Projects

Principal Investigator:

Adonia Lugo

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The state of California and regional transportation planning agencies have committed to shifting mode share away from driving as a central strategy for reducing carbon emissions; despite these aims, cities have struggled to attract more users to transit, walking, and biking systems, and today’s users face exposure to traffic violence and other safety concerns. Would a worker-centered street safety model attract more investment in active transportation projects?

Principal Investigator:

Evelyn Blumenberg

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This study examines how transportation subsidies affect travel behavior among low-income individuals across different neighborhood types in Los Angeles County. Building on promising results from Phase I of LA Metro's Mobility Wallet, this project analyzes how $1,800 in transportation subsidies distributed to 2,000 participants influences travel outcomes between urban and suburban residents.

Principal Investigator:

Hao Ding

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Communities in wildland urban interface areas face elevated risk of wildfire exposure. The existing fire evacuation literature has examined whether, when, and how to evacuate as well as behavioral variability in travel across demographic groups. These studies often rely on data from convenience samples that are not representative of all evacuees, and few studies collected qualitative data related to evacuation travel. Further, there is a gap in understanding evacuation travel from large urban wildfires like the Los Angeles January 2025 wildfires. This project seeks to address these issues.

Principal Investigator:

Brian D. Taylor

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Since the 2000s, the rise of remote working, online shopping, gaming and streaming has led to Americans spending more time at home and getting out and traveling less. These enduring changes imply a long-term decline in personal travel and simultaneously an increase in commercial travel from rising demand for delivery services, suggesting that transportation policy and management may need to shift to meet the changing travel demands and needs of people and goods, while promoting environmental and equity goals.

Principal Investigator:

Madeline Brozen

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Most existing studies of wildfire evacuations focus on vehicle-owning households and assume that evacuees will use their personal vehicles while evacuating. However, no studies have collected near real-time data on transit riders’ evacuation behavior or their adaptation behavior immediately post-evacuation.

Principal Investigator:

Yeonsu Song

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The goal of this project is to review and synthesize existing research on the challenges faced by older adults with disabilities during and after wildfire evacuations. This includes an examination of transportation-related issues, which are often a significant barrier to safe and timely evacuations. Our aim is to identify gaps in the current literature, highlight areas of future research, and explore policy implications that can improve preparedness, evacuation, and resilience for this vulnerable population.

Principal Investigator:

Evelyn Blumenberg

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In the United States, research reveals that women tend to travel shorter distances and durations compared to men. They also often have more complex travel patterns as they balance work and household responsibilities. This distinct travel behavior creates mobility challenges that can limit women's access to resources and opportunities. Recently, several California transportation agencies have started efforts to gain a better understanding of women's travel needs.

Principal Investigator:

Brian D. Taylor

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Principal Investigator:

Madeline Brozen

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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.

Principal Investigator:

Adam Millard-Ball

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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.

Principal Investigator:

Evelyn Blumenberg

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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.

Principal Investigator:

Evelyn Blumenberg

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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.

Principal Investigator:

Paul M. Ong

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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.

Principal Investigator:

Anne Brown

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Principal Investigator:

Evelyn Blumenberg

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This study examined the equity implications of supercommuting in California, with a focus on the Los Angeles region (comprised of Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura counties). We analyzed equity in terms of the housing and transportation expenditure burdens borne by supercommuters.

Principal Investigator:

Tierra Bills

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While much attention in the literature has focused on wildfire evacuation disparities tied to transportation and communications infrastructure and policy needs, limited focus has been on the transportation- and infrastructure-related needs to support recovery and resilience from wildfire events, and for vulnerable communities.

Principal Investigator:

Paul M. Ong

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This study documents the historical and current patterns of racial/ethnic residential segregation in Pasadena, examining the role of freeways and other mechanisms in shaping these outcomes. Pasadena and the wider Los Angeles County have become more racially diverse over time. Despite these broader changes, neighborhoods along the built and unbuilt freeway corridor have grown increasingly segregated and economically polarized. From 1960 to 1970, tracts affected by freeway construction lost almost 1,800 units of housing (-28%), while the city overall and the South tract, not directly impacted by freeway construction, experienced steady growth. Home values, rents, and income generally fell north of SR-710 but rose around it and south of it. Pasadena mirrored national trends in housing discrimination, including redlining, racially restrictive covenants, school integration resistance, and anti-integration ballot measures. In the face of these barriers, residents of color successfully organized protests and pursued legal remedies. Urban renewal projects, particularly around the SR-710 stub, disproportionately displaced communities of color under the guise of eliminating urban blight. Freeway development in Pasadena left a lasting legacy of environmental and social inequality.

Principal Investigator:

Jacob L. Wasserman

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A growing number of U.S. transit agencies are adding transit ambassadors to their systems to improve the customer service and safety experience for passengers. These personnel can play a variety of different roles, including providing wayfinding, system navigation, fare payment support, and other passenger support roles that enhance the customer experience. This research examines the Los Angeles Metro’s transit ambassador program. Ambassadors provide key customer service functions that are not filled elsewhere. Ambassadors spend most of their time with vital, basic tasks of orienting and aiding riders; they also assist with the first level of homelessness response, with crisis de-escalation, and by administering Narcan to prevent overdoses. Broadly, they provide more eyes on the system and offer a highly visible presence to riders. Training during the pilot period was customer-service oriented but lacked thorough instruction in conflict resolution techniques. The contractor model, while quick to implement and iterate, created some employment drawbacks during the pilot phase, such as paying below living wages, lack of on-the-job resources, and reports of strenuous working conditions. System satisfaction, ratings, and safety perceptions increased over the period ambassadors were deployed, but data were lacking to draw firm causal conclusions. The program to date demonstrates progress towards meeting the intention to advance a community safety approach to meeting riders’ needs and appears to be making a positive contribution to the system.

Principal Investigator:

Gregory Pierce

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California’s goal of transitioning all vehicles sold in the state to zero-emission models by 2035 is pivotal to address climate change and advance environmental justice. However, achieving this transition equitably requires targeted efforts to address the financial and social barriers that low-income and disadvantaged communities face.

Principal Investigator:

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

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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.