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The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected transportation systems, including the ability of localities to pay for them. This project explores the effects of the pandemic and the associated economic turbulence on local option sales taxes (LOSTs), an increasingly common revenue source for transportation in California and across the U.S. During times of economic weakness, spending and therefore LOST revenues will lag—the pattern in California counties during the initial months of the pandemic. Fortunately for local transportation budgets, LOST revenues recovered after the initial economic shock of COVID-19, albeit at a lower level than they likely would have otherwise. LOST revenue trends during the pandemic were affected by national and regional economic conditions and government policy as well. This public health crisis illustrates both the pitfalls and resilience of LOSTs during economic downturns and recoveries.

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More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every night in the U.S. With the scale of the crisis often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets — all the more so since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also use transit to reach destinations such as workplaces, shelters, and community service centers. This project investigates the intersections of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness; the scale of homelessness on transit; and how transit agencies are responding to the problem. All told, centering the mobility and wellbeing of unhoused riders fits within transit’s social service role and is important to improving outcomes for them and for all riders.

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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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Public transit ridership has been falling nationally and in California since 2014. The San Francisco Bay Area, with the state’s highest rates of transit use, had until recently resisted those trends, especially compared to Greater Los Angeles. However, in 2017 and 2018 the region lost over five percent (>27 million) of its annual riders, despite a booming economy and service increases. This report examines Bay Area transit ridership to understand the dimensions of changing transit use, its possible causes, and potential solutions. We find that: 1) the steepest ridership losses have come on buses, at off-peak times, on weekends, in non-commute directions, on outlying lines, and on operators that do not serve the region’s core employment clusters; 2) transit trips in the region are increasingly commute-focused, particularly into and out of downtown San Francisco; 3) transit commuters are increasingly non-traditional transit users, such as those with higher incomes and automobile access; 4) the growing job-housing imbalance in the Bay Area is related to rising housing costs and likely depressing transit ridership as more residents live in less transit-friendly parts of the region; and 5) ridehail is substituting for some transit trips, particularly in the off-peak. Arresting falling transit use will likely require action both by transit operators (to address peak capacity constraints; improve off-peak service; ease fare payments; adopt fare structures that attract off-peak riders; and better integrate transit with new mobility options) and public policymakers in other realms (to better meter and manage private vehicle use and to increase the supply and affordability of housing near job centers).

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Wildfires and post-fire debris flows have had severe impacts on California’s transportation system recently, and climate forecasts show that these hazards are likely to become more of a concern in the future. Yet our understanding of the vulnerability of transportation systems to wildfires is in its nascent stages, with focus largely on evacuation logistics and characterizing where risks of fire are increasing and which infrastructure are co-located. Wildfire risk is much more complex as post-fire precipitation events create conditions where roadway stormwater management is failed often leaving remote communities disconnected. There is an opportunity to improve our understanding of the vulnerability of transportation systems and associated adaptation strategies to ensure that services continue to be delivered in the face of growing hazards. This problem is not specific to California as wildfires across the Southwest are becoming more problematic.

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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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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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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.

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From 2014 to 2018, California lost more than 165 million annual boardings, a drop of over 11%. This project examines public transit in California in the 2010s and the factors behind its falling ridership. Transit ridership has been on a longer-term decline in regions like Greater Los Angeles and on buses, while ridership losses in the Bay Area are more recent. While overall transit boardings across the state are down since 2014, worrisome underlying trends date back earlier as patronage failed to keep up with population growth. But reduced transit service is not responsible for ridership losses, as falling transit ridership occurred at the same time as operators instead increased their levels of transit service. What factors help to explain losses in transit ridership? Increased access to automobiles explains much, if not most, of declining transit use. Private vehicle access has increased significantly in California and, outside of the Bay Area, is likely the biggest single cause of falling transit ridership. Additionally, new ride-hail services such as Lyft and Uber allow travelers to purchase automobility one trip at a time and likely serve as a substitute for at least some transit trips. Finally, neighborhoods are changing in ways that do not bode well for public transit. Households are increasingly locating in outlying areas where they experience longer commutes and less transit access to employment. At the same time, a smaller share of high-propensity transit users now live in the state’s most transit-friendly neighborhoods.

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Every regular school day, LAUSD operates over 14,000 hours of service using 1,307 school buses to serve over 38,000 students, who attend more than 300 schools in more than 30 subdistricts, on 1,669 routes over a service area of about 750 square miles. Bus contractors own and operate another 700 school buses to provide service for LAUSD. LAUSD also provides service for midday, athletic events, after-school programs, and on weekends. The buses are subject to traffic conditions — operating both during peak traffic times and during non-peak traffic times — and to changing enrollment patterns. LA’s very large geographic area, as compared to other US cities, makes the problem particularly acute (and also scientifically interesting).The project team seeks to help the Student Transportation Operation of the LAUSD better match its capacity with demand. Specifically, UCLA seeks to answer the following stakeholder question: What is the best way to operate their bus service within regulatory and policy guidelines?

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Local Option Sales Taxes (LOSTs) are a popular form of local transportation finance in California. Researchers partially attribute the success of LOSTs to the inclusion of expenditure plans that outline specific projects and services to be delivered using measure revenue over the 20 or more years the measure will be in place. Expenditure plans are commitments on the part of sponsoring transportation agencies, but issues of accountability might compromise these commitments and we are not aware of any prior research into the tension between commitments to projects and commitments to accountability that are both included in LOSTs.This research will examine how well expenditure plans presented in measures reflect actual project delivery over the life of the sales tax.

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Transit use is on the decline in many American cities. Research has shown that concerns about transit safety may influence travel behavior and transit use, and that women are particularly fearful about victimization while travelling. Studies have also shown that women are also very concerned about one type of crime — sexual harassment — which often goes unreported, and thus remains largely invisible to transit operators.The research team will survey college students in 16 cities in six continents to examine their patterns of mobility and transit, with an emphasis on their feelings of safety on public transit and other transportation modes, experiences of sexual harassment, and other types of crime and victimization on public transport and other transportation modes. The results of the survey will establish the extent to which fear regarding their safety affects college students’ transit ridership, and the research team will examine how survey responses may vary because of the students’ sociodemographic characteristics.

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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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A growing consensus among economists and economic geographers suggests that America’s most constrained housing markets, and in particular the constrained housing markets on California’s coast, impose high costs not just on people in those markets but on the nation as a whole, by inhibiting migration and placing a drag on productivity. Strict zoning regulations prevent people from moving to areas where they would be most productive, imposing costs that are quiet and atomized but that collectively are large. Despite gaining increasing attention in the last ten years, parking requirements remain relatively overlooked in the literature on land use restrictions. Existing attempts to quantify land use restrictiveness do not measure the stringency of minimum parking requirements, even though parking requirements are often the binding constraint on dense development.The research team proposes examining the relationship between minimum parking requirements, urban land markets, and travel behavior, using Silicon Valley as a case study. The team will specifically examine how minimum parking requirements: (1) Shape the locations and characteristics of new development, (2) Distort the location of firms and weaken agglomeration economies, and (3) Make driving less expensive.

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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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In the last ten years transit use in Southern California has fallen significantly. This report investigates that falling transit use. The project examines patterns of transit service and patronage over time and across the region and considers an array of explanations for falling transit use: declining transit service levels, eroding transit service quality, rising fares, falling fuel prices, the growth of Lyft and Uber, the migration of frequent transit users to outlying neighborhoods with less transit service, and rising vehicle ownership. While all of these factors probably play some role, the research concludes that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.