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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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One contributing factor to declining transit ridership is sexual harassment, which disproportionately affects women and gender minorities, causing them to feel unsafe while walking to, waiting for, and using public transportation. Transit agencies in the United States are increasingly interested in better understanding and addressing sexual harassment in their systems. But agencies need tools they can easily adopt that can be deployed in on-board surveys or other outreach efforts. This project will work with the SFMTA to create data collection tools they can deploy and create a toolkit for them and other transit agencies wanting to address harassment on their systems and improve gender equity.

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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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Evaluation of particulate matter (PM) due to transportation systems is of interest to public health professionals and policymakers in California and Southern California, specifically. Poor air quality can lead to short-term eye, throat, and nose irritations, as well as long-term cancers. While PM can be reduced through new regulations including bus-only lane projects, carpooling, and the adoption of clean air vehicles, there is a need for highly accurate, yet cost-effective sensors which can assess the efficacy of these improvements. UCLA will develop a field-portable computational imaging and deep-learning enhanced aerosol analysis device, termed c-Air, to characterize PM due to transportation systems. In addition to particle counting and sizing, UCLA will further enhance its system above the current gold standard by classifying particles based upon physical features and volatility using computational imaging and deep learning.

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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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New transportation networks facilitate mobility and may also spur economic development. Over the past decades, a new transportation technology — high-speed rail (HSR) — has brought a profound impact on urban-regional accessibility and intercity travel across Europe and East and South-East Asia. But the economic and spatial impacts of HSR have been varied and are largely contingent on a variety of factors, as well as local planning and policy. As California is in the process of building its own HSR network, it is important to review the experience of established HSR networks abroad and understand the possible economic effects that HSR can bring to regional and local economies, and their prerequisites. While the impacts of California’s plan on the direct creation of jobs in local markets (e.g., construction sector) and on the travel sector (e.g., forecasts for HSR travel demand) have been investigated, the possible indirect impacts (e.g., on land values, tourism, firm location, and local and regional development) have not gathered enough attention. This research proposal attempts to fill this gap.

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While the COVID-19 pandemic caused ridership on public transit and shared mobility to drop precipitously and put severe strain on their finances and operations, all was far from well prior to the pandemic. Transit ridership had dropped across the state in the half-decade prior to the pandemic, despite increasing public investment, and the relationship between shared mobility and regulators was oft-disputed. Thus, looking during and beyond the recovery from the pandemic, this project seeks to answer the question: what is and should be the future role and structure of public transit and public shared mobility in California?

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While many aspects of life have largely returned to pre-pandemic patterns as the COVID-19 pandemic has become endemic, several aspects of travel remain unsettled and uncertain. In particular, the forced experiment of working from home for at least half of the labor force in 2020 is evolving into a new normal where perhaps a third of all workers split their work hours between office and home. This has had especially significant effects on public transit, which has traditionally carried a disproportionate share of commute trips, but these new work patterns have affected the timing and character of many other trips as well. These evolving patterns of travel may call into question many current transportation policies and plans that are premised on (now) outdated ideas about travel.

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This project examines the consequences of freeway construction on neighborhoods of color across California: South Colton, West Fresno, and City Heights in San Diego. The construction of freeways was a contributing mechanism to the perpetuation of racial inequality, weakening social institutions, disrupting local economies, and physically dividing neighborhoods. In South Colton, a freeway was ultimately not built through its community of color, though largely for reasons of construction costs. City Heights, initially a predominantly non-Hispanic white neighborhood, underwent a demographic transformation driven by white flight during a decades-long pause in freeway construction. West Fresno did face consequences from freeway development but was also unique in its diversity of residents pre-freeway, including people of color and non-Hispanic white immigrant communities. Freeway development contributed to transforming West Fresno into an overwhelming community of color. Across these cases, freeways fragmented communities, displaced residents, and reinforced pre-existing racial divides. These racialized impacts stemmed from systemic socioeconomic marginalization and exclusion of people of color in the planning process.

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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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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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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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This research project aimed to develop a guide of suggested practices for responding to, managing, and deterring encampments on the right-of-way. The suggested practices will address the challenges for state departments of transportation in the design, construction, and maintenance of pavements and consider social equity, environmental impacts, safety, legal issues, coordination with other agencies, and other relevant issues. The project’s interim report documents the research approach; present findings and analysis from the literature review, industry scan, and two surveys; and identifying existing and new practices.

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has shocked many economic and social systems. One of the most profoundly affected has been the public transit systems that serve cities large and small. Ridership initially plummeted, service has been cut, and in some cases slashed, and public health concerns are many, and finances are increasingly tight on public transit systems around the globe, in the U.S., and here in California. To understand how public transit is evolving in the pandemic, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies researchers have looked into what transit service is changing, how it is changing, why it is changing, and for whom it is changing. The project has also examined how well the changes made affect the spread of COVID-19, and how transit can continue to safely serve the mobility needs of essential workers during the pandemic.

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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.