Abstract
California's Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008 (Senate Bill 375, enacted in 2008) requires jurisdictions to identify changes to policies and systems to reduce mobile source greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, local public officials and planners need flexible tools beyond traditional travel demand models to estimate the impacts of transportation policy and investment decisions on carbon emissions. Although several tools and calculators offer high-level estimates of reductions in GHG emissions in multiple sectors, the available tools and calculations generally lack local contexts and sensitivities, which are the primary drivers of the potential to reduce GHG emissions at the project level. Given this analytic need, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA), California, recognized the connection between the data estimation needs of the legislation and the existing calculation capabilities of the web-based platform for its congestion mitigation fee program. The agency partnered with Cambridge Systematics to develop a tool to estimate the project-level impacts on the carbon emissions of a diverse range of local projects included in the congestion mitigation fee program. The tools for sketch planning developed for LACMTA offer easy data entry, a transparent framework, a web-accessible interface, and immediate reporting of results while remaining sensitive to local conditions. The tool's accessible design was central to its successful use in the development of the sustainable communities strategy of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments. This paper presents the policy context that guided tool development; highlights of the development process and methodology; a summary of the testing, delivery, and application of the sustainable communities strategy of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments; and a view of the tool's limitations and opportunity for enhancements.