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Buses get stuck in traffic. Allowing priority at stoplights is one possible solution to speed them along. Transit signal priority in the City of Los Angeles faces a host of constraints. These are both technology and policy based, with the City Department of Transportation relying on transponder technology that must be keyed to individual buses and hesitant to introduce additional delays for private vehicles. LA Metro would like to pilot a program to loosen the schedule- and traffic signal cycle-based restrictions put in place by LADOT. The pilot, scheduled to occur along the A (Blue), E (Expo), G (Orange) light rail and BRT lines and 720 Wilshire and 754 Vermont bus lines, could speed many more riders along some of the busiest transit corridors in Los Angeles. By introducing smoother flows for transit vehicles in Los Angeles, it may spur transit adoption by offering more competitive travel times.

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This project presents and reviews the available sources of data on public transit riders and ridership, as a resource for those who manage or simply wish to understand U.S. transit. In conducting this review, the researchers consider the advantages and disadvantages of publicly available data on transit from a variety of public and private sources, as well the relatively scarcer and less available sources of data on other providers of shared mobility, like ride-hail services, that compete with and complement public transit and pieces missing from the transit analytics pie. Data gaps both align with existing inequities and enable them to continue, unmeasured, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made closing these gaps all the more important.

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Metro is currently engaged in various efforts to improve bus speeds to increase transit’s attractiveness and boost ridership . All Door Boarding is one program Metro is considering to reduce bus stop dwell times by allowing passengers with a valid TAP card, or other fare media, to board the bus through any available door, rather than the traditional system of boarding through the front of the bus and alighting through the rear doors. My project will provide a comprehensive review of All Door Boarding and will provide recommendations on how to cost effectively and equitably expand the program to other lines within Metro’s bus network. The research will analyze various factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Metro’s Free Fare Initiative, and will make the business case for future All Door Boarding expansions.

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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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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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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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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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In considering how transit riders must walk or bike near highways to reach transit stations, highway infrastructure becomes a significant barrier to transit access and an impediment to a safe and comfortable transit trip experience. As such, areas surrounding highways can be priority pathways for first/last mile improvements, which is in turn complicated by the California Department of Transportation’s management of highway right-of-way. In planning first/last mile infrastructure improvements, Metro’s First/Last Mile Planning program must coordinate with Caltrans to understand traffic and freight factors in a station area and implement any first/last mile interventions. This study examined three case study station areas for common first/last mile barriers at highways and interviewed staff to understand inter-agency coordination experiences. It finds that policies, such as criteria that dictate when to include Caltrans in planning processes, that seek to yield predictability in both inter-agency communication and first/last mile improvement design can aid in overall coordination at highway-adjacent sites.

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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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Transit ridership is on the wrong track across America. Yet until 2016, the San Francisco Bay Area appeared immune to the ridership declines plaguing most other cities. However, in 2017, Bay Area ridership began to fall, both regionwide and on almost all major transit operators. But this decline has not occurred uniformly. Gains at major Bay Area transit agencies masked longer-term declines in the rest of the region. The region’s largest operators are suffering from severe and deepening peaking problems: ridership during off-peak periods and in off-peak directions has cratered, while ridership at peak periods and in peak directions remains steady. Finally, jobs, and particularly concentrated employment, explain far more of variation in ridership than any other determinant analyzed, including factors like service provided.

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Mobility as a Service presents the opportunity to comprehensively shift how people travel – from personal vehicle ownership to a marketplace offering integrated trip planning, fare payment, and behavioral incentives. Increasingly, major private mobility providers, such as Uber and Lyft, are demonstrating their ambitions to be one-stop shops for urban mobility. Yet, when it comes to equity, accessibility, affordability, and use of public roadways, it is likely not in the best interest of the public to have purely privatized mobility. This project will help shape how public agencies should advance Mobility as a Service to help achieve societal goals. Project will research the Mobility as a Service market trends in North America and will identify key success factors of Mobility as a Service programs promoted by the public transportation authorities through in-depth interviews. Based on the analysis above, project will develop policy recommendations on how King County Metro should partner with private mobility service providers.

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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.

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Over the past decade, public transit operators in the Los Angeles region started experiencing steep declines in ridership, while Pasadena Transit was adding riders. More recently, however, Pasadena Transit’s ridership plateaued and then started to decrease. The Transit Division of the City of Pasadena Department of Transportation (“the Client”) is therefore interested in understanding what may be causing transit ridership to decline in its jurisdiction, what are the circumstances driving these changes, and what these causes and circumstances suggest for ways to make the system more attractive to riders. This project aims to answer these questions by contrasting ridership trends with possible causal factors: vehicle access, commuting patterns, demographic changes (e.g., age), economic indicators (e.g., income), homelessness, and housing-market conditions.

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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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The goal of the Culver City Transportation Department is to “create a great community for all to live and work by developing connected, autonomous, and shared-use transportation services and infrastructure.” In line with this goal, the City is developing a set of plans and programs to enhance multimodal travel. Transit service in Culver City can be improved; it suffers from slow bus speeds, poor on-time performance, and — perhaps as a consequence — declining ridership. These indicators are exacerbated by congested traffic conditions as well as an under-investment in multi-modal infrastructure.The Culver City Transportation Department sponsored the Washington Boulevard transit lane feasibility study. The agency designated a section of Washington Boulevard, bounded by National Boulevard to the east and Ince Boulevard to the west, as a pilot design corridor for implementing a bus lane. The purpose of this study is to explore and showcase transit lane design concepts to improve the efficiency and convenience of transit as a mobility option.