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First Metro Countywide Sustainability Annual Report, With Plenty Of Graphs

Metro Sustainability
Cover of 2015 Metro Countywide Sustainability Annual Report [PDF]
Metro Sustainability

At yesterday's Metro Board of Directors Ad Hoc Sustainability Committee meeting, Metro staff shared the agency's first Metro Countywide Sustainability Annual Report [PDF]. The report establishes a baseline to "track sustainability progress going forward for Metro’s own actions and broader measures of sustainability throughout the county. The Countywide Performance Metrics measure sustainability outcomes countywide such as how people travel throughout the county, the environmental impacts of this travel and how transportation and land use shift over time."

The report includes brief case studies on sustainability projects from vanpools, to greenways, to bike hubs. It includes a spreadsheet with Metro's status on its identified sustainability work plan.

The bulk of the report is a series of graphs showing Countywide Performance Metrics, including Vehicle Miles Traveled, Total Person Trips for Carpool and Active Transportation, Daily Total CO2 Emissions for L.A. County, Metro Transit Ridership Total Annual Boardings, and more. Each of these metrics are shown on graphs, most of which SBLA has included below in the order in which they appear in the report.

VMT
Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) for L.A. County. Image via Metro [PDF]
VMT
trips
Total trips trips made walking, bicycling, and carpooling. Image via Metro [PDF]
trips
job
Number of jobs within a half-mile radius of transit stations. Image via Metro [PDF]
job
population
Population within a half-mile radius of transit stations. Image via Metro [PDF]
population
ped bike
Overall pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries in L.A. County car crashes. Image via Metro [PDF]
ped bike
CO2 Emissions
Total carbon dioxide emissions for L.A. County. Image via Metro [PDF]
CO2 Emissions
Vehicle delay
Daily total vehicle delay for L.A. County. Image via Metro [PDF]
Vehicle delay
transit ridership
Total annual Metro transit ridership. Image via Metro [PDF]
transit ridership

SBLA will mostly leave these graphs to speak for themselves, as it is welcome to see Metro publicly establishing sustainability baselines which it will track and report on annually.

Predictions (most of which here are from the Southern California Association of Governments - SCAG, not Metro), especially ones about the future and about 21st century transportation, are pretty difficult.

Examples of metrics that could benefit from refinement would be bicycle and pedestrian injuries and deaths. It can be somewhat misleading to show just the absolute number of injuries and deaths, without taking into account how many people are utilizing a mode. If, for example, bicycle trips triple and bicycle deaths double, then the number of deaths per trip is actually declining even though the overall number of deaths is increasing. Similarly, other absolute numbers including transit ridership and VMT, could also be reported as modal share percentage and per-capita respectively.

And, of course, it would be helpful to not just publish these statistics as PDF graphs, but also include actual data in an open easily-shared format that researchers and the public can access and study.

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