SCAG, HQTA & RHNA Update

A college student reached out to me after reading SCAG, HQTA & RHNA: Acronyms you never heard of but should understand and I found the questions so intriguing, they deserved to be answered right here on the blog.  

First off, I think it's important to state that I used the Torrance Transit 8 bus line as an example, but I do not want to pick on Torrance Transit in particular. The example is just indicative of transit declines and difficulties in our region overall. 

 -How have you seen the quality of Torrance buses declined in the last 5 years? 

I wrote the post in 2022, when many people were working remotely from home. Those were the lowest years for transit service. In our area, transit service had declined for 15 years, and then fell off a cliff during Covid 2020. However, service is slowly being added back. We went from a high of 41 Torrance trips/weekday to 13-14, and we are back up to 24. I am cautiously optimistic that more service will be added as ridership returns and more bus drivers are hired. 

-What areas have you noticed the most decline? (cleanliness, punctuality, bus frequency) 

I notice the lack of bus frequency the most. Punctuality isn't a problem any more because the schedules are adjusted 2x/year for actual bus travel times. Buses report their real-time location and I can check how soon my bus is coming on my phone. Torrance Transit also provides a text number at each stop that sends a return text of when the next bus is arriving. 

While knowing when the next bus is arriving is helpful, the bus is still stuck in traffic too much of the time. Dedicated bus lanes and bus signal priority would be most helpful. Bus stop consolidation (Torrance 8 and 13 stops can be as little as 700 feet apart), would also speed up buses. 

 -Can you share a time where you were heavily inconvenienced by an event you scheduled and your method of transportation was Torrance Transit (TT)? 

I don't schedule my League of Women Voters of the Beach Cities meetings. But, the Torrance 13 schedule means I am either 20 minutes early or 10 minutes late for the 3pm meetings in Hermosa Beach. There are worse things in life than hanging out for 20 minutes with an ocean view. During the summer when it stays light later, I ride my eBike. Motorists hit so many cyclists at dusk and at night, I feel safer taking transit or driving in the winter. 

My daughter chimed in that she was ghosted by 2 buses this month. She also got on the wrong bus one time and ended up at Torrance Transit Center instead. But those things can be fixed with a taxi or scab cab. She has the RideYellow (yellow cab coop) and Lyft apps on her phone and the charge goes to her parents' credit card. She uses it only in an emergency or when the bus goes awry. 

Not every transit rider can afford a backup cab fare, and that is an issue that needs addressing. Metro sometimes reimburses riders for cab fare, but the amount doesn't cover the full cost of the cab fare. 

-What do you believe TT could do to improve their public transportation throughout the city? 

-Do you have any assumptions as to why TT has declined in quality over the years? 

I have talked to TT staff and know why service has deteriorated. It's partly due to ridership declines and partly due to reduced schedules. Those are chicken and egg problems. In a poorer neighborhood, people would pay the time tax and keep riding transit. In a wealthier area, people respond by purchasing cars and driving instead of riding transit. This has also worsened competition for street parking. Torrance is unique in passing a law that bars the city for charging for parking on city land, including streets and all city-owned lots and garages. 

DMV data shows that the South Bay has a decreasing number of residents with drivers licenses and an increasing number of registered cars. In fact, registered cars outnumber licensed drivers in the South Bay. 

Everyone complaining about difficulty parking is right. But we are the problem and transit (and eBikes/bikes) are the solution. 

Another big problem is elected leaders. Torrance city council and mayor make decisions about TT priorities, and they don't ride transit. 

They purchased a fleet of diesel "trolley buses" that resemble old-style streetcars from a century ago, instead adding to their existing fleet of the normal CNG (compressed natural gas) buses they already have. Not only are diesel buses dirtier, but they also mean that the staff have to maintain 2 different fleets with spare parts for both. 

Metro Los Angeles created a distribution network for CNG sourced from landfills, sewage treatment plants, but mostly dairy farms. Transit agencies throughout the region use Metro's refueling stations. Thus, the CNG buses throughout the region are 100% fossil fuel-free. 

People who don't ride transit are also obsessed with door to door service. So Torrance is investing in "micro-transit", which is incredibly expensive. LA Metro's experience is that it costs about $1-8 to serve a bus rider (depending on how many passengers are on the bus), but it costs over $60 per micro-transit rider.  It is incredibly wasteful and takes money and staff time away from fixed transit and para transit. 

Torrance Transit employees know this, because it is their job to keep up with developments in transit. However, they have to follow the direction of elected leaders who don't know transit and won't believe staff. 

 -Do you think that if enough people rallied together about the inconsistencies of the transit system the company would work harder for a solution? 

I don't think the staff is the problem. They cannot provide better fixed route bus service until we elect better leaders. 

Staffing is another bottleneck. It's hard to recruit new bus drivers as older ones retire. For a new trainee class of 20, they are lucky to have 3 graduates who complete the training and sign on as bus drivers. Finding the 20 trainees is also difficult as many young people cannot pass the mandatory drug test. 

Motonormativity

 Sometimes, you need a name for something before you can see it. But, once you see it, you can't unsee it. 

I first heard of Motonormativity from this 2023 paper: Motonormativity: how social norms hide a major public health hazard. 

Lead author Professor Ian Walker recently gave a lunchtime talk to Streets For All and I highly recommend watching the video and reading the paper. 

There is a pervasive view that "everybody drives in LA", but that's just not true. About 1/3 of the population cannot drive because they don't have drivers licenses. They are too old, too young, too disabled, too poor, or just never bothered to get licenses for myriad reasons. Even if they do drive and own a car, they are burdened by high car ownership costs that can sometimes push them into homelessness. 

You have only to look at the different ways that the law treats people who kill with a car vs with another weapon. As long as you are not driving while impaired, were not speeding, and stayed at the scene, charges aren't even filed when a driver kills a pedestrian. 

Even when charges are filed, judges are very lenient. A driver who ran over a family in a crosswalk, killing the 4 year old and gravely injuring the father, was sentenced to 400 hours of community service. 

We also think nothing of speeding in school zones even though we wouldn't smoke around children. According to CDC statistics, cars are the leading killer of children in the US. Yet, we don't have any public health response to this crisis. 

Car culture is us, and we can change our culture and laws. 

Wales, where Prof Walker teaches, lowered their speed limit in urban areas to 20 mph. Collisions, injuries and deaths plunged. Because car insurance is based on loss claims, Welsh car insurance rates plummeted. Slowing down is good for everyone's safety and pocketbooks. 

Who lives in those apartments without parking?

 I have written many times previously about Parking Angst in the Los Angeles region. 

But, I want to write a quick post about why we should permit new homes without parking. 

Why do we vacation in places without parking and then deny ourselves the pleasure of living in a car-light place in everyday life? People who live in places that look like this (photo from Livable Communities Initiative) do use cars and get deliveries in trucks. It's just that they park on an alley or a remote lot/garage and deliveries take place when foot traffic is low. 

I hear often from people that this won't work in LA because our area was built around cars. So let me tell you about two people I met who live in LA and don't own cars. 

Person #1 without a car: 

I met him several times while he dropped off or picked up his grandmother at League of Women Voters events. As I got to know them better, I learned that the grandmother is 100 years old and has no children nearby. He is her only relative nearby; he lives in an apartment 1/2 a mile away and rides a bike over to her house. 

He drives her car to take her on errands (they can do their grocery shopping together) and appointments. He rides a bike or takes the bus otherwise.  He lives on a major Metro LA bus line that runs every 10 minutes, which in planner speak is a High Quality Transit Area (HQTA). Click on the link for an interactive map of HQTAs in SoCal. 

A car parking spot in this area--close to jobs, transit, and the beach--is very expensive because of the high cost of land. You trade off building housing for people or housing for cars. The grandson chose to live without a car, saving the cost of car ownership and parking. It's a win for him, a win for her (because she has someone close to look after her), and for the community (he works in the arts, which has been struggling in high rent areas). 

Allowing cheaper housing without parking is clearly a win-win-win in this case. 

Person #2 without a car:

I only met her briefly in Koreatown, but she made quite an impression on me. I was walking from a meeting at Wilshire Center to the Metro B/D station at Vermont and Wilshire. She passed me slowly on her e-scooter while wearing scrubs and a backpack. I caught up to her as we waited to cross Vermont and Wilshire to reach the subway station. We chatted. Then she folded up her scooter and ran into the station, disappearing into the crowd.

She lived in an apartment in Koreatown where parking is a la carte. Her landlord wanted $300/mo (2019 prices) for a parking stall in a garage and she wondered how much she needed a car vs a nice apartment in a newer building.  

[Do the math on the $100,000 cost per stall for a multi-level parking garage, then double it for underground parking. $300/mo is not an unreasonable price to recoup the cost of building that parking.]

She was wearing scrubs so I assumed she worked in healthcare. She said that she was charged for parking at home and at work. In contrast, her workplace paid for transit passes. She added car payments, insurance, gas, parking, maintenance. She could save so much money, she could rent a car two weekends per month. 

She sold her car and bought her own e-scooter to get back and forth to the train station quickly. I asked her how often she rented a car. She said that, she met a boyfriend who has a car. They take weekend getaway trips in his car. On Sundays, they run their errands together and he drops her off at her house with her groceries. She budgeted for rental cars, but didn't need them. She saves the money instead.

She basically had a 2018 version of this heavy duty, but slower speed scooter, purchased from Best Buy on Black Friday. It cost about one month of parking and she thought it was an excellent value. 

Faster speed means heavier motor and more acceleration (could be dangerous if you are inexperienced or lose your balance). More range means heavier battery to haul on buses and trains. If you are just going (first and last mile) to transit, and can charge at home or at work, there is no reason to get a longer-range battery. Just buy an extra charger and leave it at work. 

She convinced me. I bought a similar e-scooter, just in time for Covid and staying at home for Zoom meetings. You can see a picture of my husband riding the e-scooter and me riding my first e-bike on this SBCCOG Story Map. 

Before you say, gotcha. 

I know that neither of these people live car-free because they rely on someone else with a car. Both of these people live in car-free households, but occasionally share a car with another household with a single car. That's 0.5 cars per household. Why does Redondo Beach require 2.25 parking spaces per studio apartment?

It is possible for some people to live car-light or car-free most of the time, even in LA. Why should we enact all these minimum parking rules to make housing more expensive or impossible to build? 

Wouldn't it be lovely if our children could stay near us in coastal California instead of moving to a Red state so that they could afford housing?

Why Building Expensive New Apartments Makes Old Apartments Cheaper

I often hear from people that I normally agree with on other issues that supply and demand don't apply when it comes to housing. I don't know why people who study housing all say one thing, and a corner of the advocacy space says another. I do have experience with Berkeley housing markets (albeit from the 1980s) and that soured me on rent control as the sole method to manage scarcity of an essential good. 

Berkeley has long had a rent control ordinance and a rental registry to ensure compliance. Jeff Baker wrote some Python code to visualize the public data and it is fascinating. As a scientist, I always like to see real world data compared to idealized models of how things work. 

The Rent Board of Berkeley, California maintains an Online Rent Registry with information about apartments and other dwellings under regulation by the city's rent control laws. The Registry lists the initial rent of a rent-controlled dwelling, and all of the subsequent annual adjustments.

The Registry tells us a bit about the city's rental market over time. Using the initial rent of tenancies still active at the present, we can deduce the market price of apartments in the year the tenant moved in. The chart below gives the median initial rent each year 1996-2022, adjusted for inflation to 2022 U.S. dollars, for tenants who are not listed as owners, managers, or any other special class.

Go to his site and read his analysis.  

One surprising thing I learned is that, though rents in rent-controlled units are generally lower than in newer buildings not subject to rent control, they do rise unevenly instead of monotonically rise the maximum amount allowed. Rent-controlled rents plateau during recessions. 

The population of apartments in the above figure are all older buildings, due to the nature of rent control in California. The rents shown are significantly below the advertised rents of the same size apartment in a new building in Berkeley. For example, some new buildings are currently advertising 1-bedroom apartments for around $3000 and 2-bedroom apartments at about $4200. The rents in old, regulated buildings are discounted by about 1 bedroom.

So he took the initial rents for newly-signed leases, and deflated them by the CPI from BLS All items in U.S. city average, all urban consumers, seasonally adjusted using a constant 2022 dollar (when I think he wrote/started this project). 

There's a lot of hand-wringing about how today's building code requiring two staircases results in mostly studios and 1-bedroom apartments with a few 2-bedroom units on corners. So, new construction is heavily weighted towards smaller units. Not too great for families, but fine for 1-2 person households. 

Older units subject to the most stringent rent control have to report the new leases within 30 days of signing the lease. Newer buildings only have to report annually, Each dot represents the average rent for initial leases signed in one month. Note that the dots are really tiny, meaning hardly anyone moves. In a university town of 100,000+ population, less than 20 people move into 1-BR rentals. 

In Dec 2017, 18 new leases for 1-BR apts were signed at an average rent of $2267 (2022 dollars). A bunch of new apartment buildings came online in downtown Berkeley, allowing people to move. That is when the bubbles become larger. By Dec 2024, 27 new leases for 1-BR apts were signed with an average rent of $1950 (2022 dollars). At the same time that the rent stock got more numerous, more modern (new units), it got cheaper in real dollars. 

Remember, older rent-controlled units have to report monthly. Newer buildings can report annually. The bigger circles are from the months that the newer buildings reported en masse, so the average new rents for those months are higher.  In August 2023, a whopping 785 new leases for 1 BRs were signed.

Notice how the small circles are falling faster than the big circles? 

What's going on here? I heard that building new, expensive apartments makes rents in older units more expensive! 

The data in Berkeley shows that new, expensive apartments makes rents in older units decline! Score 1 for the housing economists who say that supply and demand applies to housing. 

There are fewer new 2-bedroom apartments because of the International Building Code (IBC), but the same effect is noticeable in the 2-BRs. 

In Dec 2017, 14 new 2BR leases were signed for an avg of $3124. 

In Dec 2023, 18 new 2BR leases were signed for an avg of $2529. 

In Aug 2023, 275 new 2BR leases were signed, which is less than the 785 new 1BR leases for the same month. (Thank-you IBC.)

IBC hardly ever results in new 3 BR homes. But, when you have too few smaller apartments, people move in with roommates and outcompete families with children for the larger units. Even without building new 3 BR homes, just allowing people living with roommates who would rather live on their own (or in smaller households with fewer roommates), causes the rent for larger homes to stop sharply rising. 

In June 2017, 19 new 3BR leases were signed for an avg of $4534. 

In June 2023, 110 new 3BR leases were signed for an avg of $4728. 

The circles also get larger, meaning that there are more vacancies that allow people to move to something that better suits their needs and desires. That's a win for overall happiness. 

So, rent control provides certainty for incumbent renters, but doesn't allow them mobility if they need a larger or smaller unit. It also makes it impossible for new entrants to the market to find housing. 

Creating new homes, even expensive ones (IBC is expensive to comply with), can lower the rents on older units. 

The economists were right in this instance. 

Wastewater Surveillance Sites

 My local wastewater treatment plant is one of the original CDC Sentinel sites where the CDC samples flu variants circulating in the population. I know that sewage-sheds are not perfect proxies for the general population. But, my wastewater (and that of 4.8 Million people in LA County) goes to the A K Warren Facility in Carson, CA. It's the largest treatment facility in LA County, the US, and among the largest in the world. 

The CDC sampled at a number of facilities around the country in different metropolitan areas, determined the circulating diseases discoverable from wastewater, and then formulated the flu vaccine supply accordingly. This is a backwards-looking process. What was circulating last summer may not be what is circulating now.  But, there is a long lead time to ordering vaccines and getting shots in arms. 

Anyway, we can test for a lot more things now. And, we have the capacity to test at more sites. I'm very nervous about what is at state now that Trump has lost the election and wants to install RFK Jr to lead the CDC. Most people won't know what we lose because they don't even know what the CDC does. This is just a small window in what this agency does.  

I just want to provide a few links to useful resources because Google Search has degraded so much, it's hard to find sites. Also, some sites have broken links--either moved elsewhere or lost their funding when the Covid Emergency declaration expired. 

This is what I could find today, Jan 2, 2025

CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) main page has state-level data. 

Click on See the data at the left toolbar and you reach a page where you can select the pathogen and domain to create charts. For instance, here is the regional Covid-19 chart. Note that the CDC website has data until Dec 21. 

California's Department of Public Health has a newly redesigned website and I am still trying to find stuff. I used to visit the Tableau Cal SuWers weekly, but the old link doesn't work or redirect correctly.

New CalSuWers site (made with R Shiny) has data last updated Dec 26. CalSuWers reports to CDC and the national network, so it's showing data that is a bit more recent. 

Read the instructions/caveats. Then navigate to the Regional Data top level page.   Use the menus of the left to select regional or sewage-shed data. Note that this plant last updated data on Dec 31. 

Unfortunately, this data tool only reports Covid-19 data. There's lots more data I found on other sites. 

Members of  the California Water Environment Association collect a lot more data, including research products in partnership with scientists throughout California and the world. 

List of Participating CA Wastewater Surveillance participants. 

The best site visualization site I can find right now that collates data from around the US is from WastewaterSCAN, a Stanford-Emory led effort. 

Select the region on their national map, then zoom by region and select by sewage plant. 

Click View Chart and you can see Covid-19, RSV, Influenza A or B, Human metapneumovirus, Norovirus, Mpox, EVD68, Candida auris, Hepatitis A (for the Warren facility). The number and type of tests vary by location. The most recent data is from Dec 25. 

Based on positive detections for Hepatitis A in my subregion, I am glad that I started the 3-shot series that combines vaccines for both Hep A and Hep B. Covid-19, RSV, Inf A & B, and Norovirus are all circulating as well. 

Meanwhile, our whole family came down with a cold. We bought the Covid-19 + Inf A + Inf B home test at CVS and we just had a plain old cold. It really ruined our holiday plans. 

Mask up and stay healthy! 

A couple of additional sites:

Inside Medicine COVID-19 Metrics Dashboard by Benjamin Renton

H5N1 Dashboard by Daniel Summers