Ventura County Civic Alliance — Livable Communities Newsletter – May 15, 2022

Big Picture Perspective:

Ventura County is a collection of suburban communities and rural enclaves, many separated by greenbelts and natural borders like rivers and mountains. As such, its residents are highly dependent on private automobiles and freeways. Progress toward diversifying our transportation system has been slow. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic started, more than 78% of Ventura County residents commuted to work every weekday by driving alone. Ridership had been declining on our public transit systems even before the pandemic. Although our cities added miles of bicycle lanes in recent years, in most places, bicyclists still risk competing with cars for space on the roads. “In our county, there are a lot of incentives for driving,” said Darren Kettle, who served as executive director of the Ventura County Transportation Commission from 2007 through the summer of 2021, “We take great pride in our individual communities and the space between them and our open space, but those don’t necessarily translate to allowing for super-simple public transit.” In Ventura County, public transit is “mobility of last resort,” Kettle said. Our busiest bus routes offer service no more frequently than every 20 minutes, and a system that people would choose to rely on would need to run twice that often. That would take “a whole heck of a lot of money,” Kettle said.

What is Happening Now?

Driving alone on a daily basis — the most common way for generations of Americans to commute, at least when there’s not a pandemic raging — puts stress on the roads and the environment.

The most recent data available is from 2019, before the pandemic forced thousands of Ventura County residents to work from home. In 2019, 78.7% of employed county residents reported driving alone as their primary method of getting to work. That habit has been very resistant to change — the percentage of people driving alone actually grew slightly between 2017 and 2019, and between 2005 and 2019 it decreased by only 1.5 percentage points. Carpooling was the next most popular option after driving alone, with 11.1% of workers driving a private vehicle with one or more companions. Six percent of respondents in 2019 said they worked at home — a figure that obviously changed a great deal the following year — and only 3.3% got to work by walking, bicycling or on public transportation. The number of workers using public transportation to get to work dropped between 2017 and 2019, from 1.3% to 1.1%, which is less than those who walked to work. One possible reason for these shifts is that in the later years of the 2010s used cars and vehicle financing were plentiful and relatively cheap, which allowed more people to own and drive their own cars.

Unsurprisingly, miles driven on all of Ventura County’s highways dropped noticeably in 2020, when the pandemic kept many people home from workplaces and schools for months. The decline wasn’t as sharp as one might expect, though, given the empty roads in March and April of 2020. On Highway 101, which has the county’s highest vehicle counts, Caltrans estimated around 1.1 billion vehicle miles were traveled in 2020, a 17.2% decline from 2019. On Highway 118 through Simi Valley and Moorpark, 456 million miles were driven in 2020, a 21.8% drop from the year before. And on Highway 23 in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark, the 239 million miles in 2020 represented a 31.9% one-year decline. More surprising than the decline in 2020 is the fact vehicle miles on Highway 101 had been dropping for years before the pandemic. These declines were smaller — 2.3% in 2018 and 5.1% in 2019 — but they still amounted to millions fewer miles driven from year to year. With no pandemic or recession in those years to reduce the need for driving, and with our transit systems also seeing shrinking passenger counts, this trend bears watching.

What is Expected in the Future?

As seen in these three excerpts from our 2021 State of the Region report, Ventura County is making some progress getting to the transportation structure required to be a livable community, but there is much more that needs to be done.