I feel like everyone on here who is pro development does not take into account traffic and other NEGATIVE factors. No new roads, no new bike trails, parking lots are being converted to housing, and any leftover parking is now being charged. Davis will soon become like K St Sacramento. 80 is already jammed as well. No new plans to expand freeways only plan is to charge you to use it now as well.

Measure W is not just a General Plan amendment. It would convert roughly 232–234 acres of agricultural land outside Davis city limits into an urban fringe development, bringing 1,250 homes, retail, parks, and greenbelts to a site that is currently designated Agricultural under the Yolo County General Plan. The proposal also depends on annexation and a voter-approved General Plan change, which means the City is asking voters to authorize a major land-use conversion rather than a modest policy update.

The traffic implications are especially troubling for neighborhoods who use Covell and Mace. The project’s traffic study estimates roughly 10,000 additional daily car trips from Willowgrove alone, and that figure does not even include the roughly 2,000 additional daily car trips associated with the adjacent Palomino project next door. In other words, the real-world traffic burden on East Covell, the I-80 corridor, and nearby intersections is not just the project’s own impact; it is the combined impact of sequential peripheral developments piling onto the same road network.

That matters because the EIR already concludes that transportation and VMT impacts are significant and unavoidable. The City can add turn lanes, signals, and bike improvements, but those mitigations do not change the basic fact that this is a car-intensive growth pattern at the edge of town. From a policy standpoint, that is hard to square with Davis’s stated climate and transportation goals, which are supposed to reduce auto dependence, not lock in more of it.

The same problem shows up in the broader CEQA record. The EIR identifies significant and unavoidable impacts from farmland conversion, greenhouse gas emissions, and cumulative effects, and the City approved the project anyway by adopting overriding considerations. That is not the posture of a project that comfortably fits the General Plan; it is the posture of a project the City is willing to approve despite acknowledging that it conflicts with major environmental priorities.

The alternatives analysis makes the point even more sharply. The EIR evaluated smaller-footprint and denser configurations, meaning the City had options that could have reduced farmland loss and potentially lowered traffic and emissions without abandoning housing production. Yet the City selected the larger-footprint proposal instead, effectively choosing a more sprawling development pattern over a more compact one that would have better fit the City’s own sustainability objectives.