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The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the necessity of childcare as essential infrastructure. Without access to affordable childcare, working outside of the home is difficult or, in many cases, impossible. The need for child care is particularly pressing for mothers who continue to bear disproportionate responsibility for the care of their children. Childcare is in short supply and access to child care varies across neighborhoods by income, race, and ethnicity. Given the critical importance of childcare access to women’s ability to work, the research team will study child care-related travel in California, a topic that has received relatively little study. The researchers are particularly interested in testing whether geographic disparities in access to child care are associated with the distance that parents travel to child care centers.

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A somber statistic in STEM fields is that underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are less likely than those from well-represented backgrounds to self-report high interest in biomedical faculty careers at research-intensive universities. Hypercompetition in neuroscience careers both at the Ph.D. and post-doctoral levels is predicted to result in increased racial and ethnic disparities in this field. African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans complete undergraduate STEM degrees at approximately 2 to 3% nationally, yet there is evidence that this can be greatly increased with quality social support and mentoring in these groups.We present key approaches in this application that are aimed at enhancing the inclusive excellence of our NSIDP and develop long-lasting ties with our HBCU partners. The key approaches to increase the impact on students and faculty at both HBCU partner institutions and UCLA are to: 1) engage in active research and teaching partnerships that accompany students before and beyond the 8-week internship at UCLA; and 2) to incentivize quality mentorship of the interns in our UCLA host labs, increasing the impact on students and faculty at both HBCU partner institutions and UCLA.

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California has increasingly turned to place-based, community-driven programs such as Transformative Climate Communities (TCC), the Community Air Protection Program (CAPP), and Regional Climate Collaboratives (RCC) to address the twin priorities of climate change and environmental justice. Transportation improvements are at the heart of these cross-sectoral programs because of their potential to mitigate air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and inequities in access to transportation. In this synthesis, we ask how place-based climate action efforts are being evaluated, and what insights from the broader policy and plan evaluation research literature might inform evaluation design.

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Mobility wallets are a relatively new approach to addressing financial barriers to travel among transport-disadvantaged communities. Individuals are provided with funds to pay for a range of mobility options, including transit and shared modes, at their discretion. Los Angeles’s Universal Basic Mobility Pilot will include at least 5,000 participants from the social justice community of South LA and monthly stipends that range from $24 to $150 loaded onto the local transit TAP card. The transit agency (LA Metro) has recruited local electric carshare, ride-hail, bikeshare, and scootershare programs to accept the TAP card as payment.

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Community college students spend more on transportation than their counterparts at public and private four-year colleges, partly due to the lack of on-campus or nearby affordable housing. Recent research highlights how transportation challenges are an overlooked but basic need for community college students.

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Most U.S. metropolitan areas developed alongside the automobile. Consequently, access to opportunities in these neighborhoods is predicated on having an automobile, yet many households do not have the resources to purchase one outright, relying on automobile loans to spread out the purchase price. Moreover, COVID-19 altered travel patterns in the U.S. Few studies have focused on automobile ownership—a relationship with potentially long-term consequences for accessibility, household budgets and debt, and policy efforts to meet climate goals. To understand the association between the pandemic and automobile ownership, this project first examines three different automobile loan-related outcome measures: annualized growth rate of new automobile loan balances, average new loan size, and the number of new loans. The annualized growth rate of new automobile loans increased during the pandemic across all neighborhoods by race/ethnicity, increasing most rapidly in Latino/a neighborhoods. Controlling for other factors, loan size increased similarly across neighborhoods by race/ethnicity. The increase in automobile lending in Latino/a neighborhoods, therefore, likely was explained by a significant uptick in the number of new loans. The growth in automobile lending during the pandemic was potentially prompted by pandemic-induced changes in the need for automobiles and facilitated by an expanded social safety net. Second, the project explores the determinants and geography of automobile debt and its consequences in California, testing whether various automobile debt measures disproportionately affect non-white neighborhoods. Controlling for other factors, Black and Latino/a neighborhoods have higher total automobile debt, debt burdens (debt relative to income), and automobile loan delinquency rates. The findings underscore the importance of policies to offset the costs of automobile ownership and access.

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Frontline transit work can be satisfying and secure — but also stressful or unsafe. Many agencies across the state lacked transit operators in the wake of the pandemic, delaying service restoration. Interviews, wage data, and other sources demonstrate that these shortages were due to both compensation issues and longstanding issues of workforce safety, culture, and practices. Wages have stagnated over the past decade, though California operators earn more than their area’s median incomes, trucking employees, and comparable transit jobs in other states. Raises alone are necessary but not sufficient: pay is generally lower than necessary to attract and retain needed employees—and recent increases in pay and hardships in other aspects of the job point to the importance of factors beyond wages alone. Agencies, advocates, and unions will need to rethink and expand transit operations funding, raise wages, and implement a variety of reforms: reducing hiring hurdles, expanding outreach, making scheduling fairer, improving facilities and support offerings, removing enforcement duties from operators, and creating career pathways for advancement.

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California’s freeways have come under increasing scrutiny for their disproportionately adverse impacts on low-income populations and populations of color. This project uses empirical research to not only understand but also quantify and describe in detail the historical impacts of freeways on communities of color in four California cities and areas: Pasadena, Pacoima, Sacramento, and San José. In these neighborhoods, freeways displaced many residents, significantly harmed those that remained, and left communities divided and depleted. The four cases differ in notable ways, but they share a disproportionate impact of freeway construction on communities of color. In Pasadena and Pacoima, decision-makers chose routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than proposed alternatives. Demolition and displacement were the most visible and immediate effects of the freeways, but toxic pollution, noise, economic decline, and stigmatization remained long after. In suburban areas, white, affluent interests often succeeded in pushing freeways to more powerless neighborhoods. Massive roadway construction complemented other destructive governmental actions such as urban renewal and redlining. Freeways and suburbanization were key components in the creation of a spatial mismatch between jobs and housing for people of color, with few transportation options to overcome it. Understanding the history of racism in freeway development can inform restorative justice in these areas.

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Youth in dense, central neighborhoods often walk to school and are likely to be impacted by unsafe streets with higher proportions of pedestrian-automobile crashes. Despite Vision Zero and Safe Routes to School programs, they remain disproportionately represented among traffic fatalities, which are the highest in a decade. For these youth, social danger influences their choice to frequent traffic-heavy streets, as these arterials are perceived safer for walking than the quieter, desolate residential streets. Youth’s urban paths are informed by “hot spots” (where crime and crash data indicate danger) as well as “safe spots” (where data indicate safety from crime and vehicular injury) which, when combined with youth perceptions, impact routes to and from school.

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This project reports on changes and evolving operations in public transit during the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on transit ridership and transit service hours, this project first tracks where, how, and why transit supply and demand has changed. Since reaching an April 2020 nadir both nationally and in California, transit ridership has recovered slowly: as of July 2022, boardings were 61 percent and 56 percent of their respective national and California baselines. In California, service has been restored faster than riders have returned. This project next examines and showcases what established strategies for increasing transit ridership remain relevant in and post-pandemic.

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This project synthesizes three primary data sources—credit data, unemployment claims data, and small business loan and grant data—to explore the financial conditions of those who drive for a living before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in California. Automobile debt was high among groups likely to contain professional drivers. The occupational categories in which many drivers fall had high absolute and relative levels of automobile debt compared to other workers. After the onset of the pandemic, unemployment rose dramatically in the transportation industry and in transportation occupations, peaking at rates higher than the national average. However, state unemployment claims data, among transportation employee claimants only, show less of a spike. Contractor drivers lived in areas with more Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims, a special program for self-employed workers like gig drivers. Finally, contractor drivers received unprecedented but uneven federal small business loans and grants. Drivers in many areas, however, did not receive much or any of these funds, though those areas that did tended to have more residents of color. Assessing the full effect of the pandemic on professional drivers’ debt and finances will require additional and better data, particularly workforce data from gig economy firms that contract with drivers.

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A recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that 85% of Californians are concerned about the presence of homeless people in their community and believe addressing this issue should be a top priority. Few scholars have studied the large and growing numbers of people who live in their vehicles. According to point-in-time count data from the 2019 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, over 40% of the unsheltered homeless population in LA County, some 14,000 people, rely on vehicles (cars, vans, RVs) for shelter. The increase in vehicular homelessness raises challenges for both people who are experiencing homelessness and for cities. Vehicle living can be cost-effective relative to sky-high rents, but residents often lack essential amenities. At the same time, residents complain about the adverse effects of vehicle encampments on their neighborhoods. In response, this project seeks to create a better understanding of vehicular homelessness as a way for both homeless providers and transportation officials alike to address this precarious form of shelter.

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California is growing faster and aging more rapidly than America as a whole. California’s population aged 60 years and over is expected to grow more than three times as fast as the total population. Older adults age in place – increasingly in suburban areas where access to transit and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods is limited. Data from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey show that people over age 65 made 86% of their trips by automobile; 66% as drivers. As they age, however, many older adults limit their driving and ultimately lose the ability to drive altogether, affecting their quality of life in old age. This study explores relationships between aging, travel, mobility and residential relocation using a unique longitudinal database rarely before used in transportation research, the Health and Retirement Survey, augmented by other measures, such as transit accessibility.

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The costs and benefits of the transportation system are distributed unequally, leading to people receiving less access to opportunities. This report sought to understand how this issue plays out within Los Angeles County by analyzing trends in transportation patterns across race/ethnicity, income, gender, age, ability, and geography.

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To understand the nature and magnitude of commonalities and differences among neighborhoods in mobility and access to opportunities, the project will construct and analyze tract-level and transportation-mode-specific accessibility indicators to employment, quality elementary schools, and primary health care.

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Access to in-person medical care is critical for high risk patients, such as those who are pregnant or suffering from certain end-stage diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted medical care access, in part due to transportation system disruptions.

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Ridership at many transit agencies in California is declining. One issue raised in Falling Transit Ridership, but only lightly explored, is the changing spatial location of low-wage work and workers in California, and the implications of these changes for commuting and transit use. Transit commuting is highest in dense urban neighborhoods where residents live reasonably close to employment opportunities. However, low-income households and low-wage employment has suburbanized over time (Kneebone 2009; Kneebone, 2017) making it increasingly difficult for workers to commute by transit. Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program the project will quantify changes in the spatial location of employment and workers from 2002 to 2015 in the five major California metropolitan areas. In particular, the analysis will include (a) the extent to which jobs and workers have decentralized over time by wage group (low, medium, high) (b) the changing location of workers and employment relative to transit-friendly neighborhoods and transit supply. The second part of the analysis examines whether rising rents in some regions of the state are pushing workers to live further from their workplaces over time.

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The population of California is aging as life expectancy increases and birth rates decline. Projections from the U.S. Census Bureau show that by 2030, the number of seniors in California will increase to 10.6 million, almost a quarter of the state population. Closely related, but far less studied, is the aging of the workforce as the population ages and many older people delay retirement either because they enjoy working or depend upon earned income to meet their needs. From a recent low of less than 6 percent of the working population, the share of employed Americans who are older than age 60 has climbed to over 10 percent of all workers and is projected to exceed 13 percent of the employed population by the middle of the next decade. The objective of this study is to determine, using data from the California Household Travel Survey, whether there is a relationship in California between mobility and delayed retirement.

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