Like much of the US, California relies upon three scales of planning for transportation — project, corridor, and region. Each scale informs the others, leading to the development of state programming of projects, described in corridor and regional plans. Highway 37 in the San Francisco Bay Area is currently the subject of corridor planning by the California Department of Transportation, District 4 (Caltrans). The current C21 project “Highway 37 Stewardship Study” is the test-case for the California evaluation of C06 A&B (and other TRB) products. It will also inform the development of the corridor plan and model behaviors that Caltrans would like to include in future corridor plans. For example, the stakeholder process developed as the basis for the project could become de rigeur for Caltrans’ future corridor planning. The project relies upon three inter-dependent processes: a stakeholder process to support scenarios descriptions and negotiated planning outcomes, a regional context description and assessment, and valuation/crediting approach to support scenarios comparison. Each of these project components links to a C06 A&B product (e.g., the regional ecological framework). They are also foundational pieces for the development of a stewardship-oriented corridor plan, the first of its kind in California. The lessons learned from this process included issues specific to C06 and C01 tools, as well as larger-frame issues with combining transportation planning and environmental stewardship. For example, typically-long timeframes for planning and project delivery did not suit stakeholder expectations for getting started on obvious problems. Although the complete architecture of the Transportation for Communities (TCAPP) web site and the C06 reports were not useful to project participants, they maybe useful libraries of important pieces of information. Team members felt that the contents of C01 and C06 should be available, but were not confident about their actual day-to-day use by transportation planners or other stakeholders, primarily because of the sheer amount of material. One important lesson from the potential application of C01 or C06 tools was that planning is best done in bite-sized pieces (e.g., focusing on a project study report), rather than the complete decade-long process from problem identification to programmed project. There are implications from this finding for how ecological capacity building and training should occur: Through web sites, or through continuing “Academies”? Overall, the ecological framework provided a useful and understandable rubric for organizing information and thinking about decision-making. (Author/publisher)
Abstract