The road climbs from the Delta town of Hood to beyond the foothill city of Auburn, never out of sight of subdivisions or big box stores. It plows through the former oak woodlands of eastern Sacramento County and the west slope of El Dorado. The road affords everyone who uses it plenty of time to contemplate that scenery: Traffic rarely moves above a crawl.
That road runs to a destination few of us would deliberately choose. The big question for the Sacramento region in 2003 is whether the public and its leaders will take advantage of the upcoming Sacramento Region Blueprint discussions to imagine a path to a better future.
We know what the road to ruin looks like courtesy of SACOG, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, sponsor of the Blueprint project. Last fall, as the first step in the two two-year process, it put together a portrait of what the future would look like if the six-county region grows along its current path.
The idea was to find out where the policy road we're now cruising would lead by 2050, when the region's population will likely have doubled to 3.7 million, about the size of metropolitan Seattle or Atlanta today.
It's not a pleasant sight. The region would lose large swaths of farmland and environmentally sensitive lands. Traffic would slow and the average person would spend an extra 160 hours a year -- a month's work time -- in a car. Despite all the construction, the region would fall 135,000 multi-family housing units short of the need.
With that bleak possibility as a backdrop, SACOG next month will begin holding a series of public workshops in cities and counties across the region. Using data and mapping tools, citizens will be able to build and test alternative land use and transportation policies and envision scenarios for growing without damaging the region's quality of life.
The gold standard for this kind of public education and involvement in imagining a region's future is Envision Utah.
In the mid-1990s, the urban corridor around Salt Lake City, home to 85 percent of the state's residents, was being strained by the same kind of growth Sacramento faces, but with a twist. Hemmed in by mountains, lakes and deserts, the Salt Lake City region confronted the risk of quickly depleting its supply of developable land and pushing urbanization into hazardous or environmentally sensitive lands.
So a coalition of Utah's business, labor, political and religious leaders in 1997 launched Envision Utah to involve the public from the bottom up in shaping the urban region's future.
Starting with the region's movers and shakers and then moving on to the general public, Envision Utah invited people to sit down with maps, data and chips representing the million new residents expected over the next 50 years. Their task was to figure out how to accommodate that growth in ways that accorded with their values.
"Our process was to involve the public at a very high level, give them choices and let them choose," said Robert Grow, the founding chairman of Envision Utah, who visited Sacramento last week to share its experience with local leaders. "Envision Utah was designed to be an honest broker of choices, the premise being that once the public saw the choices, it would make wise decisions."
The biggest success of Envision Utah has been its ability to translate the often abstract and complex issues related to growth into materials that citizens can relate to their own lives and communities.
To illustrate four different scenarios for future growth, it created graphics, maps and charts that let people visualize the consequences of various choices. They could see how accommodating growth mostly with scattered developments of single-family homes forced urbanization into the back country of the Wasatch Mountains, and they could calculate the higher bill for water and taxes as new roads and infrastructure had to be built.
Through workshops and questionnaires that went to all the region's residents, the Utah public eventually picked Scenario C as its preferred future. That scenario called for developing transit, focusing more growth in transportation corridors and walkable neighborhoods and using less land per housing unit by encouraging a greater mix of housing types.
"The problem with growth issues is that you don't understand them until you go through the process and feel the pain," Grow said. "Once people bumped their own head into the issue hard, then they were ready to learn."
The learning and choosing have driven a sea change in the debate in Utah, according to Grow. Nine cities along Salt Lake are working together on a shoreline preservation plan. Controversial five years ago, light rail is now in great demand.
Instead of fighting over Target stores at light rail stops, suburban communities are building multistory transit-ready projects combining offices, stores and condominiums to show the transit authority that they are best able to maximize ridership and deserve the next light rail line. "Public officials could have never voted for such projects five years ago," Grow said.
The Blueprint project gives Sacramento a chance this year to do its own learning before it's too late. Just listen to Grow: "You have a process started here in Sacramento which, over the next couple of years, will be the most significant thing you have ever done to determine what this place will be like in the next 25 or 50 years. This is the opportunity. This is the time to get involved if you care about the future of Sacramento."
(SACOG's base case analysis and information about the scheduling of Blueprint workshops is available online at http://www.sacog.org/ Envision Utah materials can be found at http://www.envisionutah.org/)