ITS awards capstones tackling safety, health care access

So-called “road diets” convert urban streets with two lanes of through-traffic in each direction into streets with center left-turn lanes, one lane of through-traffic and, often, a bicycle lane as well. Intuition suggests that losing two through-traffic lanes would increase congestion. But because cars don’t get stuck behind left-turning vehicles, traffic tends to flow more smoothly, and crashes, injuries, and deaths are reduced — a lot.

While road diets have grown increasingly popular around the country, most guidance still holds that they only work on roads with moderate or low levels of traffic. For her capstone project, Venegas studied the safety and travel time impacts of road diets on high-traffic roads by comparing collisions and speeds on corridors with road diets to similar street segments without them.

Venegas found that corridors with road diets had 44% fewer collisions. Furthermore, collisions that resulted in fatal and severe injuries were 200% and 27% lower, respectively. She also found that the safety pay-offs far outweighed the impacts on speed. While observed travel times were indeed longer on road diet corridors, the difference averaged to just 11 seconds per mile.

UCLA ITS director and professor Brian Taylor, who served as Venegas’s faculty advisor, said her findings were impressive.

“She has shaken conventional wisdom about road diets, and in doing so has created many more opportunities to reduce crashes, injuries, and deaths on city streets,” Taylor said.

Delaying or forgoing health care can lead to serious consequences. Each year, millions of people nationwide miss their medical appointments due to inadequate transportation options. For her project, Rios Gutierrez examined the transportation challenges faced by patients of the Saban Community Clinic, which provides health care to predominantly uninsured and underinsured Latino patients at its various Los Angeles sites. Her research included spatial analysis of patient residential locations, patient surveys, and an evaluation of the clinic’s ride-hailing program meant to mitigate some of the transportation barriers.

Rios Gutierrez found that patients who use public transportation, ride-hail, or are driven by someone else are more likely to experience transportation challenges. Unreliable service and lack of money to pay for public transportation, ride-hail, car maintenance, or gas contributed to missed or late appointments.

She also found that while most patients are centrally located close to one of the clinic’s sites, some patients travel upwads of 20 miles for care. The clinic’s Lyft program has become more popular and more expensive in recent months.

Madeline Brozen, deputy director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies who served as Rios Gutierrez’s advisor, said her capstone project stands apart because of the depth of data collection and analysis and how it frames the consequences of the lack of transportation in people’s lives.

“This work resulted in not only useful information and recommendations about who needs assistance but also an understanding of the promises and perils of relying on services like Lyft/Uber to improve transportation access,” Brozen said.