California’s transportation system is making it harder for millions of people to get to work, school, healthcare, and daily necessities, according to a new report from UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab. An Abundance Agenda for Transportation calls for a fundamental rethink of how the state plans, funds, and measures transportation.
Abundance Agenda argues that despite years of reform rhetoric, California policy remains largely focused on moving cars rather than ensuring people can access what they need safely, affordably, and reliably. That approach has contributed to widening inequality, unsafe streets, rising transportation costs, and extreme housing pressure in job-rich areas.
“Most people would be surprised to learn that transportation governance centers the needs of vehicles and infrastructure rather than people ,” writes Juan Matute, the report’s author. “Today’s data and computing power makes it possible to center people’s needs and make public investment decisions based on how they improve accessibility. This will lead to more investment in safe streets and transit priority than we have today.”
The paper introduces an “abundance” framework, distinguishing between “abundance hubs” — places with strong access to jobs, schools, services, and healthier environments — and “scarcity zones,” where residents face limited access to essentials and longer, more expensive trips. In abundance hubs, transportation investments often prioritize protecting road capacity and parking rather than enabling housing growth, transit expansion, or safer streets, reinforcing exclusivity in places where opportunity is already scarce.
That critique aligns with — and extends — the intent of Senate Bill 743, the landmark California law passed in 2013 that replaced auto delay (level-of-service) metrics with vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as the standard for evaluating transportation impacts under environmental review. While SB 743 was designed to shift planning away from congestion mitigation and toward climate and access goals, Abundance Agenda argues that many agencies continue to treat the reform as a procedural checkbox rather than a mandate to fundamentally rethink transportation priorities.
In scarcity zones, the report finds, residents often depend on long trips to reach healthcare, education, and well-paying jobs, making them especially vulnerable to unreliable transit and unsafe roadways. The author calls for sustained investment in frequent public transportation and safe infrastructure for walking and biking while also improving access to essential services closer to where people live.
Ultimately, Abundance Agenda argues that California must move beyond vehicle-focused performance metrics — even under SB 743 — and adopt measures that reflect whether transportation investments actually improve access, affordability, safety, and quality of life, particularly for people with the fewest resources.
“Making it easier for everyone to get to what they need will require acknowledging that California can’t build its way out of congestion, but instead works within geometric, economic, and political constraints to directly address the root causes of limited mobility and accessibility while improving the affordability and quality of the transportation system,” Matute concludes.
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Matute is the Deputy Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and a regular contributor to Streetsblog and Santa Monica Next, both of which are published by the non-profit California Streets Initiative (CSI). Matute once served as CSI Chair.
