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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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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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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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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 capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This capstone project was completed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Urban & Regional Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

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This research project examines the impact of transportation on educational access, and how improving transportation can help to increase the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic diversity of private secondary schools in Los Angeles. The Geffen Academy is a private middle and high school located in Westwood, on the Westside of Los Angeles. I use student data from the Geffen Academy to assess the demographic profile of enrolled students, and compare the spatial distribution of students to existing transportation infrastructure. I conduct a travel survey of students to understand travel behavior to school. Finally, I research peer schools to gain insights on how other schools approach transportation as it relates to student body diversity. I find that a majority of enrolled students live within a few miles of the Geffen Academy, an area that is predominately white and higher-income. To increase access to the Geffen Academy, the school should focus on developing a carpool program to reduce the travel costs for families who live further away from the school’s campus.

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As the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) embarks on a one-year dockless mobility pilot program, both LADOT staff and the residents they serve have raised concerns over equity and access. Dockless mobility refers to dockless or free-floating bicycles, electric bicycles, and electric scooters available for short-term rental that have begun to proliferate in cities across the country. LADOT staff have permitted eight companies with an accumulated 36,000 vehicles. Because the distribution of scooters across Los Angeles neighborhoods is far from even, LADOT staff are currently using CalEnviroScreen 3.0 to identify disadvantaged communities where regulations incentivize operators to deploy their scooters. However, CalEnviroScreen 3.0 is a metric developed to identify communities likely affected by environmental injustices and as such prioritizes environmental exposure factors over those that may affect transportation access.

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The Jordan Downs housing development is a public housing complex in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. In accordance with the Jordan Downs Relocation Plan undertaken by the City of Los Angeles Housing Authority, the housing complex is currently being re-designed and relocated to an adjacent property. This relocation presents a rare opportunity for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to address transportation equity concerns in the design of surrounding roads and sidewalks. The purpose of this project was to answer the following two research questions: 1) What built environment factors influence perceptions of mode choice for residents of Jordan Downs and the surrounding Watts community?; and 2) How can LADOT best implement transportation investments to best address these perceptions?

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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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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 2016, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) introduced the Universal College Student Transit Pass (U-Pass), its reduced transit fare pass program for college and university students, with the expressed goal of increasing student transit ridership. An increase in college student transit ridership has great potential in Los Angeles County, where public transit ridership is declining, traffic congestion is worsening, and over one million students are enrolled in postsecondary education at public institutions. Researchers have found that reduced transit fare pass programs for university students are successful in increasing student transit use, generally with modest operational costs imposed on transit agencies. Is this true for U-Pass? A relatively young program, U-Pass raises questions for Metro staff about added costs and service demand on Metro buses and trains in exchange for increased ridership and student savings. Using ridership and survey data from the first two years of U-Pass, this research explores the relationships between U-Pass and student transit ridership, service demand and operating costs, and fare revenue.