Regional commuting patterns drive most congestion in Temecula, WRCOG deputy director tells council

Chris Gray, deputy executive director of the West Riverside Council of Governments, told the Temecula City Council that most local congestion is driven by nonwork trips and by people traveling short distances within the region.

Gray opened his Aug. council presentation by describing the data sources and intent: “we continually ask the question of, can we fix congestion by bringing a bunch of businesses or certain businesses to Riverside County and to places like Temecula?” Gray said the analysis uses Census LEHD (Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics) and private mobility datasets and emphasized that the vendors buy and resell location data: “The truth is this, we're buying information from vendors who've already got your data from someone.”

Gray said about 55,000 people work in Temecula and roughly 10,000 of them live in the city, leaving about 45,000 daily inbound workers. He noted that only about 10% of trips that start in the WRCOG region leave it and that “for Temecula, almost 60% of the trips start and end [within the city],” meaning many trips are short, local trips for shopping, school, deliveries and other purposes rather than the classic home-to-work commute.

Why it matters: Gray said those trip patterns change which tools reduce congestion. “We are so hyper focused on the work trip, we forget that many more of these trips are traveling not for work, and they require different strategies,” he said. He argued that adding jobs to a city can increase congestion in both directions — inbound and outbound — and gave a hypothetical example showing a multimillion-dollar business subsidy could add only a small number of local workers relative to existing job flows.

Gray recommended continued focus on fixing near-term, localized bottlenecks and maintaining quality-of-life amenities that attract residents and businesses. He praised recent local improvements, including work on French Valley Parkway: “you got rid of a pain point. And that's what we, on the transportation side, need to be doing.”

Council members asked for public-facing materials and follow-up. Councilmember Ron asked staff to work with WRCOG to make a short explanatory video; Gray agreed to share the underlying data and the slide deck. Other council members echoed that Temecula’s local economic-development and workforce efforts are important to keep the city attractive to residents and employers.

Ending: Gray closed by urging realistic policy expectations: state-level strategies that assume dense rail-oriented commuting do not match the travel patterns he reported for much of Riverside County and the WRCOG region. He said cities can create conditions that help people live and work locally but that individual household decisions about where to live and work are ultimately not controlled by a city government.