Independent Study Validates El Camino Real BRT Project Environmental Analysis

During the five-year course of project development on the El Camino Real Bus Rapid Transit Project, there has been much public discussion surrounding the benefits, impacts and the analysis conducted to date to environmentally clear the proposed transit improvement.  

The Draft Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Assessment (DEIR/EA) is the environmental document that conforms to federal and state environmental laws and regulations. A 75-day comment period was held late last year, that continued into 2015, resulting in 740 written or oral comments comments - the most feedback any project has received in VTA's history. 

Due to feedback from the public that involved some skepticism related to ridership forecasts and transportation impacts presented in the DEIR/EA, VTA initiated an independent third party review to evaluate this analysis.

The independent third party review was led by a Steering Committee consisting of distinguished researchers from the Mineta Transportation Institute, Cal Poly, and other industry academics. The Committee retained the private consulting firm, Iteris, to undertake a technical review of the Transportation Operations Analysis Report.  Specifically, Iteris’ analysis focused on:

• Methodologies for study area selection, traffic diversion, travel forecasting and traffic analysis;
• Calculations regarding level-of-service (LOS), operations analysis, traffic diversion, traffic forecasting and queuing; and
• Review of the travel demand model outputs used for vehicular and ridership forecasts.