Projects

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The racist legacy of freeways has come into stark focus in the past year. This research focuses on one specific impact of freeways: neighborhood severance. Freeways disrupt the neighborhood street grid, creating particular hardships for pedestrians who must take circuitous routes to access transit and to walk to stores, schools, and other destinations. The impacts of disconnected streets on walking and public health are well documented (e.g. Handy 2003; Marshall et al. 2014; Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball 2019). But the environmental justice dimension of connectivity has remained unexplored, as has the link between most academic studies of street connectivity and local planning efforts. The research team will test the hypothesis that, while freeways disrupt street networks everywhere, the severance effects are greatest in BIPOC communities. This injustice might arise if White residents have more political voice to advocate for a denser mesh of local streets that cross the freeway, or to cancel a freeway proposal altogether.

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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 project’s ultimate goal is threefold. First, we will deliver a broad but accurate and relevant snapshot of vulnerable travelers in California. Second, we will use that information to carefully consider how different forms of congestion pricing might improve or degrade equity. Third and most important, we will use lessons from other safety net programs, and particularly those operating in the utility industry in California, to propose specific safeguards for poor and marginalized populations that can be built into congestion charging programs. We examine the fairness implications of congestion pricing and propose policy mechanisms to mitigate its potential unfair outcomes. Our project first empirically establishes the broad contours of travel by vulnerable populations in California’s major metropolitan areas. We then examine particular forms of congestion charging, and evaluate how they might affect equity. Finally and most importantly, we draw on models of the guardrails instituted by other public utilities to illustrate ways to have congestion pricing while still protecting low-income travelers.

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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 is the second study of voter-approved transportation sales taxes in Los Angeles County performed by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies with support from the Haynes Foundation. The earlier study examined the history of the four half cent sales taxes enacted by voters in Los Angeles County between 1980 and 2016. The current study looked in depth at four issues raised but not addressed in the first one. We report on the extent to which the “local return” provisions of the four measures fund transportation programs and projects in the cities and unincorporated areas of the county. We also explored tradeoffs between accountability to the voters through audits and taxpayer advisory committees in comparison with the county’s flexibility to change program elements through amendments when conditions change. Accountability to the voters was enhanced in the later sales tax measures but amendment procedures have been used to respond to changing needs in the county. We examined lawsuits brought against Metro regarding implementation of the sales taxes and found that there have been rather few. The COVID-19 pandemic struck while the study was underway and in response the report also explores the impacts of the pandemic on transportation sales tax revenues and program expenditures. The transportation sales taxes through the end of year 2020 have been the most important and resilient LA Metro funding sources during the pandemic. Sales tax revenue declined but far less than did federal and state sources of finance and revenues from fares paid by passengers.

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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 Washington State Ferry System is responsible for carrying millions of passengers per year in the waterways around the Seattle area. In publishing a Long-Range Plan in 2019, the agency outlined key improvements to be made over the next 20 years. One of the tenets of the plan is improving customer experience by more accurately conveying real-time wait time reports to passengers to better inform trip planning decisions. This project aims to evaluate best practices for line management and wait time analysis, both within the field of public transportation as well as external sources and review domestic transit agencies’ best practices for conveying wait time information to passengers.

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More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every night in the U.S. With the scale of the crisis often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets — all the more so since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also use transit to reach destinations such as workplaces, shelters, and community service centers. This project investigates the intersections of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness; the scale of homelessness on transit; and how transit agencies are responding to the problem. All told, centering the mobility and wellbeing of unhoused riders fits within transit’s social service role and is important to improving outcomes for them and for all riders.

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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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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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Travel patterns have been significantly altered due to COVID-19. However, LA Metro experienced the smallest percent drop in public transit ridership during this time. Though no public confirmation is currently available, anecdotally, we are witnessing sustained ridership in non-traditional peak hour traffic areas such as in South Los Angeles, and low-income neighborhoods in the South Bay. I will analyze travel patterns from NextGen research to better understand public transportation travel patterns. The project topic would involve identifying multiple low-cost opportunities to adjust LA Metro bus services to improve customer experience by better matching LA Metro service to major travel patterns as identified from Metro’s LBS cell phone database as well as Census “On the Map” data and Metro ridership data. The analysis would include reviewing changes to travel patterns and volumes (as seen in cell phone data patterns) resulting from the impact of COVID-19.

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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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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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The Covid-19 pandemic has forced a series of social distancing measures upon Angelenos and prevented public access to many traditionally community spaces. Fears of infection have disincentivized many from public transit, severely limiting the mobility of those without cars. This project will look to see how closure of local streets may substitute public recreational space and promote active transportation. My project will analyze the current “Slow Streets” program by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, which attempts to slow local traffic in select streets to create recreational opportunities in the city. I look to analyze the effects of Slow Streets in two capacities – public perception and mobility impact.

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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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Street rights-of-way are typically a city’s most valuable asset. Streets serve numerous functions — access, movement, and the provision of space for on-street parking, children’s play, and social interaction. But the more land that is devoted to streets, the less land there is available for housing, parks, offices, and other land uses. In this research project, UCLA researchers quantified the width of streets in 20 of the largest counties in the United States, and the value of the land under those streets. This research found that streets in the U.S. are much wider than in other countries. Street widths are normally dictated by subdivision codes and local street design manuals. The highest street land values are found in coastal California, and streets could be much narrower.

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In response to the increasing need to socially distance on the streets, many cities nationwide — and especially in California — have installed Slow Streets that prohibit thru traffic on roads. However, because Slow Streets are new, few cities have extensive data about resident responses to these new walkways. SFMTA has issued a questionnaire to better understand resident attitudes and understandings of Slow Streets. This project will perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis to provide insight into the responses from San Francisco residents.