How to Move 1000 Laguna Beach Visitors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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LBUSD Facility Master Plan SOW

On May 2 2023 the LB Unified School District revealed plans for a $120 Million replacement of facilities on four campuses, the allocation consists of $88 Million for the LBHS campus. The replacement consists of two parking garages designated  Lot-A and Lot-B on the Facility Master Plan SOW for May 23, 2023, the entire project is estimated to take 10-years to complete.

The project allocates roughly $15 Million for multi-story parking structures at Lot-A and $9 Million for Lot-B located in existing parking lots. Given similar project experience in Lagna Beach these costs may be considerably more. Given the details from the Facility Master Plan, an analysis of the proposed structures reveal the real cost of the development.

Project Assumptions:

Construction time 3-years,   Facility Life: 40-years,   Debt Financing: 30-years

Project Lifetime Debt Considerations:

Construction, Debt Service, Salvage, O&M, In-lieu Fees, Opportunity Cost 

Externalized Costs: VMT, Congestion, Emissions, EIR Review, In-lieu fees

Lot-A and Lot-B Design details:

Lot-A: number of spaces:  existing spaces -113, added - 19

Lot-B: number of spaces:  existing spaces -19, added - 103  

 

An economic analysis for the lifetime of the structure using a Equivalent Uniform Annualized Cost (EUAC) approach and the assumptions above give the following results. The calculations are a break-even case where amortized project costs are just covered by meter rates. 

 

The study does not include costs for  parking enforcement,  opportunity costs, environment factors (quakes, floods), depreciation and inflation. 

 

For each parking lot, the first chart shows the meter rate per hour charged per space at different prevailing interest rates. The meter rate is shown for two cases, one for spaces added and one for all the parking spaces in each lot A and B.  

The second chart shows the accumulated costs for each parking space if the space was rented by the month. It is shocking to realize the monthly cost of each parking space approaches cost of rent for a double occupancy flat in Laguna Beach.

-LS

Renewable Replacement Reality

When the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) proposes a 1.5-degree cap on global temperature increase by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 by simply substituting renewable energy sources for the dominant hydrocarbon ones, it's time for a reality check (Bill Gates warns do the math).

To show the extent hydrocarbon energy from fossil fuel dominates the global energy mix, consider the reality presented by the Manhattan Institute in a comprehensive March 2019 article.

What does the world consumption of fossil energy look like?  If the world consumption of coal and oil were measured in only barrels of oil, then the barrels would line-up from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, and a stack of barrels equivalent in height to Washington Monument would be consumed every week.

To transition our world civilization dependent on fossil energy to something else like wind and solar, consider these inescapable realities between renewables and hydrocarbon energy.

• Private vehicle replacement: A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace only five percent of global oil demand.
• The cost of transition to renewables: A small  2% decline in hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of global energy.
• The rate of fossil fuel replacement: Global petroleum production grew ten-fold in five decades, renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. 
• Energy poverty increases energy demand: When the world’s poorest 4 billion people increase their energy use to just 15% of the per-capita level of developed economies, global energy consumption will rise by the equivalent of adding an entire United States’ worth of demand.
• Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: due to improving energy efficiency since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33 percent, the economy grew 80 percent and global energy use is up 40 percent.
• To make enough batteries to store two day's worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Tesla Gigafactory.
  
• It costs less than $0.50 to store the energy in a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy in batteries.
• About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
• No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech: Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33 percent of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26 percent.

The realities are that both hydrocarbon energy and renewable sources contribute to climate disruption over their life-cycle of discovery, extraction, processing, consumption, waste.  Renewables suffer a cost penalty due their low energy density compared to fossil fuels. Presently no other energy source is remarkable as hydrocarbons in terms of the combination of low-cost, high-energy density, stability, safety, and portability.

A sustainable policy based on these choices faces drawbacks in execution, but there is a third choice. Complete Streets Policy is a demand-side mobility policy consistent with lowering the carbon footprint in our transportation sector by enabling low-carbon transportation modes.

For a comprehensive review of many more energy transition realities, see the article by Manhattan Institute "The 'New Energy Economy': an exercise in Magical Thinking".  ( Manhattan Institute)

-LS

Incentives for Bike Month

May is bike month!  Use your bike as a statement for climate action, and the perfect tool for door to door trips within Laguna and you'll never look for parking.  The bike is also the solution for the "last-mile" connector between public transit stations and your destination. Remember Homer's Rules of Mobility.   

Join the Tool for Joy Challenge at People for Bikes where we are celebrating power of the bike as a tool for joy, ride along with us all month as we share the joys of riding a bike for recreation, transportation, community, health and more!

The poppy is a perfect symbol of the transformation we want to see in California, to do so the state has incentivized the removal of wasteful lawns in favor of native flora like the poppy "bringing beautiful diversity of plants designed to thrive in our climate". Support  CalBike with diverse mobility options so all California communities can thrive. Join today to plant the seeds of change, so we can see bike lanes blooming as plentiful as golden poppies across the golden state (Calbike). 

-LS