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The State of California has multiple climate, equity, and planning objectives established in legislation and executive orders. There are several State agencies individually responsible for developing policies, administering programs, and distributing funding to guide land use, housing and/or transportation planning decisions that advance the State’s vision. Maps are key decision-making tools for these agencies. While the maps have similar purposes, they each reflect the responsibilities of their respective State agencies, and so may not support coordinated land use, transportation, and equity decisions required to achieve the State’s goals. This project will address the following questions: 1) To what extent do California State government maps guide planning and investment decisions that help meet climate and equity objectives? 2) How do these maps overlap or conflict and what opportunities might there be to coordinate agency efforts to improve or combine them to support the State’s goals?

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The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected transportation systems, including the ability of localities to pay for them. This project explores the effects of the pandemic and the associated economic turbulence on local option sales taxes (LOSTs), an increasingly common revenue source for transportation in California and across the U.S. During times of economic weakness, spending and therefore LOST revenues will lag—the pattern in California counties during the initial months of the pandemic. Fortunately for local transportation budgets, LOST revenues recovered after the initial economic shock of COVID-19, albeit at a lower level than they likely would have otherwise. LOST revenue trends during the pandemic were affected by national and regional economic conditions and government policy as well. This public health crisis illustrates both the pitfalls and resilience of LOSTs during economic downturns and recoveries.

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California is a large state with a complex and fragmented governmental structure, as well as an intricate transportation funding system. Local funding, in the form of Local Option Sales Taxes (LOSTs), has become increasingly popular over the last several decades. While these allow local jurisdictions to raise additional revenues and decide which project to fund, the uniqueness and the sheer number of these measures make it difficult to understand California’s transportation finance system as a whole. This project will address the following: What are the funding formulas or methods at the county level for those that have LOSTs? How much of a role do Local Return Programs have in funding formulas? How flexible are these funding sources? For counties that do not have LOSTs, what other funding sources can they use (e.g. grants)? What equity issues arise with these various funding streams, and how can a better understanding of them further equity-focused advocacy and analysis?

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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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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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In California, driving is cheap and housing is expensive, and both these facts impede the state’s progress toward sustainability, safety and affordability. Efforts to solve these problems, however, often operate on parallel tracks: bold plans to increase housing production say little about congestion, and plans to address congestion rarely discuss the housing crisis. While these omissions are often understandable, they create a situation where policy proposals to solve one problem often flounder on concerns about the other one. Proposals to allow more development, even near transit, encounter resistance from neighbors concerned that development will bring congestion. Similarly, proposals to price roads encounter resistance based on the concern that California is already extremely expensive, and people have to live far from where they work because of the housing crisis. Somehow this policy gridlock must be resolved, if California will meet its stated goals of reducing VMT, reducing emissions, and building millions of units of housing.

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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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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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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 report partially fulfills the requirements for the Master in Public Policy degree in the Department of Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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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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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.