Thursday is going to be our environmental justice conference called Building Alliances
and Progressive Solutions.
It's actually going to be here in downtown Los Angeles at the cathedral.
Just a few blocks away from here, SCAG is a co-sponsor of this event.
It's free to attend.
We just asked folks to register ahead of time.
Happy to report we have over 400 people registered for this phenomenal event.
And there's still some room left for anyone else who would like to join us.
Again, it's the fifth time we're doing this event.
Environmental justice is a very important issue for the region,
also for SCAG and the development of the regional transportation plan
and our air quality management plans.
So I invite you and any of your community stakeholders
who are interested in attending this event to register.
And then next month, on October 4th,
will be the annual Clean Air Awards.
also held here in downtown Los Angeles just a couple blocks away from here on
Figueroa. That's going to be on Friday, October 4th. And like-to-deficials are
invited as our guests to attend and any, you know, request for information on that
SCAC staff habit or you're welcome to contact me. Those are the two upcoming
events I wanted to highlight for you. Also, tomorrow's our monthly meeting
of our governing board meeting. You can watch it streaming on our YouTube
YouTube channel.
A particular interest will be the AB617 program.
This will be a heavily focused meeting on AB617, the three communities, which were the
focus of the year one, which we're currently wrapping up, and also the two communities
being proposed for year two.
And all that information is available on our website, aqmd.gov, and again, you
can watch it live or on playback over our YouTube channel.
Finally, I just want to mention, again, we have our new smartphone app.
I know there was a great amount of interest in this when I've announced it in the past I think you sir
We're very interested in it from Riverside. I think yes
And great great. Well, thank you. We're getting great feedback and please tell folks
We want to continually modify this and make it better. It gives you also the temperature
But certainly what the high temperatures we've been having this summer and this week in particular
Does have a connection to air pollution. So I urge folks to download the app. Thank you very much
Thank you for your comments. Also note that October 2nd is Clean Air Day, and you can go to cleanairday.org and sign up.
And every city and county and all did a project on that day. That would be excellent.
In Ventura County, we're looking at coordinating all the college campuses to plant trees, for example, on that day.
So you can all participate. This will be the second anniversary of Clean Air Day sponsored by the Coalition for Clean Air.
I also wanted to announce before we move on to the Consent Calendar,
I call your attention to Agenda Item 2 on your agenda packet,
and that's September is California Pedestrian Safety Month,
dedicated to reducing the number of pedestrians killed and injured on California roadways.
Staff's conducting activities throughout September to recognize
and promote available resources for safety during
during a walkover for the month of October.
The SCAG region experienced a period of annual declines in traffic-related fatalities, both
pedestrian and bicyclists, until 2012 when it began to steadily rise, and the number
of both pedestrian and bicyclists killed are now at the highest they have been for
more than a decade.
That's something you can take back to your communities and let them know.
So we need to do what we can, and at SCAGS, their Go Human Campaign is an Active Transportation
Safety Encouragement Campaign, and it was a really successful campaign in terms of getting
the message out there, billboards and all.
And it has safety resources available to our member agencies and our partners if you're
interested in how to pursue that, particularly with the emphasis on walktober.
And today you can also stop out in the foyer there, they have a pop-up
parklet from the GoHuman kit of parts.
With that then, I'm going to go ahead and we'll move to, we can
Can we switch the order on those two?
Yes, review and prioritize agenda items.
And what we're going to do is we're going to move agenda item 7
to be right under agenda item 5. And on agenda item 5, which we'll go to after consent calendar,
we'll have Sarah Jeffson presenting. So at this time, I'm going to go ahead and go to the consent calendar,
and this is the approval of the minutes, as well as the reports items 2, 3, and 4.
Yes.
Motion to approve.
We have a motion.
Do we have a second?
And we have these wonderful machines that we can vote on the motion.
If you could...
We're using the...
Oh, forget the screen.
Go to your cool little blackberry kind of things.
And so if you're for it, you push the one button, for example.
Not telling you how to vote.
Okay.
I
believe she's voting right.
Everyone's got their card in.
That was in your name plate.
And then you can push a button.
Okay, we've got it.
Great.
Now we know how to do it.
Let's go to our first information item.
Again, this is with Sarah Jepsen,
and this is on Connect SoCal Electric Vehicle Strategy.
Cool. Good morning. I'm actually here this morning with Joseph Crier as well, who's going to talk more about the electric vehicle piece of the presentation.
But my role here is to kind of set the context on where we are with Connect SoCal, our regional transportation plan and sustainable community strategy, which you've now been hearing for several months.
So we're in the final stretch. We have about, well, final stretch before the draft is released.
We have three more meetings.
So in this meeting, we'll be talking about some of those strategies in the plan that help us to achieve our greenhouse gas reduction targets.
And then we'll bring another set of those strategies to you during the October meeting.
And then in November, we are – well, all the committees will get back together to talk about the full plan and its totality and the performance metrics that we use to evaluate its success.
Yes.
You mean walktober, right?
And walktober.
Exactly.
Right.
We'll make sure to highlight the extra transportation pieces in walktober.
So this is just a reminder of where we've been and where we're going, as I had mentioned.
And when Comey talked to the Joint Policy Committee in August, he talked about the
broad range of goals and performance metrics we're trying to achieve through our plan.
And today, I'm going to focus a little bit more in on the greenhouse gas reduction target.
Especially within this committee, you are familiar that one of our big goals of the plan is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to meet the requirements of SB 375.
And that includes the development of a sustainable community strategy that's integrated with our transportation plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
If our sustainable community strategy is not able to achieve our targets we do have an option of developing an alternative planning strategy.
However, this is something that we've looked in through as we've developed the plan as our targets get farther and harder to reach.
But we're pretty confident at this point with some of our preliminary modeling that we're going to be able to reach our goal.
And so we do plan on pursuing the SES as opposed to the APS.
So, as a reminder, the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions per capita, and in order to prove that we are achieving those goals, we have to develop a technical methodology that is approved by the Air Resources Board so that we're all clear on and have a robust manner in which we are estimating our emission reductions.
So a couple of things about hitting the target this cycle compared to previous cycles.
We have some greater policy challenges.
And the first is that our target has changed and is higher for this round.
So there's two targets that we were aiming for.
We have a 2020 target, which is 8% below 2005 levels.
And then we have a 2035 target, which in our last plan, the target was 13% below 2005 levels.
And for this plan, the rules have changed, and we now need to achieve a 19% reduction.
So there's a 6% increase in the reduction that we have to achieve,
so it makes it more challenging for us to achieve the goal this time around.
The other thing and just doing kind of the simple math is that 2035 is closer to us today
than it was last time we developed the plan.
So we have 15 years to achieve that goal with this Connect SoCal plan versus the 19 years
that we had in the last time we developed the plan.
The state has also provided greater incentives or greater penalties, however you would
like to look at it if we do not hit our targets.
The SB2 funding program has specific ties to penalties if a region does not achieve its target through its SES.
And two particular programs, the Solutions for Congested Corridors and the Trade Corridor Enhancement Program,
it's written into the law that if you don't hit your target, you aren't going to be eligible for those funds.
So that's about $500 million per year that we wouldn't be able to compete for as a region.
Beyond those two funding programs, there's other funding programs within SB1 that through
the guidelines and the process for you being competitive for those funds, there's going
to be consideration on whether your region is hitting the greenhouse gas reduction target.
So we think, you know, it's very important for us to maintain competitive for these
resources that we really do our best and put our best foot forward on achieving the
target.
I won't get into too many of the details of this, but also just wanting to highlight
that we have some technical challenges this time around, too.
And the technical challenges have just put a little bit more uncertainty into our process.
And the first technical challenge, which will eventually be an opportunity, is that
we have a new model.
And so it's taking us a little bit longer to discuss the model with the Air Resources
board and make sure that we're all on the same page about the assumptions and
other pieces of the model so that so that everyone is comfortable with the
way in which we are we are assessing the impact of our plan. So the model will
be a great tool. It has a lot more sensitivities than our previous models
but in the short term it does cause this uncertainty which has made it a
little bit more challenging as we move through this process.
The other
Another technical challenge which is also an opportunity is as you look around you notice
transportation has changed quite significantly and even in the last four years we have e-scooters
and more bike share and TNCs and all of this and so our models and tools weren't developed
to project the impacts of these new technologies and we don't have a whole lot of good data
in order to develop the tools that will help us model these strategies.
So it's a challenge for us, and it's also a really exciting opportunity where we can work with the Air Resources Board
to try to develop some new off-model strategies to assess the impacts.
So, again, this technical challenge we have just inserts a little bit more uncertainty into the process,
but it's something that we're working through.
So with that said, just reflect on where we are then as we've run some of our preliminary
models.
As we assess our traditional strategy or strategies that we put in the on-model piece of our analysis,
we're looking at a 11 to 13 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per capita.
So we feel pretty good about that.
And then when you add it to our off-model analysis, which again...
To assess some of these more innovative strategies, we get a 6-7% reduction. To give you the range
of where we are, we're between 17% reduction and 20% reduction, and we need to be at 19.
We will be pushing really hard over the next month, and working with you all to explain
the strategies that we are putting into the plan in order to make sure that we can hit
this target.
The other thing that, you know, just pointing out, as you can see from the numbers in this
six to 7% reduction we get from our innovative strategies, innovation is a key part of hitting
our goals.
So again, we are continuing to push and developing new ways of improving mobility
within the region as well as finding ways to evaluate the impacts of that new mobility
with our modeling tools.
The other final thing I wanted to mention that's a little bit different.
I think this committee talked a little bit about SB150 and there being an overall interest in the state
in making sure that we're not just modeling the impact of our plans,
but we actually then are reaching targets.
And so the state wants to see that, again, in addition to modeling,
you do have some ways in which you're working to implement your plan.
So they're looking at that a little bit more closely.
And so, as you see this plan roll out, you'll also see a stronger focus on the way SCAD
can work with the county transportation commissions and the cities to advance the concepts in
the plan.
And a piece of that that is, I guess, made easier by our strategies is a lot of these
new and innovative strategies that we have in the plan are going to require a lot of
local engagement and work with our cities.
things like bike shares and scooters and some of our transportation demand
management programs. Those are programs that we work with with cities and they
can be implemented much faster than say building a huge expanse of the freeway
or building a new transit line. So a lot of these innovative strategies will
require collaboration with local jurisdictions like you all to move
forward and advance the goals of the plan.
And I've highlighted that a
of the things that we're thinking about in terms of regional initiatives that we'd be
working on with our local agencies.
This includes kind of broader goals of the plan.
We want to continue to work on resilience of the system with the impending impacts of
climate change.
Safety is going to be a key piece of continuing to advance the goals of our plan.
And then we are also looking at ways we can be more effective in our work on complete
streets, clean technology, which you'll hear more about today. We have a new role and some
new resources in housing. And so we'll be talking more about the ways in which the work on the
land use side can really support the goals of the transportation piece of the plan. And then
another piece of our work that we've highlighted at various times is the smart cities and the
future of the workplace. And when we're looking at continuing to work with the subregions
and the cities to just think about how work is going to be different in the future
and how we plan our communities around that.
So that's just kind of the big picture overview
of where we are, some of the challenges we face,
to set the stage for the rest of the team
to talk about the strategies that are going to be in,
that we're proposing to conclude in the plan.
And again, you'll hear about those this month
as well as next month.
So I will hand it over to Joseph
to talk about the EV strategy.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sarah.
Sorry, Marko couldn't be here today,
but I'm really happy to speak to this board again.
Like Sarah had set it up. We have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but we also have a lot of opportunity and it's gag
We're
Working quite hard to make a good plan that's going to hit the target and to help out our region
So I'm going to give you a small sampling of those today
And then also tell you a little bit about the EV electric vehicle landscape in the state
Great. So you might be familiar with these maps last time if you recall back in April
I asked you what hydrogen fuel cars run on and I said it was magic because it's only water that comes out of
tailpipe, I think that's kind of magical. Anyway, and then electric vehicles, they run
on batteries that you charge at a normal outlet. And this right here is our infrastructure
that we have in our region. You can see that hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen fueling stations
are only really located in our urban areas. And then electric vehicle charging stations
are also located in some of our more rural areas. But you might be able to notice
in that map that even though it looks like a pretty big cluster in our urban areas,
we still are far behind where we need to be in order to accommodate all the
vehicles that are coming to our region. And also if you'll notice the
corridors we don't we have quite a few gaps there which is really important for
goods movement and for getting people in and out of our region between our
neighboring states of Nevada and Arizona. So we really need to have a
more complete infrastructure picture here to support the electric vehicles
that are coming.
And so that kind of leads into our work that we're doing here at SCAG, which has been
taking place since 2012.
Since 2012, we've been creating plans and resources to help our local agencies and
to really bring in money from the federal and state and regional agencies that are
installing electric vehicle charging and also selling vehicles into our state.
So it's really important for us to not only meet our target, but also meet economic goals, meet national security goals in terms of energy security
by getting this infrastructure into our region and getting these vehicles on our streets.
Because then we see an immediate decrease of pollution and immediate decrease of greenhouse gases, and also then we're relying on American-made energy,
be it hydrogen or be it batteries from solar panels and hopefully other generally green
sources in California.
So those resources to highlight one of them is our plug-in electric vehicle readiness
atlas.
Now this before was a standalone report which I'll highlight a little bit more of later
in this presentation, but we also created this online mapping tool that can help you
answer questions such as where are the PEVs today? So where are plug-in electric vehicles
drivers? Where is the current demand for charging? Where is the greatest demand for workplace
charging? Where is the greatest need for retail and commercial charging? So people driving
in the morning to their workplace or to go shopping. Where do they need to charge?
And then where's their lack of nearby charging?
And if I can just cut you off one second, and that is, you can get that presentation on your screen by pushing the little box at the bottom left with the B in it.
Sorry to interrupt you.
No worries.
For those of us who can't see well, the screen, so.
I appreciate that.
So this we updated in – we had a pretty rudimentary form back in 2012, then we updated
it in 2017, and in about two weeks we'll have an even more updated version with extra
data that we added from open sources, saving quite a bit of money on that data and also
getting the kind of latest and greatest data available as well as some additional tools.
So we will be promoting that once it's updated in two weeks to our members.
We'll also be using that data that we have for some planning efforts that I'll be telling
you a little bit more about later in this presentation.
Here from the report that I mentioned, we have a standalone report that kind of projects
the electric vehicle charging needs in our region, as well as how many vehicles that
we have.
And so you see that upward curve if you can see it on the screens.
That's a pretty good thing.
That shows the number of electric vehicles, plug-in electric vehicles that we expect
to have in this case in Los Angeles, but we've also looked at regions, subregions all
around the SCAG region, so that's a good thing is the line is going up, we're expecting
more electric vehicles, but what that means is we really need to get busy with bringing
the infrastructure that we need into our region, and that costs a lot of money.
Some of these chargers, you know, if you want to install one in your home, you
can just kind of get a cord of 500 bucks, plug it into your wall, you're set.
But if you're looking at multi-unit dwellings, if you're looking at charging workplaces,
If you're looking to see fast charging, which that's really the future if you want to fuel up
medium heavy duty vehicles or fuel up a vehicle like a Tesla in about 30 minutes
You're looking at tens tens of thousands of dollars like fifty thousand dollars from some station
So it's going to cost a lot of money and we've seen some of our financial plans
We don't just have that money lying around so we need to make sure that we get it from the from the feds like I said from the
state from the
from our
utilities, and we need to make sure that we can leverage all that we can, because this
is the future we need to plan for.
Now, got a little bit ahead of myself, here we go, showing some of those vehicles in
more detail.
In California, we're really forging ahead in terms of electric vehicles.
In 2013, we had EVs only made up about 2.4 percent of the market share, and that's
That's pretty low, especially considering the great benefits that we have from green house
gases and from pollution and energy security.
By 2017, that was 4.9.
This year, it's at 7%, which is still pretty low.
I also did a comparison looking at hybrids, and we still only have about 7% of the vehicles
sold and new vehicles sold are hybrids.
So we're looking at maybe 15% of our vehicles that are being sold every year are alternative
fuels.
Now, we drive around and, you know, you see a lot of Prius, you see a lot of those HOV
stickers, and it might seem like there are a lot of clean vehicles out there, but our
number one selling vehicle in the country is the F-150.
And we're trending more towards larger vehicles and towards, like, SUVs and trucks.
And right now, well, there's some good news coming up in my next slide, is that we're
actually...
I'm sorry, could you tell me what PHEV stands for and DEV stands for?
Thank you.
I get kind of carried away with the alphabet soup sometimes, EV, I'm referring to electric
vehicles, PHEV is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and BEV is battery electric vehicle.
So EV, electric vehicle is kind of an all-encompassing term.
That could be a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, it could be one that you plug in.
A plug-in hybrid vehicle is similar to the Prius where it's a hybrid drive where
where you have your internal combustion, question motor,
but you also, and you have an electric motor,
but you can also plug it into a wall to charge it up.
Usually get about 20 to 50 miles on that charge.
And then a battery electric vehicle
is something that's just purely battery.
And with those vehicles,
you get anywhere from 90 to like 330 miles
with some vehicles.
So that was a good transition.
I appreciate you asking for that clarification.
So the hope is, or I mean the promise is right now in California we already have 48 different
electric vehicle models.
And there's a pretty cool video out there of Ford who announced that they are developing
an all electric F-150.
So that most popular vehicle that, I mean although it has been getting more efficient
over the years, it's still really a gas guzzler.
We're pretty soon going to see that in an electric model.
So you know we don't necessarily need to change people's minds about what kind
of vehicles they need to buy because they're going to be those vehicles to meet their demands
out there.
They're already here.
They're a number of SUVs, full-size SUVs, and they're coming.
Also, Tesla, I know that one's – everybody always gets excited about Tesla.
They also have a – they announced a light-duty truck as well.
So we're going to have a lot of options out there for people.
And just a quick stat.
I just pulled this up while I was sitting back here listening to Sarah was – I
As of July, in California, we have 626,800 electric vehicles in our state.
What does that mean?
So by 2025, we want to have 1.5 million.
By 2030, we want to have 5 million.
So we're making progress on it, but we're not quite where we want to be today.
As you saw from our GHG targets, we really want to be on the ball and, like I said,
But get this money into our state, get the vehicles, get the infrastructure, and it's
really important to get both.
There's kind of a chicken and egg debate here of, do you put the electric vehicle charging
stations in first, and then people will buy the vehicles, or do people need to buy the
vehicles and then we'll get the charging?
It's the jury's a little bit out on that.
But as you can see from this chart here, it's kind of a lot going on, but essentially
what it shows you is that the more electric vehicle charging stations you have in a
city, the more electric vehicles that you have.
So we really need to take a dual approach to make sure that
we're getting people driving these cars, purchasing them.
Because they are fun.
There's a lot of evidence out there that shows that people,
once they drive these cars, they like them.
And they want to buy them.
There's some kind of cute videos out there where they
interview people, and they're like, electric car,
what's that?
I don't know.
That sounds scary.
Am I going to get shocked driving it?
And they say like really ridiculous things.
It's like kids say the darnest things.
And then they try these electric vehicles.
And they're like, OK, when can I buy this?
Oh, and there are how many incentives for it?
So it's pretty impressive how quickly people kind of are won over by electric vehicles.
But like I said, it's still not enough.
It's only 7% of new vehicles being sold, despite all the incentives out there.
But we're working on it, and like I said, or kind of going back to GHG, our strategy,
what we're doing for Connect SoCal to kind of bring it back to our regional plan
is that we are going to, through our work,
supporting jurisdictions to streamline permitting,
to get more funding to the region, to have educational events
where we get people more interested in these vehicles.
We are going to model that.
And the way that it works,
that's kind of described in more detail in the staff report,
is that we essentially, by supporting workplace charging,
we get people to drive their plug-in electric,
plug-in hybrid vehicles more on the electric mode.
So that's somebody who's driving this car that can only go
about 20 miles on a charge, but they drive to work maybe 10 miles.
They're able to charge there, and then they can drive back home
on that battery.
So zero emission all the way.
This is the anecdotal, but a guy I used to volunteer with,
he posted on Facebook that his Prius Prime,
that's a plug-in electric hybrid,
he went 12,000 miles just straight, all just plug-in.
It never had to be.
He's just really diligent. He's just like a super hyper-myler, I think they call him, really
good about charging up. So what we want to do is kind of give people more of that opportunity
so they can kind of just do the right thing so it's kind of built into their lives so they
can drive electric. And then the other side of the slide is something that we'll have
to dive into more in the next two months and you'll see more details in our financial
But SCAG will also be looking at creating a rebate program that will act both on the vehicle side and also on the charging side.
And that will lead to a net reduction of 0.1% GHD reduction, which these numbers seem really small.
But when we're trying to kind of add up to this 19%, every little bit helps.
All right. Something pretty exciting that I'm working on right now is we're about to release some projects for request for proposals to get some consultants to work on the
infrastructure plans, and these are the cities listed there.
We have them kind of sectioned off according to the city's readiness, because we have some
cities like LA where they've streamlined their permitting processes, and then we have some
smaller cities that are a little bit more challenged in terms of resources and staffing,
so we're going to help them, give them the tools so that they can also become
I'm ready for EVs, because EVs aren't just for small cities, or excuse me, they're not
just for big cities, they're not just for, you know, wealthy folks, EVs are for everybody.
And as you can see, hopefully the colors show up well here, is that most of our urban area
is covered by these projects.
So these are the cities, and this is actually a map showing where those are located.
And what we'd like to get out of this is, I can't say too much about what the plans
are going to cover because, like I said, they're going to go out for bid soon.
But the end result of this will hopefully be a template for the rest of our region.
So we're going to start with quite a bit of our region here, and then we're going to move on to the rest of our region.
And as SCAG and as our Clean Cities Coalition, we're going to promote the best practices that we find.
Really quickly, one of the reasons why this is important and kind of one of the things that we're going to be covering is permitting.
So I listened to a presentation from Electrify America.
They came here to talk to us, and they're spending $800 million over the next eight years or so.
And they told us their number one barrier, number one barrier to installing charging,
number one barrier to keeping our greenhouse gases low, keeping our pollution low,
bringing in money into our region, spending that money here was permitting.
And the number one area in that permitting was zoning.
And that's really problematic because in California we have Assembly Bill 1236.
That one's kind of easy to remember the number.
And that one essentially takes EV charging out of the zoning process.
It makes it so that every city has to have a streamlined process,
and that unless there's a health or safety concern, you get EV charging.
The state has decided that this is a priority, and a lot of cities are picking up on that.
But not everybody, and I don't think he named anybody in the SCAG region, hope not, but he
said on average California, the permitting process is 25 days longer than the national
average.
So in the nation it takes 41 days to get your permitting done for an electric vehicle
charging station, California it's 66 days.
So California, if we want to be the leaders, SCAG, if we want to be the leaders of California,
we really need to make sure that we're streamlining our processes and taking advantage
of the funding that's available.
So that's my call to action for you.
I want to thank you again for your time.
A plug for a couple of events that we're doing is every year we help support the Alt Car Expo,
which is there's typically a ride and drive event where people can check out.
I think there are at least 10 electric vehicles that people could check out last time
in addition to shuttles and other vehicles that you could consider for your city's fleets.
That's going to be taking place in Santa Monica.
That's the 14th annual alt car.
That's going to be at the Santa Monica City College on November 2nd.
So I know many of you hail from this area.
But if you don't hail from this area, if you're more from the Inland Empire area,
there will be the very first one in the Inland Empire taking place
at the Riverside Convention Center on October 16th.
And that one will be a little bit more focused on heavy duty, given the inland empires'
kind of strategic location as warehousing areas, as having a lot of heavy duty vehicles
going through there.
And a big focus in both of them will be air quality because, well, for obvious reasons
we've been seeing a lot of poor air quality, and I think one of our speakers earlier
got to mention that.
So please, I'd like to see you at those events.
Hopefully we'll do something in Ventura soon.
I know we have some representation there as well.
So really thank you for your time and appreciate or look forward to any questions you have.
We have some questions.
Council Member Gardner.
Thank you.
Really more a couple of comments than questions.
You talked about infrastructure and I took it as pointing mostly to you can't just
plug an EV into anything that exists at your house, you have to get maybe a larger panel.
That's one piece of it, but the utility infrastructure to feed that is really important.
And the fast chargers are not long-term demand, but they're high demand.
And the utility infrastructure at some point is going to get pushed as far as what is installed can go.
and there will be a need to upgrade. Transformers may be heavier conductor,
maybe even transformers and substations at some point.
So it's important that local jurisdictions work with their utility,
whether you have your own utility or it's Southern California Edison.
You need to be from a planning perspective understanding what you anticipate
The load demand is going to be over time and give the utility the time to get their system upgraded so it can actually serve it.
Because installing it, if you can't get enough electricity to run it, is kind of a waste of time.
And on the permitting side, yes, there are local jurisdiction permits.
That's an issue, but there's also the utility connection.
And none of our utilities are as quick as we would like them to be in terms of planning a new service,
setting a new meter, getting you a new service drop from your transformer, maybe setting a new transformer.
So I think that adds to some of the delay, but it really is important that there be good communication
and planning between whoever you're serving electric utility is and your local jurisdiction.
Otherwise, you're going to – you'll find yourself in a bind and it will be slow to get out.
Thank you.
Definitely appreciate that comment and hopefully make – you trust our judgment more.
Even more so is that with those plans that I told you about – oh, we're not on there anymore.
We will have a steering committee that will be comprised of members of utilities.
So we've already been recruiting them, and then as you saw when we were here in April,
Southern California Edison was here to give us a presentation in tandem with this item.
So definitely something we were thinking about, and I really appreciate that comment.
And it's not just Edison.
There are a number of municipal utilities from Department of Water and Power,
which is very big to the city of Banning, which is very small.
So they're important to coordinate with as well.
It is.
And it's also neat to see when they're also using solar power to charge the cars, too,
which I know some of the companies are doing.
Mayor Robertson, you have a question.
Yes, thank you.
Good point.
I love the presentation and it definitely was timely.
So I had some notes here and starting with my first point when you were talking
was you were talking about the, you know, I would say individual usage.
But yesterday at Omnitrans, we had a rather robust conversation about moving ourselves
from the hydrogen after we've made such a major investment in knowing we need to do electric.
So in your presentation, I was just wondering what discussion and coordination are you having
with the various transit agencies, especially if they're not in a situation like Metro
where you have the bus system with Metro. In our case, we have the County Transportation
Agency, SB, and then we have Omnitransit. There may be, at some point, a discussion
of consolidation, but we have all of those out there, and they moved in a direction.
So now how are we interfacing with them? So our interfacing with transit agencies
is unfortunately somewhat limited due to our capacity. We have Marco Anderson and
myself who are essentially we're on the electric vehicle and alternative fuels programs. However,
we do interface with them with our Clean Cities Coalition. And so we've provided support in
a number of ways including primary ways of support or letters of support. We've done
some modeling. So I know this isn't transit, but we did some air quality modeling for
the LA County Sheriff's Department to support their application to report, excuse me,
to replace a number of diesel buses with electric buses.
We also, I just had a kickoff meeting with another project with Gold Coast Transit District
and up in Ventura and kind of led to some conversations and they got me in touch with
their fleet manager so we're going to work with them to plug them into the resources
that they have because as a Clean Cities Coalition, we are certified by the Department
of Energy.
So we have a number of tools and data and resources that we have available that we then
share with our transit agencies.
Another way that we support them is that we recognize our work through our Clean Cities
Coalition Awards.
So last year we awarded Sunline Transit for recognizing them at our General Assembly for
their work of purchasing, it was like 20 or so hydrogen electric buses.
And then this year we also – it was a long beach this time.
Again, actually that was in their transit, but that was their fleet vehicles.
So, like I mentioned, our capacity is somewhat limited, but it's something that we tried to get into as much as we can.
And we – as I mentioned, we have resources at our fingertips, so if you all have transit agencies, we would like to support those.
One other thing real quick is that one of those programs, the sustainable
communities program that was, excuse
me, it was ported by this board and we're
going to start the projects later, one of the cities that we're working with is
Gardena and they have G-trans. So part of that work will be to support charging
for their utility. Okay. Just get us on the radar. We'll get ourselves on it.
Just two more questions I had. When you were talking about the person who
was the hyper mileage person, 12,000 miles, and I thought, you know, I had a
hybrid very early, the Prius, and at the time it was, you know, it was probably
the first generation, actually, it was. Question hour second. Does there, in
way of an incentive, is there any way when someone is using that level of
electricity, do they get some kind of reading, and this is totally just
being ignorant to what they are doing in terms of their carbon footprint reduction?
Is there something in the systems and the technology that gives a person an indication
of how well they're helping the environment?
That's not something that I've heard of other than, I know, I also have a Prius, and it
tells you not your GHG, but it does tell you miles per gallon, so you have that
kind of immediate interface.
And then I've seen even, I've had some rental cars, and even with internal combustion
They kind of tell you your mileage conscious, which if you are you can go to fueleconomy.gov
and you'll get a lot of tips there.
You have to do your own conversion, huh?
Last thing, checklists.
I mean, up to what Congressman Gardner said and to what you're saying and the permitting
process and all those that you need to go through because I did note that you have the
electric video vehicle ready this project list of which I see red lenses under
there but I also know we're working with fast charging network strategies and I
was wondering we're working with fast charging company whatever the
checkpoint or something and I'm wondering so how are we how do some of the
other cities that are actually doing some of it as well and and actually
putting those charging stations in city of Rialto did how do we end up or
you become aware of that or is it through the smart clean cities coalition?
Yes, so are you referring to kind of a tracking the number of electric vehicle charging stations
that are deployed and installed around the region?
Well, I'm talking about the readiness project list that you spoke of and you have three
categories.
And I just wondered, you know, what are you tracking there and how the cities that
are actually doing some things and have actually went through a permitting process
process and put those things in, how are you aware of that?
I see.
So speaking specifically to these, the projects without giving too much away, because we have
any potential bidders out there, but they might be listening.
We kind of, just a little bit more background on those.
Those were, we have the fast charging network strategies, that's kind of for some of our
larger cities because they have done a little bit more of the basics in terms
in terms of doing the stringlining that's permitting.
Then we have the initial PV readiness planning.
That's kind of some of our smaller cities.
Redlands is included in that group.
And then we also have the San Gabriel Valley regions,
which is also a number of small cities,
which many of them are also just kind of beginning
with the installing EV charging and their jurisdictions.
But it's also kind of concentrated on that geographic area.
What we're going to do with these is that there's kind of a multi-tier approach
where we're going to, just as I mentioned in my presentation, we're going to kind of focus.
It's on education, making sure that people know that these vehicles are out there, public
outreach, and then doing a site suitability analysis.
And then on top of that, we're going to take lessons learned from those cities themselves.
So we're going to find out what they're doing already, because I don't think there are
really any cities in this region that are not doing anything, that don't have any charging.
So there are definitely lessons to learn there from what they've already been
doing.
And so what we're going to do is take what they've been doing, take the resources
that we have from the Department of Energy, from UCLA, from VELOS, from other
groups out there, and create essentially a path forward, specifically for these
cities, but it will be something that will also relate to the rest of our region.
So I hope that addresses your question. We're going to learn from them, learn from the best practices.
Thank you.
You can come up with a checklist that people can use.
That's it.
Oh, sure. This might address your question real quick.
is the governor's office of business, they just released in July a guidebook on electric
vehicle permitting. And there's a table in there. It's a table to one page. It's really
easy to look at. So if you just look at one thing, look at that table too. It has a checklist
of, is your city EV ready? So it has things like, does your city have a website? Does
your city, where you talk about EV charging, do you have a single streamlined process?
Are you compliant with AB1236, which is making sure that this is only involved in the zoning
process if it has an access to health and safety, and a number of other things.
So that's the Governor's Office of Business, the PEV Streamlining Guidebook.
It has quite a long title, but you'll be able to find it on here if you Google it.
Thank you.
And Mayor Sally Wells?
I'll try to be quick.
Thank you.
So thank you for the call to action.
I'm hoping that all of us can go back to our respective COGS and agencies and kind of
repeat that, that we shouldn't be the barrier, that our city's regulations shouldn't be
the barrier to more EV.
And I would kind of one up that by saying that we need to make sure that we are requiring
especially in multifamily. And hopefully what we can do through SCAG would be to have some model policies that we could put forward as suggestions to really actually meet our targets and not just talk about our targets.
Another little piece is I don't think, especially when we were listening to Sarah's presentation
before with the kind of bigger picture, we're not proposing to just replace every single
vehicle today with an EV that will not solve the problem because a lot of the emissions
are coming from, you know, tires and brake pads, and like it's not about from an overall strategy, yes, more EV, but especially less cars.
And so I appreciate Mayor Robertson's comments about, you know, also prioritizing EV in our own fleets and designing our streets for public transit, active transit, as opposed to single car transit,
it because that's not big picture, that's not the equation that we should be looking
at.
And you're not.
I just had to kind of infuse that into the discussion.
Thank you.
Can I ask a question?
I'll get to others because you brought up the point regarding we need to meet our targets,
as mentioned in the earlier presentation.
And as I recall, the sustainable community strategies does not focus on the vehicles
And that is not part of the percentage reduction that we need to make.
That's being done as the vehicles change, but that's not considered part of the greenhouse gas emissions we need to reduce.
Am I correct on that?
That 19 percent, reaching 19 percent, we cannot use the change in vehicles to electric vehicles as part of that.
Is that correct?
We can to some small degree so carb has kind of in their models in their emission factor model
They have an assumption that we will achieve some level of alternative fuel vehicles
So we can't take credit for what they already assume
So we can't say hey, we're gonna meet
You know your goals that you've put in place and you know had ourselves on the back
We have to go above and beyond that so that's what our programming is doing
And that's what it's kind of spelled out in the staff report and I touched a little pond here
which is the main way that we capture that in the model, and that gets reflected in our greenhouse gas reductions, is that
the strategy of increasing the amount of time that people in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles spend in their battery-only mode.
So you're correct other than that little caveat.
But is it not accurate to say that we can't base our reductions that we need to do on the
vehicle fleet?
My understanding is that we have to do it other ways to get to that 19 percent.
I'll just jump in.
The majority, but there is a small increment that we can get credit for by converting
to EVs faster than CARBA assumes that we're going to as a state.
So it's just that incremental increase in what is assumed.
Okay, thank you.
Hope I agree, thank you.
And then Council Member Mamed, and then Jeannis.
I have our assumption.
May I take a hit on a point that I was going to make?
We know that there's going to be a lot of pressure on us too.
And I was very surprised I inquired and...
Oops, thank you.
And unfortunately, California law apparently requires new multi-unit developers.
to install the electrical infrastructure necessary to accommodate the chargers,
but not the installation of the chargers themselves.
So as a representative of a small city with a lot of challenges and small staff,
it would be very helpful if SCAG could develop a model ordinance that we could utilize.
So go beyond just the policies that Megan identified,
but give us something that we can look at and that we can actually consider and modify as appropriate for our own communities.
But I think that would be very helpful.
Another thing is because of the cost identified by Council Member Gardner, it really is economically challenging to install EV chargers
if you're putting them in a public place where the infrastructure does not already exist.
And Edison has had programs in the past and they've been modified.
And in addition, as a result of the VW settlement, there have been grants available.
But basically it takes quite a bit of time to chase down the number of different pots
of money that may be available from third parties to fund the installation of EV chargers
and it would be very, very helpful if SCAG could serve as a clearinghouse not only to
identify these potential third-party sources of funding but also the various information
resources, such as the one that you just mentioned that, quite frankly, I was previously unaware of, and that's from whatever office it is, the checklist, I guess, what you need to do.
I think if SCAG did that, that would really help us out a lot.
Good suggestion.
Thank you.
I have two things.
One is there's definitely a need and a demand for EV charging, but in some ways that's like
the old technology.
So we need to be looking at fuel cell, accommodating fuel cell vehicles as well, because that's
really going to be the future. And we don't want to put all our eggs in one old basket,
although gasoline is the really old basket. But my main question, though, is, do you have
a demographic on who's driving the EVs or purchasing old people, young people, millennials,
seniors? Is it spread? And is there a target group that really where the technology hasn't
caught on where there could be a little more work on that particular demographic, whether
it's, you know, you save money or it's cool or, you know.
Sure.
Yeah, no, that's a really good question.
There's one group.
I hope I'm not telling you the wrong one.
I believe it's Plug in America.
They have a new ad campaign called EVs for All.
And there are these commercials about how electric vehicles are for everybody.
And they do something like they have a punk rocker and they have an opera goer and they drive an electric vehicle together
and then they have like a Hasidic Jew and a
Hipster because they like to both have like the same kind of hair and they're like look they're for everybody
And so the cat lovers and dog lovers veterans and veterinarians and so their their marketing campaign is that electric vehicles are for everybody
So as much as we'd like to see that happen. Yes
Yes, there are definitely some areas that are lagging, namely our disadvantaged communities.
If we were to zoom in on that map that I showed you with our electric vehicle charging infrastructure,
they do cost more.
But groups like, oh yeah, so if we were to zoom into that map, yes, there's less infrastructure,
especially in South Central LA, that's a place that's lacking, as well as some areas
in inland empire or disadvantaged communities especially.
If you look at data of who's using the California clean vehicle rebate, that's the $2,500 to
$7,000 that you can get for an electric vehicle, hybrid or battery, it's mostly being used
by people with incomes of over 80 or over 100,000.
So we're seeing kind of those benefits accrue to our higher income households.
So we definitely need to see a greater focus on disadvantaged communities.
That's something that will be a priority in our future programming as well as the plans
that are coming out.
And then in terms of age, I couldn't tell you that right now, but I could look more into
that to see if we have better demographics on that.
You know, I'm living in an area where there are a lot of electric vehicles.
I just think about how the air quality in higher income areas may actually be better
because of electric vehicles than in lower-income areas, and you get into that whole social justice
thing.
I don't know if there's actually yet been any on-the-ground testing of air quality reduction
as a result of the change, but that would be interesting to note if that's the case.
Mayor Clark.
Yeah.
Mine's real quick.
Kind of piggybacking on what Megan and Diana said.
AB1236 said that we have to, the EV charging is out of the zoning, and others, we're not
allowed to put it in the zoning, is that, but how would you mandate that multifamily
have it if it's not, can you explain that?
I believe it's in the zoning review process, so if somebody goes to, let's say, Walmart,
so what I've heard a lot about is Electrify America, they are managing the Volkswagen,
the diesel gate settlement, and the one sending $800 million.
So I've heard the most about their experience.
And they've been working a lot with large properties,
like Simon's Group or with Walmart, Target, et cetera.
So for example, they go to Walmart
and they put in an application.
They want to install electric vehicle charging.
What it should do is it should go straight
to their building department
or whatever responsible department that is.
What it should not do is not go to zoning
so that they see, okay, well, do you have appropriate screening?
Is this, you know, are you in compliance with building setbacks?
Things like that.
It's only supposed to be going to, like, the responsible building department or whatever they...
No, you said the word should.
Is it mandated in the bill or is it...?
So I said should because it's mandated in the bill,
but a lot of cities are not compliant with that.
Quite a few because, you know, they oftentimes, as an assistant planner,
For example, who's processing these applications, they answer to their senior planner or their manager, they don't answer to the California legislature.
That's at least the way that electrify America representatives put it to us is that, yes, they should. It is the law.
I heard some rumors of a lawsuit maybe coming around of California.
Yeah, you know, we're very much for local control,
so I hate to say like, state is coming in
and it's gonna make cities do the right way,
but there are some concerns that some cities
just really don't wanna get on board.
And just to kind of give you an example
of what I've heard from Electrify America,
is they get things like the property owner,
so let's say a Simon's mall, this example.
They want the charging infrastructure,
like right out front like maybe by the Macy's wherever it was and
That's where electrify America wants it because it's going to have the best visibility
It's going to be easy to hook up and then they go to they put in their permits to install the chargers and
Then the city says well, we don't we don't want it there. We don't like it there
We want you to put it back by the loading docks
Even though that's going to cost them an extra hundred fifty thousand dollars and it's not going to be visible
People aren't going to be able to see these chargers charging stations other things like that like oh
Okay, well, Electrify America, they want it to be visible so people can see the charters,
but then the permitting office, the zoning office will say, no, we want it fully screened
off.
We don't want people to see it.
So you kind of have those conflicting forces there between kind of what's actually happening
on the ground and what is.
Thank you for bringing that to our attention because that is something that we all have some
oversight on as our zoning codes and being able to ensure that they're friendly for charging
stations. And I know Inventor County, our air pollution control board puts out a lot
of grants for charging stations, for public charging stations. But it is important, too,
for these private sector ones. I'm going to move our program forward. Thank you, Joe,
for your presentation, and we'll go on to our next agenda item.
Thank you all for the great questions.
Thank you.
Good discussion.
So the next item we're going to is item seven, and this is with Allison Linder,
and this is regarding SoCal Goods Movement Environmental Strategy.
Hi.
Good morning, everyone.
I appreciate the agenda shift, I think it makes sense to flow from passenger EV charging to heavy duty vehicle efforts.
So it's interesting because they're both in such different places based on where the technology is.
But I'm still happy to tell you where it stands now and what SCAG is working on.
So today I'll talk to you briefly about the connect SOCal plan for goods movement environmental issues.
And just to give a little context though, air quality isn't the only thing we have to think about.
As we often discuss, the goods movement system in California is associated with many benefits,
such as the ability to support businesses and jobs and to provide us access to the goods we need and want.
However, the process of moving these goods, as you know, creates many environmental externalities and challenges, such as noise, congestion, and emissions.
Our extensive goods movement facilitates our ability to purchase the products we need and trends indicate that the simplicity of e-commerce has increased rather than decreased consumption.
This provides economic opportunity, but transportation and disposal challenges that are driven by our behavior.
So we're the ones buying all the goods.
So supporting this demand, the Skag region is currently home to 1.2 billion square feet of warehouse space.
And that's an area that's roughly 37 square miles.
It's greater than the entire land area of Miami.
and to put it in a local context, the city of Santa Monica is 8.4 square miles.
So we have 37 square miles of warehouses as compared to the city of Santa Monica, which
is 8.4 square miles.
So these goods movement impacts are far reaching, but today we're going to focus
on air quality.
Air quality is the priority for improving public health, meeting federal and state requirements
and reducing our region's contribution to climate change.
So as you may know, the Federal Clean Air Act regulates emissions and requires that
our region reduce emissions to prescribed levels in a given timeframe, known as the
attainment date.
Emissions of particulate matter are small particles that get trapped in our lungs
when we breathe and they cause a lot of health issues and the smaller the particles the
more dangerous.
However, for PM2.5 emissions we are expecting to meet our targets.
The greater challenge is NOx emissions which are more problematic as they are the key
component of ground level ozone or smog.
These also present health impacts.
And these are the greatest immediate air quality challenge.
To meet the federal requirements, we need to reduce NOx emissions by 45% above and beyond existing regulations by 2023 and 55% by 2031.
We also want to do our fair share to meet state targets and combat GHG emissions.
So,
of the SCAB, the South Coast Arab Basin, NOx emissions, mobile sources are 83%.
And this makes more or less sense because historically, the AQMD has had greater jurisdiction
over stationary sources.
So the remaining share are these mobile sources, which are much more difficult.
Goods movement sources of the whole pie are 52%, and trucks are the greatest contributor
followed by off-road equipment, and other sources include ocean going vessels,
the tug
boats, or what are they called?
The commercial harbor craft, I think of them as tug boats and trains.
Aircraft are also part of this, but they're not included in this calculation.
In addition to SCAG's plan, there are several regulatory initiatives underway that will support these efforts.
One of them is the South Coast AQMD's facility-based source measures.
They are looking at measures that are quantifiable and could generate credit toward state implementation plan requirements.
They want to first focus on voluntary agreements where possible, but will create regulations
if necessary.
So for example, the San Pedro Bay ports have recently updated their Cleaner Action Plan.
So currently, a Q&B in the ports and a whole lot of other stakeholders are working on kind
of a voluntary MOU concept.
But for some of the other sources, such as warehouses, new developments, airports,
They're looking into regulatory concepts.
There are also several California Air Resource Board initiatives underway.
A series of freight handbooks is under development to help jurisdictions in guiding the development of freight facilities
and to empower environmental justice groups to participate in decision-making.
The first module of this is going to be focused on warehouses and is expected in 2020.
They're also advocating for stricter federal standards to create an even playing field.
They estimate that 60% of truck VMT is from vehicles that are purchased out of state.
So really when you think of the emissions issue, it is a national problem.
And for some sources like rail, it's kind of more national, and ocean-going vessels
are even governed by international treaties.
But ARB is kind of trying to advocate for greater regulations in those areas.
They're also working on an advanced clean truck regulation, which is expected to be finalized by 2020,
and would include manufacturing, reporting, and fleet purchase requirements.
It would set a requirement for a certain percentage of manufacturer's sales to be zero emission with percentages ramping up over time.
So
moving on to this Gag plan, what this, what Kinect SoCal includes is kind of an overarching
framework.
We call it our four step technology advancement strategy.
And it, it moves, the idea is that it's a process that moves technologies from an initial
scoping phase through a process of continuous iteration and innovation until eventually
they're fully commercialized.
So to talk a little bit more about that, the first phase is a scoping plan and I want to emphasize that this work has started many, many years ago, at least a decade.
Like in the 2012 plan, we talked about early efforts to categorize the market and determine the needs and requirements that our region needs, you know, that a manufacturer would have to follow in order to develop a useful technology.
So that doesn't mean that that phase is over.
You know, constantly we're kind of reevaluating where is the market?
How are these technologies being used?
What are the needs?
And then those specifications are fed back to the manufacturers.
So for example, in 2017 the ports just did a pretty extensive truck feasibility assessment.
And also ARB has done work on this, looking at total cost of ownership studies.
phase and other organizations like CalSTAR are also pretty involved.
So moving on to phase two, the OEM would develop an early prototype and then this would be
tested and it would be iterated.
Eventually that would be scaled up to larger demonstration projects.
So right now I would say the region is kind of in phase three where we've tested fleets
of up to 10 vehicles as part of one demonstration project.
And then in the future, their goal is to scale this up even further.
So the ports have created a large scale zero emission truck working group where they want
to start deploying and testing fleets of about 50 to 100 vehicles to see how they work.
work. And then eventually the goal is to get to phase four where these technologies are
fully commercializable.
And I also wanted to point out that as part of this, you could
call it phase two, the ports have already tested about 120 different vehicles used for
dryage and also yard operations, including battery electric, natural gas, and hydrogen
feel so.
So in an earlier version of this slide, so what are SCAG's roles and responsibilities
and not of our partners? So in an earlier version of this slide, I had replaced all
the S's with dollar signs because the real need here is to fund these very expensive
demonstrations and deployments to further advance this technology.
As an example, a recent project at the port of Los Angeles funded 10 hydrogen fuel cell
tractors and two hydrogen fueling stations at a public price tag of $41 million funded
through CARB's Zanzath program.
So yeah, so when Joe was saying, we need money, we need money, Ian and I over here
we're like yeah add another two zeros to that instead of tens of thousands we're
talking tons of millions but and that project that had the price tag the
public price tag of 41 million dollars is being matched by in-kind or cash
matches from private partners so the actual cost is higher so in the past
SCAG has participated in Zero Emissions Collaborative, which had partners from Metro, AQMD, the
ports, Gateway Cities Cog, and one of the purposes of this group was to take a very collaborative
approach to advocating for this investment, supporting each other's grant applications,
and also sharing the results, sharing information, kind of coordinating who is testing what
And that group has had a lot of success in attracting investment and one of
Skag's roles moving forward would be to try to expand that group to include
partners from Inland Empire, Port of Winimi, and to give it more of a greater
regional focus.
Another part of our plan is to increase the focus on
on life cycle impacts of these technologies.
So as these trucks are being designed and developed,
we're at such an early stage that we can have
great input into looking at the end use.
So there's concern about how the batteries
are gonna be disposed of and what materials
are included in them.
Can they be recycled and reused?
Can components of them be reused?
or are they just going to be disposed of their end of life.
So these are things that have been looked at more extensively in Europe.
They have producer mandates where they're requiring the OEMs to take back the batteries
at the end of their life.
And this is, I think, a direction that our region can take as well, kind of mandating
a cradle to grave look at these technologies.
Skag also wants to take a greater look at our infrastructure, thinking about how charging
and fueling infrastructure can be incorporated as we design and build projects and also thinking
about ways that this infrastructure might be able to incentivize use of these technologies.
So once they get to a certain stage of commercialization, then you still have the hurdle of getting
people to adapt them.
So instead of merely one way of doing this is more public investment and defraying some
of the incremental cost of the purchase.
But potentially infrastructure can help catalyze this by providing greater access or reduced
tolls if there was a toll lane, things like that.
To this end, SCAG has a couple of studies going on.
One thing is that we're currently initiating an integrated passenger and freight rail forecast,
and that's going to include a look at opportunities to reduce emissions of rail.
We have an ongoing study in San Bernardino County looking at different pathways to zero and near-zero emissions
that will develop recommendations for the county.
I know this slide is quite crowded.
It's exciting because, as I said, this effort has started over 10 years ago, but it's catching
a lot more momentum now. And there's a lot of targets and commitments from both private
and public entities to see this goal realized. Some of these are regulatory. So, as I mentioned
earlier, ARB is looking at a regulation that would require by 2030, between 15 and 50 percent
of sales would be zero emissions, and that depends on the vehicle type and how it's used.
On the private sector, on the private side, SOCal gas has committed to include 20 percent
renewable gas in their pipeline by 2025.
And Southern California Edison has a charge ready program and an electrification pathway.
They want to deploy 870 charging sites by 2024.
And they project that by 2030 between 15 and between 6 and 15 percent of vehicles
would be electrified depending on again on the vehicle class.
So there's a lot of technologies that have potential to be zero and near zero emissions.
Definitely, I think more progress has been made on the truck side rather than the rail side.
I've definitely heard a lot more about those efforts.
These can range from kind of simple and very cost-effective things to improve the aerodynamics
and reduce the fuel needed to power the vehicles,
looking into other things like natural gas
or alternative fuels like electric and hydrogen.
The largest obstacles are the range, the power needs,
the charging time, and of course the cost.
But we expect that cost would decrease
as they become more developed.
Currently, there are already vehicles in use, mostly for local delivery operations, so FedEx,
UPS, and other companies like Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay have already been incorporated into
their deliveries.
So to conclude, the goods movement environmental strategy focused primarily on air quality,
and we put forth a vision of a zero and near zero emission system.
Our Technology Advancement Plan outlines a four-phase approach where technologies are iteratively developed and deployed through a cycle of continuous innovation.
Building on previous RTPs, this plan includes greater consideration of charging and fueling infrastructure and also advocates that this product bear in mind the development of a cradle-to-grave approach.
which were potential impacts associated with new materials
and extraction and disposal are accounted for.
As usual, any effort of this scale
requires a great deal of collaboration.
And as a regional convener,
SCAG is wanting to take a leadership role
in working with our partners
to do what we can to further this effort.
Thank you.
Are there any questions or comments on this?
Yes, Ms. Robinson.
Thank you. Not so much a question, but I have maybe a question to the body. I was wondering
how many of us that are sitting here are also sitting on emerging technologies.
And I guess
why I asked the question is because as you were making the presentation and to your
point earlier about, you know, even we're into a next generation of not the fuel
sales or whatever, I feel a need that there needs to be some collaboration between the
two groups.
I mean, we're a policy committee, and then that's a ad hoc committee right now.
But some of the conversations and the things you've covered, we still seem to be missing
some of the other things that are going on in emerging technology and also are probably
contributing to adding to the NOCS and the things we're trying to address.
but we're not touching on them. I think you briefly touched on it when you talked about
I think you may have said something about wastewater treatment plants or some of it,
but in the Emerging Technology Committee, we've been talking about going to look at
emerging technology, new technology, their facilities, and one of what we're talking about
is looking at desalination plaques and what they mean, but I don't know if we've captured
even the process of moving product and pumping stations and how they admit it to the atmosphere
or if we've even talked about one of the big projects I have in my city and yesterday
California Energy Commission was there because they founded the grant is this big bio, what
it's, that energy a plant is going to be the big digester project for organic waste.
And you know, I looked through a meeting with them to talk about it, but even if they
are doing one thing on site, one of the things I was sitting there thinking, I don't
I don't think we're planning for the infrastructure for the vehicles that could become electric
vehicles that could move the product to that site.
I was talking to them about Access Road, but I'm sitting here thinking I need to go back
and have them put in that infrastructure now, and I doubt if it's in their plan.
I don't think they'll be opposed to it.
So I was listening to the investment, the commitment, and it all starts,
this is
what they could do and should do before they finish it.
So, is this something that I...
It's good to have these positive examples too.
And you talk about just even capturing methane gas from landfills
and having it used for your trash trucks that are in your neighborhood.
I don't even...
We don't have that currently in our county,
but, you know, looking at where there are positive examples,
I think would be really helpful information.
Well, and I would hope,
because that's what the conversation was yesterday,
is how do they make part of their responsibility through the California Energy Commission?
I don't know if everyone knows, but there was nine grants that were let throughout the
state of California, and three of them were focused on disadvantaged communities, a question
how San Diego became a disadvantaged community in the port, but I now understand how.
But that's going on, and we seem to be all in these paths that are parallel, but they're not integrated.
And I'm sitting there thinking, well, this is supposed, because this is the biggest one in the nation.
And I said to him, yes, it's big, but big as big as how big?
Because as soon as I tell the average person we're doing it, they go, oh, no, we have one down in Riverside and in Paris.
And I'm thinking that's not it.
So we were talking about awareness and education yesterday, and I listed SCAG as one place
where they need to come and present as well as a whole lot of others.
But it just dawned on me that here we have a opportunity to capture and maybe have partners
building what we need that could be beneficial because it is co-located in
our wastewater treatment facility where we're building a brand-new big wastewater
treatment facility. We're also testing first-in-a-nation technology of how we
can process affluent water in a smaller footprint again funded by the
California Energy Commission and you know it's telling our story was one
of the things that Steve Lambert presented yesterday at our sub-region, but it's just
I'm looking at this and going somehow we're all in the same room, but we're not aware
of what has been rolled out by the California Energy Commission, what they're funding,
and they're doing it for one reason because of regulatory behavior on the recycle side,
which relates to the landfills, which relates to eliminating the methane gas that comes out of the landfills.
And so the digester is going to be they have the same thing by 20-something.
We've got to have all this organic waste put in by commercial.
And I asked them, are you going to make the tonnage you need to make this work by next year?
And they go, yes, because they're making the tonnage by all of this.
This gorgadic waste is going to be trucked in from LA to Rialto.
And I'm thinking, well, I got to work on figuring out how I get them into electric vehicles
or something.
And so I just would, that's, I really like that idea that you mentioned.
And just think about the different summits that SCAG does put forward, just one that
just talks about great examples throughout our region where we're saving energy
or.
And I bring this up because the director called me, he was saying to me, he needed to understand what path and what comes out of emerging technology.
And so I was sharing with him what I've got on the emerging technology because my view is never – it's not never, but it's not just about the trucks and the vehicles.
vehicles. It's also the other sides of things that most of our community have to be sustained
with, which is for me, my passion is water. And we've got a very innovative discussion
going on. Desalination on the coast is not new technology. But it is new technology
and emerging technology, if you start talking about trying to bring desalved water all
the way into the Inland Empire and I have had the conversation with your mayor and my
neighbor because it's vital and we got to think outside the box we can't just all
rely on the aqueduct you know and so everybody thinks they're fine on the
water side so anyway we have the ability to show power we have the
the ability to plug in ships now so they don't sit there and idle.
I really like the idea that maybe the Emerging Technology Committee
could put on a summit where they can present some of the best in the region
and that will help the educators.
Well, I'm just thinking, we just got to figure out how do we connect problems.
I like to think of it as coming from two directions.
You need big picture thinkers that can really think about how to break down silos
and find those connections, but then you really need the experts
who are deep in the weeds and can really understand the
distinctions between the market and like the complications of
you know installing of just even getting
um the transportation community to talk with the energy community about
you know we want we think that this is the best location because
of demographics, trans travel patterns and then they're saying well
um but we need to get the power there
So you need that kind of expertise of people who know their subject matter really well and can talk about those distinctions.
But as well, those big picture thinkers who want to break down those siles and coordinate those efforts.
So thank you for your comment.
And when you talk about price tags of $42 million to buy some equipment,
maybe there are also things that can do legislatively that there may be a lot of bureaucratic hurdles that are necessary to knock down
so that some of these things can be less costly to put out there.
So ways that we can encourage that, I think, would be good to know, too.
Yeah. I mean, I think, well, if you think about the regulations that are coming down,
public investment is generally used for beyond regulation.
So once the regulations are in place, then the cost to some extent shifts.
That doesn't mean it completely shifts, though, because then the focus is on providing assistance to help meet those regulations.
Do we have any other questions or comments on this one?
Oh, please go ahead.
A mention was made of the cost of the equipment, but I think in the overall context of the port and how the port operates, to me it's not that much.
Because if you look at what it costs for the port to buy a crane or their tenants to buy a crane or to buy some of their other equipment, regardless of how it's powered, it's going to be millions of dollars anyway.
So when we say it's that much, we really should be looking at the differential between the clean equipment and the dirty equipment, because the dirty equipment is pretty darn expensive as well.
And I think that people, oh, it costs so much.
Well, look at the differential.
Like even say the differential between an electric car and a gas-powered car.
Yeah, it costs more, but it's not, you know, if you just look at the raw cost as opposed to the differential,
it seems a lot more expensive than it is.
And then if you look at the kinds of volumes of freight coming through the port,
You're looking at maybe two cents on a pair of sneakers and you figure some celebrity
spokesman is getting a lot bigger cut for each pair of sneakers than we're getting for
clean air.
I'm just thinking of overall costs of production and advertising and marketing.
So basically clean air tends to be an afterthought there.
In some ways, I'm encouraged at hearing all this, but in other ways, I'm somewhat discouraged
because a lot of this conversation seems to be repeats of things that Greed knows 15 years
ago.
We're talking about some of this, and some of it was supposed to be done long ago.
and then you
You read in the times, for example, they were supposed to be like plug-in vessels. When
you come into port, you don't run your generators, you plug in. And then what was it a couple
years ago, the Times said even though they'd agreed to do all this stuff, they weren't
doing it. And so I really hope that this time it comes to fruition because also looking
at the environmental justice study, there have been a lot of environmental justice studies
regarding goods movements, particularly around the port area, but also along the transportation
and around some of the freight hubs in the Inland Empire.
And I think it's time we stopped studying the effect on our lower-income communities
and started alleviating the effect on our lower-income communities.
We seem to study things a lot, and so, like I say, I'm very encouraged,
but in some ways I'm discouraged because there are things
that you would hope would have been done by now. I remember talking about rail
electrification in the 1990s. We're still talking about it. Do I sound
frustrated? Maybe a little bit. But the one thing I would point out, and there's
things that they were doing in ports like Rotterdam 20 years ago, we haven't
started doing it.
And I know that the EPA currently, the administration is
not inclined to look at stricter rules on the environment.
But I might point out as an
alternate strategy, a great many of the shipping companies at the ports of LA and Long Beach
are owned by Chinese, which may incline the administration to come down a little harder
on some of the rules, even though that may be for the wrong reasons. But that may
I mean, you hate to utilize weird stuff like that, but at the same time it may present an
opportunity to at least get a foot in the door with the administration. It's kind of bizarre,
but it could be. But I think the biggest thing is that we look at the cost of some of this stuff,
and it seems like it's so much, but when you look at the vast, vast volume of freight
coming through. Oh, it would be 50 cents more on a plasma TV. I mean, that's just insane
to look at the number without the context of the vast amount of goods coming through.
Thank you.
Very good point. Thank you. I know we have Judy, then Carmen, then Margaret.
So
many things to talk about.
I want to thank the presenter for your presentation.
And as I heard that, I thought SCAG is a good place to be the clearinghouse for a lot of things that are going on that affect all of us and affect what we do as local government leaders.
And I imagine many of you don't know that these things are going on.
For those of you here, how much of this is a surprise?
Because as a regulator on the car board and on the Air Quality Management District Board,
I'm very involved in all of these things that deal with electric vehicles,
that deal with goods movements.
You're talking about the indirect source rule that we're planning for certain facilities
around the region.
And there's just a lot of, a lot going on and a lot of different things in the mix.
Deborah talked about Derry Digester program out in her area and what she mentioned was
is the one that is down near Paris, which is CCNR,
and that is a dairy digester operation.
They are producing renewable natural gas.
It doesn't have anything to do with an electric,
pre-electric engine.
It has to do with low-nox renewable natural gas
that fuels their trash trucks.
So the gas is generated there,
the trucks come there and get fueled up,
and then they operate in their neighborhoods on renewable natural gas.
There's a bit of a struggle with renewable natural gas and the competition between renewable
natural gas and pure electric.
And that is going on around in our state.
And that's something I've been enmeshed in and burdened with,
exactly.
So, there is a low NOx natural gas truck that reduces the NOx emissions considerably.
It's commercialized.
It's certified by carb.
It's on the road.
But there's been a struggle in getting funding for that truck and the competition between
that technology and pure electric.
And certainly that technology is best for our south coast region because we have these attainment deadlines that they were talking about in 2023 and 2031 where we need to reduce NOx emissions by dramatic amounts, 50 some percent.
And one of the pathways to get there is that low NOx truck.
We also, the South Coast Area Quality Management District went to Washington at the end of the Obama administration
and submitted a petition for a low knock standard that is a national standard.
Because a lot of the trucks that come into California are from out of state.
And so there's no regulation that governs those.
So we wanted to have a national low knock standard.
and we've heard recently that the US EPA is going to begin working on that, so we have some high hopes
that maybe that will happen. A CARB also has a regulation scheduled in 2020 for a low NOx standard
for California, so we may see it happening in our state as well as nationally.
One of the
things that we need to worry about here at SCAG is the issue we're going to face with
transportation conformity. That comes into jeopardy in part because President Trump wants
to roll back the CAFE standards and eliminate California's waiver to have lower standards,
lower mission standards than the national standard. And so I know I've heard people
talking both here at SCAG, at CARB, and at AQMD about what will happen if when that standard gets rolled back.
And we will definitely be facing a problem with transportation conformity, and it kicks in immediately.
There isn't any lag period. If that, if we don't meet that standard, we'll be out of conformity,
and the federal government will take over our implementation plans for emission reductions
and can, you know, impose penalties on the state.
So that's something we all need to be worried about and thinking about.
We talked a little bit about money.
And let me bring up that when the South Coast Area District passed their Quality Management Plan,
Part of that plan was to generate one billion dollars a year in funding to help the turnover
of fleets and also stationary sources.
Incentive money is to provide the money for that gap that you're talking about between
what ordinary equipment might cost and what the cleaner equipment costs.
And so Ben Allen carried a bill for us last year. It's a two-year bill. It's SB 732.
And what we have run up against, what it was, was it was a bill that would give the South Coast Air Quality Management
District the authority to put a measure on the ballot to increase the sales tax.
And a lot of cities have pushed back on that because they're already running up against the cap on sales tax.
there is a cap, and cities are worried that that will impact that. The bill
exempted this item from that cap, this sales tax from that cap, but I think
they were still concerned that if you brought that to your voters there's a
lot of voter exhaustion over, you know, one more tax, one more thing, you know,
we've done lots of transportation sales taxes, etc., so there was, you know,
some pushback on that. That's become a two-year bill and it will proceed again next year but
I want to bring it to your attention so you can think about that, how that might impact
your city. Before we embarked on that plan, we did polling with FM3 and the polling showed
that the voters, the constituents, are very concerned about air quality and they supported
a sales tax to improve air quality. It was overwhelming. It was like more than 50 percent
in all the counties, all the four counties that AQMD operates in. So it's just something
to think about. I don't know whether it'll be a success or a – the idea was just to
create a voter authorization district. Let the voters decide. You know, we're not
going to – AQMD isn't going to impose that sales tax. Let the voters decide. Do
they want to tax themselves for cleaner air? And so that's kind of out there
are floating in the legislative chambers for next year.
The other thing I want to mention
that is happening because it was brought up
about environmental justice.
The legislature passed a bill about a year and a half ago,
AB 617, that requires all the local air
districts to identify severely impacted communities,
environmental justice communities that
are impacted by emissions.
And so,
South Coast District has three communities.
And it is taking up a lot of staff time.
This is the first year we've had it in place.
And the law requires the identification of communities,
the ones that each local air district wants to focus on.
Then each community forms a steering committee.
And those steering committees have been meeting over the year.
I know Deborah, she left, but there's one in Deborah's community out in Muscovia San Bernardino.
And then in South Coast, the result of those meetings and this year of work has been to
a develop a monitoring plan to monitor what emissions are in those communities and then
to develop an emissions reduction plan, which goes right toward, you know, what those emissions
are and how are we going to reduce them, how are we going to get there.
So that item approval of the Community Emission Reduction Plans is on the AQMD agenda tomorrow.
So anybody who's interested, you can tune in or it's webcast and take a look at that.
So that has been a project that has taken up tremendous amount of time at AQMD.
I mean, meetings are held in three communities and every month there's some meeting going on somewhere.
Ultimately, the California Resources Board will approve those community emission reduction plans called SERPs, CERP.
each local air district reviews those plans and decides whether or not to adopt them.
So, the other thing that was brought up the rail, rail issues, well, I went to Washington,
we sat down with the Federal Rail Authority, and the first thing they said when we walked
into the room and sat down was, we're exempt.
And they are exempt.
They're exempt from any regulation that we may try to do, whether it's carb or whether
it's a local air district.
So that is what we run up against when we are working with the rail.
The rail is one of those boxes for facility-based regulation.
So we're working with them and we'll see whether we can come to any kind of agreement
because the rail yards in the central part of the city of industry and that city of commerce down there
Our have not been good neighbors, have not been easy to work with.
And we have our rail yards out in San Bernardino, the Muscoly region, too, where we're trying
to work with them as well.
So and you mentioned the Chinese issue, I don't know how many of you know the Long
Beach Container Terminal down in the Port of Long Beach is all electric.
electric. It's the only port terminal in our ports that is all electric. It was Chinese-owned
and Chinese-funded. So there's some good things happening out of China as well. So anyway,
that's the end of my speech. But that's what I do think is...
I just think we're so fortunate to have you on this committee. You bring so much
It's really important that we exchange this kind of information on your reports.
The reports this morning here in this committee are very well attuned to what is happening
in the air quality area, both at Carbon at the local air district.
And so this is a good place to have that clearinghouse, to have these things talked about
so people know what's happening.
And having you here to let us know what's happening is really helpful.
We have a couple more comments and questions on this, and we also have another presentation.
And my suggestion is that we hold that next presentation until our next meeting.
If that's okay with everyone, we'll continue working on this.
This topic is really important.
So, Carmen, do you want to go next?
Yes, really quickly.
And thank you, everybody.
And Judy, we need to capture everything you said.
some
Think about the human impact of these changes. I know for a long time, the people who work there
are considered independent contractors, and they live almost a medieval existence because
they have to buy everything, work very long hours, and it works out to a very, very small
amount of money to take home, and a lot of them live in the quarter that's impacted
by all the emissions. So I know there's been a big issue about mechanization or robots
in the LA port I think, and that's been controversial. But I think it would really be good to have
a discussion about what it's going to take to help people transition and not just leave
people stranded because they cannot purchase their own equipment or we don't need those
individuals to work in or what does that mean to them and their families and how we all have
to take responsibility for not stranding people.
I think that's a big challenge for the quote-unquote green new deal.
How do we get people into new industries that are cleaner without abandoning people
like the coal miners?
So, big challenge here, so I just want to mention that thing.
And I know also the unions are very involved in that too, but it is important to realize
what the impacts are of being able to go green and sometimes that does impact jobs.
Margaret, you have a comment.
I think this has been one of the most valuable discussions we've had where we bring these
things and I totally agree with Judy that we should – SCAG could be the clearinghouse
and screaming and yelling, if you will.
And when Deborah said the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand, I just have to say that the biggest I told her so in my life was when in the mid-90s, when carb before Judy was on mandated cleaner gasoline additive, okay?
And it turned out to be MTVE, and I helped form the San Gabriel base of water quality 30 for the groundwater cleanup.
So we were involved in water, and the water people said, this is going to get into the groundwater.
And so I argued with the biggest cities, we talked, the guy from CARB, and he said,
oh no, we're just going to double on all the gasoline storage tanks and share up all the pipelines.
And I was on a committee with the regional board, the water board, called the leaking underground storage tank.
We joked it was lust for short, okay?
And if you have a committee, if you have a problem big enough to have a committee studying, it's a big problem.
So if you google it today, maybe it's even more, but $30 billion for cleanup because the right hand wasn't talking to the left hand.
The air people were not listening to the water people. And that was an epiphany for me.
We better be screaming and yelling because if the regulators don't know what they're doing and not willing to coordinate,
we're going to have unintended consequences everywhere.
So I really hope that Skag can take what we have and really bring things, educate all of us, and be advocates because we're in trouble if we don't.
That's my rant.
I would comment that that's why we've included a greater focus on the life cycle impacts of
the technology this time around.
Just thinking about, you know, it's so new and there's such an opportunity to make it
a full circle, holistically beneficial product.
I thank you very much and I know our next presenter, Hina, was to have 20 minutes.
Is this something that you would like to hold off on or be able to present in a short period of time?
I don't see her at the moment.
That answers that question.
She might have left.
Thank you.
All right.
At that, then, we'll go to the chair's report.
Thanks, everyone, for all your comments.
Thank you.
And I just want to thank Vice Chair Pollack for leading the meeting at our last meeting.
and I know he did an excellent job and I appreciate his work on that, and our next item is our
staff report.
Do you have anything to report?
No, but I will make sure that Hina can come back and talk about the safety strategy at
our next meeting.
Thank you.
And then also future agenda items.
This could be, well, would you like to do a encapsulation of your presentation
or wait till next time?
This will be really quick.
so I can go. Okay.
Hello everyone. It's good afternoon almost. My name is Inna Chinchalani
and I am an assistant planner with the Transportation Planning and Programming Team and I'll be talking
about the safety element for Conex SOCAL 2020 draft plan.
So the goals for the Transportation
Safety Report was to identify strategies that will align with the State Strategic
strategic highway safety plan, and that also allowed locals, county and regional agencies
to identify projects that support Connect SoCal implementation.
And SCAD also identified actions that cities and counties can take in their future to support
transportation safety planning and project implementation across the region.
So before we started coming up with the safety strategies for the Connect SoCal 2020 plan,
we looked at the existing conditions. Approximately 1,500 people die every year, 5,200 are seriously
injured and 136,000 people are injured in collisions every year. About 270 collisions
occur per day in SCAG region, which accounts for 99,000 collisions per year.
The trends have been going up since 2012, and so SCAG came up with some safety strategies
as shown on this slide.
These safety strategies are grounded in the Strategic Highway Safety Plan.
It's a state safety plan.
The Conexocal prioritizes ensuring safety and mobility of the region's residents, including
drivers, passengers, transit riders, pedestrians, bicyclists, and SCAG identified actions for
cities to implement for these 16 challenge areas in the SCAG region.
So the first challenge area is reducing, so the challenge area second is improving
improving safety for aging population, and an example of the strategies are shown on
the slide. We have seven strategies for improving safety for aging population in our region,
and SCAD recommends that cities should promote implementation of multimodal guidance included
on the manual on uniformed traffic control devices, MUTCD. Cities should also implement
design treatments like curb extension, bulb outs, and refuge islands to enhance safety for older
population. The left picture is an example of how cities can implement curb extensions,
bulb outs, and the right side of the picture is MUTCD guidance at the federal level.
So these are some of the SCAG actions that we are planning for the Conex Ocal Draft 2020 plan.
SCAG has developed and maintained a high injury network mapping tool
that will support planning efforts related to transportation safety in our region.
SCAG will also support regional safety efforts including vision zero policies and plans and
also provide technical assistance for the cities to develop these plans through safety workshop
and webinars that we recently conducted. The webinars are upcoming so please look out for
the for further information on the webinars and there are a couple of other action items
systems that SCAG is planning to implement for the Conexo Cal 2020 plan.
So traditionally there have been two approaches to safety.
One of them is in traditional approach and one of them is a safe systems approach.
These three approaches come under safe systems approach and SCAG is going with the towards
zero deaths approach for the Conexo Cal 2020 plan.
plan.
The towards zero death approach aligns with the state's plan and that is one of the reasons
that SCAC is going for the towards zero death approach.
So far, 12 cities, one county and one county in SCAC region have a vision zero plan and
some of which are in development and 47 cities have safety element which has been incorporated
it in their general plans.
And this is a map basically showing which cities have vision zero policies, safety plan
and safety targets.
So MAP 21 is a federal requirement and it indicates that MPOs have to set five safety performance
measures.
These are the five safety performance measures on the slide.
And these are the targets that we committed to for 2019 safety targets.
Lastly, I'd like to talk a little bit about zero-traffic fatalities task force.
AB 2363 was passed on September 2018.
The bill requires establishing a task force for zero-traffic fatalities by the Secretary of Transportation.
And the task force will provide a report before January 1st, 2020, and it will analyze issues
related to setting speed limits on the streets.
Councilmember Megan Sally Wells is a SCAG representative for this important task force,
and she has been an important voice on behalf of SCAG on advocating for region's need
to adjusting speed limits that will promote safety for all users of the road.
And that's my time.
Thank you so much.
That was good, alright.
So with that, you have, okay, go ahead, two comments, thank you.
Those of you who know me know, I lost a friend on a bicycle years ago and I've always been advocating for safe protected bike lanes.
I don't see that much in the rails to trails where you take the abandoned railroad tracks and make them into bicycle lanes.
Why don't we have anything there to encourage that?
So we do have specific strategies under these challenge areas and one of the
strategy one of the challenge area is ensuring and improving bicycle safety
and not just bicycle safety but also other mode safety and one of the action
that we ask cities to implement is complete the present or the current
and bicycle networks and also create some active transportation plans.
But protected bike lanes in there? I don't understand why it isn't one of the bullets.
Just painting a stripe with everybody on their cell phones and the marijuana and everything,
it's going to get worse.
I'll just step in here because I'm on the task force. The number one cause of death
is speed. The number one cause of death is speed. So yes, protected bike lanes, but that's
not the only thing.
That's not for pedestrians either. So really the focus is speed and how
are we lowering speed both through some of the California state laws, which are making
it hard and expensive for us to actually lower speed limits and be able to enforce
But also, there are a lot of physical things like the complete street strategy that has to be part of our planning unless, you know, if we want any grant money or anything.
These are the types of things that we need to implement. They absolutely include protected bike lanes, but that is not the only strategy because it is speed that kills.
Thank you. And we have one other question. Council Member Springer.
Yes. On page 52, it says, reduce the occurrence of lane departure fatalities. What's a lane
departure? A lane departure is when a vehicle is leaving. A vehicle is stopping at a stop sign
and then it's leaving and it collides with another vehicle. It's a lane departure. Thank you.
Can I answer your question?
You're good.
And then Council Member Gardner.
Actually, mine is a future item.
Okay.
When we get there.
And then that is, let's go there then.
Okay, I can do that.
I think everybody is aware that Replant has closed all of their recycling facilities in the state.
and it's having a really significant impact on, I think, all of us, all our jurisdictions.
I'd like Skag to take a look at where we ought to be going.
It strikes me that kind of falls squarely within the preview of this committee.
If you think it goes somewhere else, that's okay.
But I think we should take a look at it.
Not only is it more difficult to recycle things, so more stuff is going to landfills
and getting just thrown on the ground, but for those few that still exist, they are getting
much more traffic, which is having a negative impact on the location where they sit and
to people who want to recycle things. Unfortunately, we've
Recycling centers draw an element that can be a problem, and when that gets concentrated
in one spot, that just makes the issue bigger.
I think that's a great suggestion. And perhaps we also had one presentation a while ago about
over-packaging. You know, that might be two subjects to talk about in one meeting. And
Diana?
Thank you. I'd like to take that a step further and explore as part of the presentation the feasibility of SCAG actually sponsoring legislation to conform to the practice in other states where they have a far more successful recycling effort because they require retailers to take back the various beverage containers.
Okay. Sure, Greig will do it for us.
Okay, with that, I think we're ready to adjourn.
Nothing else on the agenda?
We'll go ahead and adjourn.
Thank you all.
Great presentations.
Yeah.
To the public.