Projects

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The project aims to present an in-depth understanding of the public EV charging infrastructure in the present and future transportation electrification for public agencies, such as SCAG. One contribution is to provide an integrated eTranSym tool, which can simulate the travel and charging behaviors of every EV user, assess disparities in charging infrastructure distribution among communities, and predict the future demand for public charging facilities. The eTranSym tool helps prioritize underserved communities and assists the spatial-varying investment of the public charging infrastructure.

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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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Personal safety concerns continue to be one of the most critical issues among transit riders and women and gender minorities in particular. These safety concerns stem from the experience of sexual harassment that people who identify as women face frequently. While harassment can be a common occurrence, the vast majority of these experiences go unreported to transit agencies, leaving agencies without information about the magnitude of this problem on their system. This project details work with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) in their efforts to understand and address this problem. The SFMTA, working with two UCLA graduate students, designed a survey that drew from previous survey efforts and was tailored to address their interests and needs. This project documents the process of developing and deploying the questionnaire, in an effort to help other agencies take the first steps to better understanding rider safety and harassment.

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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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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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The United States’ transportation workforce is currently at a skills deficit in key areas. New and innovative transportation technologies and approaches threaten to exacerbate this situation. Yet, transportation workers need more than skills to implement new technologies: they need the skills to critically determine which technologies are likely to support a thriving nation and under what conditions. Additionally, transportation workers need the skills to support non-technology-focused solutions to the nation’s transportation challenges, including cultural, political, and social change.

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This project for the California 100 initiative examines transportation in California: where we are today, how we got here, and where we might be headed. We begin with facts on travel and transportation systems in California today. We next explore the decades of public and private land development and transportation systems that have shaped the current state of play: today’s transportation problems stem, in significant part, from yesterday’s land use decisions. We then consider factors that have either recently come to the fore or are likely to emerge in the near future. We review possible context-specific reforms to reshape transportation in the state, in order to better manage vehicle travel and reduce chronic congestion, shift patterns of development to make them less car-dependent, and increase access for all. Finally, we summarize the findings from a diverse panel of transportation experts convened to explore the possibilities, pitfalls, and implications of four possible future transportation and land use scenarios for California.

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This project uses mixed methods to examine the systemic causes and consequences of the construction of Stockton, California’s Crosstown Freeway and of urban redevelopment for Asian Americans communities. In Stockton, state and local government implemented connected freeway and urban renewal programs. Xenophobia and racism placed Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila in their path. The choice of freeway route was racially biased. The neighborhood surrounding an unchosen route was predominantly white, whereas that of the chosen route was predominantly home to people of color. Freeway construction during the 1960s and 1970s directly displaced hundreds of people and housing units downtown—mainly people of color, particularly Asians. The communities most harmed were the Asian American enclaves, where the housing stock declined by about three quarters between 1960 and 1970. The losses were not only physical, as the freeway and redevelopment eviscerated once vibrant ethnic commercial hubs. Because of long-standing economic and political marginalization, Asian Americans were relatively powerless to prevent the destruction; nonetheless, they fought to build affordable housing for their people, protect and in some cases relocate cultural institutions, and support surviving ethnic businesses. In the long run, Stockton failed to revitalize its downtown, while destroying its cultural diversity.

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In recent decades, homelessness has become an increasingly major challenge in the U.S. Of the half million unhoused people in the U.S., many seek shelter in settings under the auspices of state departments of transportation (DOTs), such as freeways, underpasses, and rest areas. This project synthesizes existing literature and findings from interviews with staff from state DOTs, service providers, and organizations responding to homelessness. Homelessness represents a recognized and common challenge for DOTs, but the numbers and location of unhoused individuals in state transportation settings vary and fluctuate. As DOTs face jurisdictional, financial, and legal hurdles in responding, DOT staff employ both “push” and “pull” strategies, the most common of which is encampment removals. However, the effectiveness of such removals is limited. Other strategies include “defensive design” and, more proactively, establishing or partnering with low-barrier shelters, providing shelters and sanitation on DOT land, and coordinating rehousing and outreach efforts. The findings suggest that DOTs should acquire better data on homelessness on their lands, create a homelessness coordinating office, establish formal partnerships with nonprofits/service providers, and evaluate the necessity of encampment removals, through the development and utilization of prioritization criteria.

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This project reports on the recent past, present, and immediate future of public transit finance in California and Southern California in light of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the financial situation of transit operators in the state and the region appeared dire, with plummeting ridership and fares and rising subsidies and operating costs. However, the three enormous federal pandemic relief bills brought billions of dollars to California transit agencies and helped them weather the fiscal storm, until many of the state and local tax revenue sources on which the state’s transit agencies rely bounced back and more quickly than most forecasters initially predicted. Yet in 2023, many of the state’s transit systems are struggling operationally and financially. Ridership began eroding in the half-decade leading up to 2020. While the federal pandemic relief bills provided a critical lifeline to keep struggling transit systems afloat early on, these funds are running out. Meanwhile, operating costs have risen, ridership and fare revenues have only partially returned, and some transit systems face “fiscal cliffs,” where they will need substantial new infusions of funding, substantial cuts in costs and service, or some combination of the two. Against this backdrop, this project examines the current state of California transit finance: why ridership and fare revenues are down and their prospects for recovery; what lessons the successful federal relief bills provide; why commuter-oriented systems are struggling financially much more than those that primarily service transit-reliant riders; and what the financial managers at transit systems have done to cope with this turbulent time and how they see their future financial prospects.

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The racist legacy of freeways has come into stark focus in the past year. This research focuses on one specific impact of freeways: neighborhood severance. Freeways disrupt the neighborhood street grid, creating particular hardships for pedestrians who must take circuitous routes to access transit and to walk to stores, schools, and other destinations. The impacts of disconnected streets on walking and public health are well documented (e.g. Handy 2003; Marshall et al. 2014; Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball 2019). But the environmental justice dimension of connectivity has remained unexplored, as has the link between most academic studies of street connectivity and local planning efforts. The research team will test the hypothesis that, while freeways disrupt street networks everywhere, the severance effects are greatest in BIPOC communities. This injustice might arise if White residents have more political voice to advocate for a denser mesh of local streets that cross the freeway, or to cancel a freeway proposal altogether.

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Growing public interest in fare-free transit demands an assessment of fare-free and/or reduced transit fare programs, particularly how these programs may benefit disadvantaged communities, both urban and rural. Fare policy equity entials decisions about the similarities and differences in treatment afforded to various constituent groups. It also involves decisions about the extent to which travelers are expected to pay for the costs of serving their travel demand. This is of particular concern with regard to low-income, largely non-White, travelers, who are both disproportionately likely to use transit and to be burdened by the monetary costs of transit use. Given the foregoing, there is rising popular and scholarly interest in making public transit systems “fare-free.” Accordingly, in this research we will carefully review and synthesize the current states of both the practice of and research literature on fare-free transit. We will focus our review on the various dimensions of equity raised by charging for transit fares, and how they have/are likely to play out with conversion to fare-free transit service.

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By the fall of 2020, most transit systems had recovered to about half of their pre-pandemic ridership, but transit’s recovery largely stalled there, even as rates of driving, walking, and biking have mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Research has shown that the riders who left transit in the pandemic tended to be higher income, better educated, more likely white or Asian, and with access to private motor vehicles. Spatial patterns of ridership have shifted dramatically as well, with downtowns and other major job centers losing the most riders, and low-income neighborhoods retaining the most riders. In net, the level, timing, and direction of transit travel have changed dramatically.

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Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, about five percent of the U.S. labor force worked primarily from home. Between February and April of 2020, the share of the labor force working from home skyrocketed to well over 50 percent in response to public health orders to contain the pandemic. While no one expects the share of those working from home to stay at such high levels as the pandemic recedes, there is considerable debate among experts on just how many workers will return full-time to employment sites. This research will review the well-established and substantial pre-pandemic literature on working from home and travel as well as the nascent but rapidly growing literature on working from home and travel in the COVID-19 pandemic to offer insights on the future of home/work location choices, commuting, and transportation mode usage, likely through the presentation of plausible future location/travel scenarios and their policy implications.

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Over 3,500 people have died on California’s streets and highways each year since 2016, despite commitments at the state, regional, and local levels to reduce this toll. A growing number of safety experts have pointed to high speed limits as a serious obstacle to increased traffic safety. The basic rule for setting motor vehicle speed limits in California, and across the U.S. is the “85th Percentile Rule.” This rule is deeply ingrained, both practically and legally in transportation engineering practice, but is now being scrutinized by those committed to improving traffic safety. This research synthesis will review the history and evolution of the 85th percentile rule in traffic engineering practice, and critically analyze and summarize research to date on its effects.

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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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For decades evaluation of the benefits and costs of new- or re- development in urban areas has centered on the effects of development on nearby traffic flows. Historically, and in most states outside of California, the level-of-service (LOS) scale has been used to approve or disapprove commercial developments. The logic of such an evaluation model is that smooth traffic flows are a primary goal of urban areas, which has the effect of discouraging the sorts of densely developed places that are more easily accessed by foot, bike, shared mobility, and public transit. To overcome the traffic flow focus of traffic impact analyses, the California legislature passed SB 743 in 2013, which mandated a change in the way that transportation impacts are analyzed under CEQA. New CEQA Guidelines were created to replace LOS with a new focus on how proposed developments affect vehicle miles of travel (VMT). This translational project will build on prior research, as well as the burgeoning literature on operationalizing access into transportation planning and engineering to develop and test some new analytical tools to evaluate the access impacts of developments.

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This is the second study of voter-approved transportation sales taxes in Los Angeles County performed by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies with support from the Haynes Foundation. The earlier study examined the history of the four half cent sales taxes enacted by voters in Los Angeles County between 1980 and 2016. The current study looked in depth at four issues raised but not addressed in the first one. We report on the extent to which the “local return” provisions of the four measures fund transportation programs and projects in the cities and unincorporated areas of the county. We also explored tradeoffs between accountability to the voters through audits and taxpayer advisory committees in comparison with the county’s flexibility to change program elements through amendments when conditions change. Accountability to the voters was enhanced in the later sales tax measures but amendment procedures have been used to respond to changing needs in the county. We examined lawsuits brought against Metro regarding implementation of the sales taxes and found that there have been rather few. The COVID-19 pandemic struck while the study was underway and in response the report also explores the impacts of the pandemic on transportation sales tax revenues and program expenditures. The transportation sales taxes through the end of year 2020 have been the most important and resilient LA Metro funding sources during the pandemic. Sales tax revenue declined but far less than did federal and state sources of finance and revenues from fares paid by passengers.

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In California, driving is cheap and housing is expensive, and both these facts impede the state’s progress toward sustainability, safety and affordability. Efforts to solve these problems, however, often operate on parallel tracks: bold plans to increase housing production say little about congestion, and plans to address congestion rarely discuss the housing crisis. While these omissions are often understandable, they create a situation where policy proposals to solve one problem often flounder on concerns about the other one. Proposals to allow more development, even near transit, encounter resistance from neighbors concerned that development will bring congestion. Similarly, proposals to price roads encounter resistance based on the concern that California is already extremely expensive, and people have to live far from where they work because of the housing crisis. Somehow this policy gridlock must be resolved, if California will meet its stated goals of reducing VMT, reducing emissions, and building millions of units of housing.