$51.4 Million for Sustainable Transportation Planning Grants

Caltrans announced today that it is awarding planning grants to 89 local and regional projects that will lay the groundwork for making transportation “more resilient to the impacts of climate change.”

These include funding for climate adaptation planning, land use planning – including charging infrastructure and bike and pedestrian safety projects – and “strategic partnership” grants that focus on a wide variety of projects including transit network analyses, managed lanes, and coordination of multimodal transportation.

Caltrans awards transportation planning grants every year via a competitive process to encourage the best local and regional projects, with projects evaluated on well how they identify and address transportation needs on the state highway system (which includes many city streets). The grants announced today are funded from a variety of sources, including about $29 million from one-time state and federal sources created by the 2022-23 state budget’s “clean transportation package.” Another $12 million comes from Senate Bill 1, the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017, and the rest is from the federal DOT.

Today’s announcement includes:

• $28.8 million for Climate Adaptation Planning Grants to thirty agencies to develop local and regional climate adaptation plans based on local circumstances and needs. These also include individual project planning to climate impacts on transportation infrastructure.
• $19.2 million for Sustainable Communities Competitive and Technical Grants to fifty local and regional agencies for transportation and land use planning.
• $3.4 million in federally funded Strategic Partnerships Grants to nine projects that plan improvements to local and regional transportation networks and build cooperative partnerships among agencies.

The complete list of grants winners can be found here.

Examples of awarded projects include:

• A Strategic Partnership Grant for $479,000 for Humboldt County to complete a comprehensive analysis of transit needs, with the aim of creating a more connected, efficient, and user-focused multi-modal public transportation network. Part of the project will involve building strong working relationships among the County, transit providers, Caltrans, local tribes, cities, and other county agencies.
• A Sustainable Communities grant for $251,223 to Modoc County, which has almost no infrastructure that supports walking, biking, and access to transit, to develop an Active and Multimodal Transportation Plan. The plan will identify changes that can be made to streets, sidewalks, crossings, trails, and transit service to improve access for pedestrians and cyclists to schools, retail, and other key destinations in the city of Alturas and unincorporated communities, including trail connections between communities and to recreation areas.
• A Sustainable Communities grant for $218,472 to the city of Folsom for a feasibility study on how to improve transit connections to health services.
• Two Sustainable Communities grants to the city of West Sacramento: $309,855 to update its Bicycle, Pedestrian, and Trails master plan, and $354,120 to develop criteria for a local VMT mitigation fee. That study would consider what projects would be subject to a VMT reduction program, establish metrics and thresholds for a traffic impact fee, identify projects and programs to be funded by a mitigation fee, and recommend a fee structure.
• A Climate Adaptation Planning grant for $1,500,000 to the county of Fresno to evaluate and plan a resilient transportation system in unincorporated areas that experience flooding, drought, and subsidence.
• Another Climate Adaptation Planning grant for $221,325 is for the Fresno Council of Governments to develop an extreme heat analysis and shade plan for Fresno county. This will include identifying native and drought-tolerant tree canopy improvement projects in communities most vulnerable to extreme heat.
• A Sustainable Communities Grant for $600,000 to the city of San Diego to develop a multimodal mobility plan for the mid-city communities.