COMMENTARY; PUBLIC TRANSIT ESSENTIAL TO REGION'S QUALITY OF LIFE.

Byline: Ron Kilcoyne Transportation manager, city of Santa Clarita 

Affordable public transportation is absolutely essential if Californians are to continue to enjoy both economic growth and a high quality of life.

No economy can prosper without sound transportation and in California public transit is a key element of our transportation system. No citizen can enjoy true quality of life without the ability to move freely and at a reasonable cost. Suffering painful hours in gridlocked traffic is a quality-of-life issue.

Public transit also promotes economic development by transporting people to jobs and making employees more productive through reduced congestion. Public transit not only helps relieve traffic, but also helps promote livable communities, clean air, sound land-use planning and intelligent growth patterns. Public transit also employs 30,000 Californians and supports numerous businesses.

It's hard to find anyone who would argue those basic facts. Yet funding of the state's public transportation needs remains woefully inadequate. Each day millions of commuters struggle through maddening congestion - each day seemingly worse than the one before. With a projected increase of 18 million residents within the next 25 years, the importance and necessity of transportation improvements seems starkly obvious.

Every day, 4 million Californians rely on public transit to get to work, and access necessary services. That equates to 1 billion people each year. In California's major urban centers, public transit makes the difference between gridlock and a barely tolerable transportation system. During peak travel times, 38 percent of the trips in the San Francisco Bay Bridge Corridor are serviced by public transit, 30 percent in downtown Los Angeles and 18 percent into downtown San Diego.

Santa Clarita Valley residents make more 2.5 million trips on Santa Clarita Transit buses and Metrolink trains every year. This is impressive considering that transit service was virtually nonexistent here seven years ago and much of this growth occurred during a period when the recession put a temporary halt to most new housing construction and population growth. Furthermore only about half the population of the Santa Clarita Valley is within a quarter-mile of a bus stop.

Earlier this year the city adopted a revised Circulation Element to our General Plan. The most startling finding was that even after every new road contained in the plan is built, traffic congestion will be worse. We need to increase the role transit plays in the Santa Clarita Valley if we are to retain and enhance our quality of life. We need a balanced transportation system.

The fact that so many Santa Clarita residents have embraced public transit illustrates that if quality service is provided, people will use it - transit can play a larger role. The fact that only half of the current population can easily access transit and that most new development is occurring beyond the reach of current bus routes dramatically illustrates that service needs to be significantly expanded to be a convenient alternative, so residents have choices and gridlock is avoided.

Santa Clarita Transit and Metrolink join with transit operators throughout the state to strengthen public transit options in California. The industry has done much to help itself, but we are still in need of more tools to successfully do our job. We need assistance from state government to develop and implement broad improvements to public transit, highways, and local streets and roads. Help is also needed to preserve the local option sales tax, which allows voters to tax themselves to improve transportation. It is imperative that California develops a new and comprehensive state and local transportation funding strategy for all transportation modes, one that allows transit to provide services needed by all Californians.

Without public transit, transportation systems throughout the state would grind to a halt. Public transit is the state's best hope of meeting California's 21st century needs.

Economic growth, quality of life and adequate transportation go hand-in-hand. No one disputes that. The challenge before the next governor is to make the protection of existing funding sources and development of new funding strategies a priority. Only if the governor succeeds will California be able to meet the needs of its growing population.