Coordinating Transportation and Land Use Strategies Across Scales: Lessons from California’s Climate Action Planning Experience

This chapter explores how regional and local governments can coordinate transportation and land use strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, drawing on lessons from California’s Senate Bill 375 and its multilevel climate planning framework. It asks: To what extent do regional sustainable communities strategies (SCSs) and local climate action plans (CAPs) align in their approaches to reducing vehicle travel, and what does this alignment – or lack thereof – mean for climate action? Using qualitative content analysis of 25 planning documents from five diverse California metropolitan regions, the study examines 24 strategies across four categories: transportation infrastructure, land-use policies, transportation demand management, and cross-cutting issues such as collaboration and equity. The findings reveal that regional plans tend to emphasize modeling and best practices, while local plans are often more tailored to community needs and, in some cases, more ambitious. Strategies requiring significant infrastructure investment, such as transit or active transportation networks, benefit most from vertical integration, whereas locally driven innovation fills gaps through policies such as parking reform, urban greening, and community-centered engagement. Key barriers to coordination include mismatched authority, uneven technical capacity, and differing timelines, though cities with long-standing climate commitments often act as leaders. California’s experience underscores that effective decarbonization requires both coordination across levels of government and room for local innovation. These lessons are transferable to other jurisdictions seeking to align transportation and land use planning in support of climate action.