DEPARTMENT: Department of Planning & Community Development
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Bridgett White, AICP
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: Citywide
SUBJECT:
A Briefing on the updated adoption timeline for the SA Tomorrow planning initiative, which consists of the following three plans:
a) Comprehensive Plan
b) Multimodal Transportation Plan
c) Sustainability Plan
SUMMARY:
SA Tomorrow is an innovative comprehensive planning initiative to guide the city toward smart, strategic growth. The SA Tomorrow planning initiative consists of a Comprehensive Plan, which will serve as the city’s policy and land use guide; a Multimodal Transportation Plan and a Sustainability Pan, which will serve as implementation components of the Comprehensive Plan.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
SA Tomorrow builds on the vision articulated by the community through the SA2020 process. SA Tomorrow will result in an innovative overall approach aimed at accommodating the city’s projected growth by the year 2040 by providing the community with more choices for housing and transportation while preserving our resources and maintaining a high quality of life.
ISSUE:
By combining feedback from a diverse array of experts throughout the community and allowing constant public input, the SA Tomorrow plans will address the projected population growth by increasing options and moving towards strategic and efficient development patterns. Highlights of each plan are presented below.
Comprehensive Plan
The major “building blocks” of the Comprehensive Plan include:
• Regional Centers;
• Urban Centers;
• Corridors; and
• Neighborhoods
Each building block has a role within the greater San Antonio landscape.
San Antonio will build upon its polycentric pattern of regional development, which has resulted in the formation of 13 Regional Centers that are home to roughly 50% of all jobs in San Antonio. These regional centers present our City’s best chance for absorbing our projected population and employment growth. By using this approach, San Antonio can preserve and protect existing neighborhoods, parks, open space, and trails by concentrating a large portion of future growth and development (housing and employment) in these centers, as well as, smaller scale Urban Centers, and along attractive multi-modal Corridors with enhanced transit services. The City’s Land and Development Capacity Study suggests an infill development strategy using vacant and underdeveloped parcels throughout the City to build supply in the Regional Centers and along the city’s corridors. Occupying the space between the regional and urban centers and the corridors that connect them, Neighborhoods form the backbone of the community. By focusing much of the new housing and jobs into regional centers, urban centers, and corridors and thereby protecting existing neighborhoods, we ensure the ability to create and support complete neighborhoods with access to a variety of amenities and daily needs and services.
Sustainability Plan
The Sustainability Plan will articulate the City’s Sustainability strategy and serve as a roadmap in subsequent years by City of San Antonio Department and policy makers to make our community and municipal operations more sustainable. With an additional one million people coming, the Sustainability Plan balances the growth with our environmental, economic, and social resources.
The SA Tomorrow Sustainability plan was developed from an evaluation of past plans, such as Mission Verde and SA2020, as well as through engagement with the public, an expert steering committee, subject matter experts, key members of City leadership, the SA Tomorrow comprehensive and transportation planning teams, along with best practice research from around the country. The Sustainability Plan highlights seven focus areas and five cross cutting themes. Each focus area has its own vision, outcomes, strategies, and measures of success. The cross cutting themes were identified as key priorities for San Antonio and they create the framework by which every identified strategy was evaluated to ensure that upon implementation, the state of these priority areas is improved or, at a minimum, not negatively impacted. The Cross Cutting Themes include Air Quality, Resilience, Economic Vitality, Equity, and Water Resources. The Focus areas include
• Green Buildings & Infrastructure
• Energy
• Food Systems
• Land Use & Transportation
• Natural Resources
• Public Health
• Solid Waste Resources
• Innovative Economy
Multimodal Transportation Plan
The Multimodal Transportation Plan lays out a vision for the future that utilizes technology and innovation to transform our extensive existing system into a dynamic, balanced, and forward thinking system that helps us begin to prepare for the inevitability of connected and autonomous vehicles as well as high speed rail in Texas. The plan includes 5 key components:
• Focus on moving people not cars. Providing transportation mode choices. San Antonio’s street system is largely complete, and the opportunity to add new roadways or widen our existing ones is limited. This means in the future the introduction of light rail, dedicated Bus Rapid Transit and HOV facilities must be considered. Working closely with VIA, Amtrak, future commuter rail and High Speed Rail providers will be critical.
• Build a multimodal transportation system to serve the city, connect to the region and support smart growth. The city is going to build projects incorporating all modes and providing connections between those modes. The projects will use public roadways as well public parks, trails, and linear creek ways to offer transportation choices and connect all modes. The pedestrian and bicycle networks are clearly defined and options to improve the facilities is a must.
• The City and our internal agencies must partner with TxDOT, MPO and Bexar County on implementing a dynamic “incident management program”. One of major causes of congestion and delays during the peak travel time are incidents. In many cases it involves a disabled vehicle, minor vehicle crash, abandoned vehicles and one of the successful program to address these incidents is a Roadway Operations Patrol that can respond to and clear traffic incidents and emergencies.
• Continue to use “Smart Cities” technology to make innovative and emerging technology available for all mode users. Working with our Transportation partners, TxDOT, VIA, San Antonio Airport and the carshare companies and Taxi services to provide real time transportation updates for all modes. Everything from real-time reports of the next bus technology, congestion management information, alternative mode choices and detouring due to a crash to walking guides, bicycle routes or construction project updates all through the use of mobile apps.
• Safety remains a priority and protecting our infrastructure through regular maintenance. We must get the best return on taxpayer’s transportation dollars already invested by maintaining San Antonio infrastructure and keeping it operating safely, smoothly and in good repair. Preserving and maintaining roadways, bridges and other structures, signals, trees and sidewalks will extend the life of our infrastructure and provide for a more sustainable transportation system.
o Designing our roadways for all users and all modes focused on safety for our citizens and visitors through our “Vision Zero” and School Pedestrian Safety Programs.
ALTERNATIVES:
N/A
FISCAL IMPACT:
None.
RECOMMENDATION:
This briefing is for informational purposes only.