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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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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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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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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 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 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.

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This project uses mixed methods to examine the systemic causes and consequences of the construction of Stockton, California’s Crosstown Freeway and of urban redevelopment for Asian Americans communities. In Stockton, state and local government implemented connected freeway and urban renewal programs. Xenophobia and racism placed Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila in their path. The choice of freeway route was racially biased. The neighborhood surrounding an unchosen route was predominantly white, whereas that of the chosen route was predominantly home to people of color. Freeway construction during the 1960s and 1970s directly displaced hundreds of people and housing units downtown—mainly people of color, particularly Asians. The communities most harmed were the Asian American enclaves, where the housing stock declined by about three quarters between 1960 and 1970. The losses were not only physical, as the freeway and redevelopment eviscerated once vibrant ethnic commercial hubs. Because of long-standing economic and political marginalization, Asian Americans were relatively powerless to prevent the destruction; nonetheless, they fought to build affordable housing for their people, protect and in some cases relocate cultural institutions, and support surviving ethnic businesses. In the long run, Stockton failed to revitalize its downtown, while destroying its cultural diversity.

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In recent decades, homelessness has become an increasingly major challenge in the U.S. Of the half million unhoused people in the U.S., many seek shelter in settings under the auspices of state departments of transportation (DOTs), such as freeways, underpasses, and rest areas. This project synthesizes existing literature and findings from interviews with staff from state DOTs, service providers, and organizations responding to homelessness. Homelessness represents a recognized and common challenge for DOTs, but the numbers and location of unhoused individuals in state transportation settings vary and fluctuate. As DOTs face jurisdictional, financial, and legal hurdles in responding, DOT staff employ both “push” and “pull” strategies, the most common of which is encampment removals. However, the effectiveness of such removals is limited. Other strategies include “defensive design” and, more proactively, establishing or partnering with low-barrier shelters, providing shelters and sanitation on DOT land, and coordinating rehousing and outreach efforts. The findings suggest that DOTs should acquire better data on homelessness on their lands, create a homelessness coordinating office, establish formal partnerships with nonprofits/service providers, and evaluate the necessity of encampment removals, through the development and utilization of prioritization criteria.

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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 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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Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, about five percent of the U.S. labor force worked primarily from home. Between February and April of 2020, the share of the labor force working from home skyrocketed to well over 50 percent in response to public health orders to contain the pandemic. While no one expects the share of those working from home to stay at such high levels as the pandemic recedes, there is considerable debate among experts on just how many workers will return full-time to employment sites. This research will review the well-established and substantial pre-pandemic literature on working from home and travel as well as the nascent but rapidly growing literature on working from home and travel in the COVID-19 pandemic to offer insights on the future of home/work location choices, commuting, and transportation mode usage, likely through the presentation of plausible future location/travel scenarios and their policy implications.

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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 project examines the spatial distribution of tenant-based Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) units and Low-income Housing Tax Credit units to understand whether geographic patterns and trends are consistent with climate change and equity goals. The analysis compares the location of HCV and LIHTC units in 2012 and net changes from 2012 to 2019 with a number of transportation, environmental, and racial and economic equity metrics. The change in HCV units from 2012 to 2019 shows promising trends for reducing vehicle miles traveled and increasing walkability and transit accessibility. LIHTC unit locations are, at best, somewhat more sustainable than the state overall, with slightly lower-skewing vehicle miles traveled and better walkability, though low transit accessibility. What environmental gains there were, though, come at the cost of higher exposure to pollution. HCV and LIHTC units are also concentrated in disproportionately low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color, with worse access to economic opportunity. The findings reveal an inherent structural dilemma in whether the HCV and LIHTC programs are able to simultaneously achieve climate and equity goals.

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This project for the California 100 initiative examines transportation in California: where we are today, how we got here, and where we might be headed. We begin with facts on travel and transportation systems in California today. We next explore the decades of public and private land development and transportation systems that have shaped the current state of play: today’s transportation problems stem, in significant part, from yesterday’s land use decisions. We then consider factors that have either recently come to the fore or are likely to emerge in the near future. We review possible context-specific reforms to reshape transportation in the state, in order to better manage vehicle travel and reduce chronic congestion, shift patterns of development to make them less car-dependent, and increase access for all. Finally, we summarize the findings from a diverse panel of transportation experts convened to explore the possibilities, pitfalls, and implications of four possible future transportation and land use scenarios for California.

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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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The United States’ transportation workforce is currently at a skills deficit in key areas. New and innovative transportation technologies and approaches threaten to exacerbate this situation. Yet, transportation workers need more than skills to implement new technologies: they need the skills to critically determine which technologies are likely to support a thriving nation and under what conditions. Additionally, transportation workers need the skills to support non-technology-focused solutions to the nation’s transportation challenges, including cultural, political, and social change.