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City of San Leandro Proposed Guidelines for Analyzing VMT December 8, 2023 Page 2 of 12 transportation impacts under CEQA. Mitigations of LOS impacts compelled communities to widen roads and incentivized spread out land use patterns resulting over time in more driving, congestion, and pollution. Senate Bill 743 (Steinberg, 2013), codified in Public Resources Code section 21099, requires lead agencies to replace LOS to better align transportation impact criteria with State environmental, economic, and public health goals. The criteria for determining the significance of transportation impacts and setting new thresholds must “promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the development of multimodal transportation networks, and a diversity of land uses.” The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) supports the implementation of SB 743 by providing resources including the Technical Advisory on Evaluating Transportation Impacts in CEQA (2018). OPR recommends that jurisdictions replace LOS with VMT based metrics and provides guidance on how to accomplish this. This shift better aligns transportation impact analysis and mitigation outcomes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, encourage infill development, and improve public health. Jurisdictions in California are now required to use VMT based metrics to evaluate environmental impacts related to transportation. Jurisdictions may still use LOS within the local development review process to inform site access and traffic operations decisions, but LOS cannot be used to evaluate CEQA impacts or mitigations. Thus, the City of San Leandro intends to continue to use LOS analysis for some purposes, such as evaluating the need for adding or modifying traffic signals, or modifying lane configuration at intersections. Section 6 of this memorandum addresses when a project may require the preparation of a Local Transportation Impact Analysis (LTIA), which would include LOS analysis. VMT measures the amount of driving produced by a project and provides a measure of travel efficiency of a land use project. For most types of projects, VMT-based analysis offers a streamlined analysis that saves jurisdiction staff time and provides clarity for the public and land developers. The shift to VMT policies is intended to help achieve climate commitments, preserve the environment, improve health and safety, create sustainable communities, encourage more efficient use of the transportation network, and provide more travel choices for each jurisdiction, as well as for the region and state. VMT can be measured in several ways. For the purposes of VMT analysis in San Leandro, the City proposes to use the metrics of home-based VMT per resident for residential uses, and home-work VMT per worker for employment-generating uses. Both metrics are “efficiency” metrics, in which the level of VMT is expressed in “per person” terms. This form of the metric speaks to how efficiently the people at a given location travel. A project that contributes to a more efficient use of the transportation system would reduce the VMT per person as compared to a no-project scenario. Some amount of overall VMT growth is always expected to occur when there is overall growth in population and economic activity; many development projects will cause an increase in total VMT, but the VMT per person can decrease if the new residents and/or workers travel in