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identify general development aspirations for areas within their jurisdictions. These places <br />were mostly the Priority Development Areas (PDAs) already identified through the <br />FOCUS program. They also included additional Growth Opportunity Areas, some similar <br />to PDAs and others with different sustainability criteria. <br />Based on local visions, plans and growth estimates, regional agencies distributed housing <br />growth across the region, focusing on PDAs and Growth Opportunity Areas. ABAG in <br />some cases supplemented the local forecast with additional units based on the typical <br />characteristics of the relevant locally - selected place type. ABAG also distributed additional <br />units to take advantage of significant existing and planned transit investment, and it <br />assigned some units to locally identified areas that present regionally significant <br />development opportunities for greater density. <br />The Initial Vision Scenario accommodates 97 percent of new households within the <br />existing urban footprint. Only 3 percent of the forecasted new homes require "greenfield <br />development" (building on previously undeveloped lands). Priority Development Areas <br />and Growth Opportunity Areas contain about 70 percent of the total growth (743,000 <br />households). <br />Among counties, three take the lion's share of growth: Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra <br />Costa absorb a little over two- thirds of the total. These same counties also are anticipated <br />to take the majority of the region's job growth (64 percent). (See Tables 13 -- 22.) The <br />region's three major cities do a lot of the heavy lifting. Thirty -two percent of the forecast <br />and proposed housing growth occurs in San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland. Seventeen <br />percent goes to medium -sized cities like Fremont, Santa Rosa, Berkeley, Hayward, <br />Concord, and Santa Clara. <br />The analysis embodied in the Initial Vision Scenario is founded on the location of housing. <br />Employment forecasting and distribution in this Scenario is not directly related to land use <br />policy. Employment location can have a strong influence on travel demand, vehicle miles <br />traveled, and vehicle greenhouse -gas emissions. In light of these factors and considering <br />economic competitiveness, transit sustainability, and a balanced relationship between <br />employment and housing, regional agencies will be embarking, with local partners, on <br />further analysis regarding appropriate employment locations in relation to future housing <br />growth and the transportation network. This will inform the development of the detailed <br />scenarios. <br />The Initial Vision Scenario reflects the transportation investments from MTC's current <br />Regional Transportation (known as the Transportation 2035 Plan). To support the <br />increased housing growth, it also includes some tentatively proposed improvements to the <br />region's transit network. These include increased frequencies on over 70 local bus and <br />several express bus routes, improved rail headways on BART, eBART, Caltrain, Muni <br />Metro, VTA light -rail, and Altamont Commuter Express, and more dedicated bus lanes in <br />San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, all resulting in overall growth in transit capacity. <br />However, the Bay Area's transit system is financially unsustainable with operators unable <br />to afford to run the current service levels into the future, much less expanded headways <br />contemplated under the Initial Vision Scenario. MTC's Transit Sustainability Project will <br />propose a more sustainable transit system for inclusion in the detailed scenarios to be <br />tested. <br />2 <br />