As communities across California look for ways to reduce driving while protecting open space, land conservation is increasingly part of the conversation. Our latest white paper explores this connection using six real-world California case studies.

This work builds on our previous collaboration with The Nature Conservancy that explored how vehicle miles traveled (VMT) mitigation programs can help protect natural resources and wildlife in Western Riverside County.

This latest phase takes the analysis statewide, looking at how real-world factors like development pressure, nearby housing capacity, and the risk of “leapfrog” development affect the potential for VMT mitigation in different contexts.

The goal was to understand whether protecting and conserving land that might otherwise be developed can reduce driving, measure how much it reduces driving, and identify when this approach can count as a defensible mitigation strategy under CEQA and Senate Bill 743.

What we found was nuanced. Land conservation can help avoid or reduce VMT over time, but not always. There must be a realistic chance that the conserved land would have been developed, and that the development that would have occurred there could instead be built in a lower-VMT area. There’s still a lot to learn about how statewide policies promoting infill development will play out, and what that means for using land conservation as a VMT mitigation strategy.

Read the full white paper to learn where this approach works best, what questions to ask early, and how today’s land use decisions can shape travel patterns for years to come.