Big Brother and Big Data have arrived in Santa Barbara.
But those two privacy villains might be our friends after all.
In a first for Santa Barbara County, smartphone, GPS and credit card data are being used to learn how people travel, where they travel, and why they travel.
Those quick trips to Target, Costco and to fill up the gas tank, as well drives to work, and those long lunch breaks in your car, are all being tracked and used to make decisions about mobility, transportation and even housing development. The data is not trackable to individuals and only used to determine overall trends.
The Santa Barbara County Association of Governments, a powerful, yet low-key regional agency with a professional staff separate from County government, makes decisions about housing, transportation and overall long-term planning, and spent $92,000 on a contract with Lakewood, Kansas-based Replica to learn about travel trends throughout the county.
Mike Becker, SBCAG’s director of planning, and Lauren Bianchi Klemann, its government affairs and public information manager, met with Noozhawk to share the mountain of data and some of the surprising conclusions.
For example, a higher percentage of people than anecdotally suspected, have short commutes to Santa Barbara.
About 66% of people who live in Santa Barbara, work in Santa Barbara. Another 8.8% come from Goleta, 2.5% from Montecito and 2.1% from Carpinteria.
Including unincorporated areas, 83.4% of work trips into Santa Barbara are from the South Coast.
“You would think that there is this big vehicle miles traveled problem with everyone commuting in, but it’s not as big as you think it is,” Becker said.
“No longer are you trying to get people to live closer to where they work, but you are trying to get people to take the bus, ride a bike or carpool.”
And most of the trips are short, according to the data.
About 22% of trips into Santa Barbara are between 2 and 4 miles. Another 18.1% of trips are between 4 and 8 miles.
The percentage of people who drive 2 miles or less to work in Santa Barbara is 15.9%. Nearly 14% travel less than a mile to work in Santa Barbara.
“It’s super-exciting stuff and information we have been wanting for years,” said Dan Gullett, principal planner for the city of Santa Barbara.
“This really informs our conversations about where to put housing, what jobs can go where, and what’s the best way to facilitate that.”
Gullett also said he was surprised by some of the commuter data.
Jessica Grant, supervising transportation planner, said the high percentage — about 60% — of short trips that are 4 miles or less stunned her.
Grant spoke with Noozhawk recently after a work trip to Santa Monica and other Los Angeles area cities to look at bicycle paths and mobility networks, to study what works in other places and what might be worth pursuing in Santa Barbara.
This kind of data can help Santa Barbara make smarter decisions with its roughly $94 million in grant money for ways to encourage people to use transportation other than cars.
“The overall vision is really to have a multimodal network,” Grant said, adding that equal options for car, bike, walking or busing should exist when people walk out their door.
“The data show we are seeing a high demand for alternative transportation.”
The Replica data did show that only 1.5% of people use public transit in Santa Barbara. Bus riding is highest in Goleta, for people going to work and school, at 2%.
The Replica contract allows planners from Santa Barbara County’s eight cities to access the database.
Grant herself has been using the numbers to create her own charts to help fuel Santa Barbara decision-making. She said the travel trends could be paired with the city’s own camera data to get an even more precise sense of commuter patterns.
Becker says the data are not 100% exact in capturing all travel trends, but they are as close to a real-life measure of how people travel than any other model.
“It’s an activity-based model, which is state-of-the-art for current best practices,” he said.
Previously, trips were only measured as “to-and-from,” Becker said.
“You came here, you probably dropped your daughter off at school along the way, then you are going to go to Starbucks before you go downtown, and then you go home, your trip is not home-here, home-there,” Becker said.
“This activity-based model provides a much better representation of how people actually move.”
The cell phone data are combined with credit card data and Caltrans data, such as those strips on the road you drive over that count cars.
That data use information from 2022.
Among the other surprising conclusions:
Total vehicle miles traveled are down everywhere in the county except Lompoc and Guadalupe, which Becker said is likely because of the population that works in the farmfields.
Vehicle miles traveled are down 25% in Solvang and 5.4% in Goleta.
Planners are no longer using traffic congestion as a measure to determine whether environmental review is needed.
Instead, they measure vehicle miles traveled, so there is less of a focus on hotspots such as a busy intersection or portion of the highway and a better sense of overall driving patterns emerges.
“People are driving less than they did in 2019,” Becker noted.
Becker also incorporates U.S. Census data from 2000 to 2020, which show that people in the middle stages of their careers are leaving Santa Barbara County.
The population of individuals between the ages of 30 and 49 has dropped 22%, while the number of people between the ages of 60 and 80 has doubled.
“You have the college-aged population growing, the middle-aged is slightly declining and the older population is growing,” Becker said.
“I think it is going to create some issues in the future.”
Since 2000, Santa Maria has built the most housing, at 8,266 units. Goleta is second, with 1,703 units, followed by Santa Barbara, at 1,597. The unincorporated portion of the county has built 3,854 units.
“Ultimately, it’s to try to draw a picture of who’s here, how’s the population changing in Santa Barbara County, what’s the jobs picture, where are jobs being added, what’s the housing picture,” Becker said.
“When you tie those together you get the three pieces you need to analyze the jobs-housing imbalance.”
The smart phone information also offers a window into who is working remotely.
People with higher incomes tend to have the luxury of working remotely, while lower-income earners have to commute. About 25% of people who earn below $75,000 annually work remotely, whereas 44% of people who earn more than $150,000 work from home.
“If you want to get people to drive less, work from home is probably the best way to do it,” Becker said.
About 15,000 people still commute into Santa Barbara from outside of the city to work every day, but the number who come from Ventura County to work is about 11,000.
Most of those people are not low-wage earners in the service industry, Becker said.
About 55% of individuals make more than $100,000 annually.
“There’s always the assumption that the people coming up from Ventura County are the ones working in the restaurants, but that’s not necessarily true,” Becker said. “It’s more the middle-class workforce.”
Still, he said, it is important to also reduce Ventura County commutes.
Santa Barbara County Second District Supervisor Laura Capps said the data will help her as she approaches decisions related to affordable housing.
“Hundreds of acres of county-owned land are either vacant or barely used and have the potential to be a real solution to the housing crisis we are in,” she said.
“I worked hard to include 320 units across nine county-owned sites in the Housing Element, but there is much more that can be done, including at the county parking lot that takes up two-thirds of a block in downtown Santa Barbara.”
Capps is currently facing pressure from developers to rezone agricultural land to build housing. This new data could affect those decisions.
“Affordable housing is my driving force to make Santa Barbara a place for all of us to live and work, rather than commuting from less expensive areas,” she said.
“The county has the power to do what’s right to meet our community’s pressing needs on all county-owned land.”
Becker said Replica provides the data twice a year, and SBCAG currently is looking to extend the contract for at least another year.
Becker said the “massive amount of really short commutes” is the most surprising part of the data, but all the information will help planners attempt to reduce vehicle miles traveled, even if it’s not in the ways previously assumed.
“It’s getting more and more competitive with limited resources from the state and federal governments to do quality transportation and infrastructure planning projects,” Bianchi Klemann said.
“If we are going to be competing, we better have the data that can allow us to make the case for why we need to make these investments in Santa Barbara County.”
