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A growing consensus among economists and economic geographers suggests that America’s most constrained housing markets, and in particular the constrained housing markets on California’s coast, impose high costs not just on people in those markets but on the nation as a whole, by inhibiting migration and placing a drag on productivity. Strict zoning regulations prevent people from moving to areas where they would be most productive, imposing costs that are quiet and atomized but that collectively are large. Despite gaining increasing attention in the last ten years, parking requirements remain relatively overlooked in the literature on land use restrictions. Existing attempts to quantify land use restrictiveness do not measure the stringency of minimum parking requirements, even though parking requirements are often the binding constraint on dense development.The research team proposes examining the relationship between minimum parking requirements, urban land markets, and travel behavior, using Silicon Valley as a case study. The team will specifically examine how minimum parking requirements: (1) Shape the locations and characteristics of new development, (2) Distort the location of firms and weaken agglomeration economies, and (3) Make driving less expensive.

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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 2018 electric powered shared scooters and stationless electric bikeshare proliferated throughout the United States. Many cities have begun to experiment with new permitting systems and regulations for these vehicles. To date, there is scant academic literature on how well scooter and stationless bikeshare permits have helped cities achieve their transit, sustainability, and equity goals. San Francisco was one of the first cities in the United States to create permit systems for stationless bikeshare and scooter companies. This research evaluates scooters and stationless bikeshare use as a first/last mile transit option, reductions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and equity of utilization. Results indicate that the two travel modes substantially support transit usage, both by connecting riders to transit and by replacing automobile trips.

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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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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 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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This report analyzes ten peer cities across the state, country and globe with the goal of providing best practices and lessons learned for Los Angeles’ update of its street design guidance: Atlanta, Dallas, London, Mumbai, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Toronto, and Washington DC. Specifically, the report examines each city’s development and implementation of its street design guidelines through semi-structured interviews and an analysis of six priority complete streets design treatments. Treatments analyzed include corner radii, curb extensions, pedestrian refuge islands, raised crosswalks, roundabouts, and transit platforms. Based on my analysis, I recommend three policy guidelines for the City of Los Angeles: 1) prioritize street design regulations over recommendations, 2) choose flexibility over specificity, and 3) create unified documentation.

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This research models vehicle travel and emissions in an effort to answer the question: What are the potential environmental impacts of congestion pricing?

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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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Investment in public transportation systems brings the potential for temporary and permanent neighborhood disruption, including displacement, gentrification, and changes in community character. This research seeks to develop a set of policy recommendations for Los Angeles Metro, which is increasingly involved in land use planning in station areas. First, the team will analyze Metro’s potential involvement and influence in the land market around stations, both on the property it owns and on property it does not own. The areas of analysis include 1) alternative ownership structures such as Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and limited equity corporations, that can take place on absorbed Metro-owned land, and 2) the incentives and planning tools Metro can utilize to further the goals of Metro Transit-Oriented Community at the station area level. Second, the team will evaluate land use policies, plans, and funding mechanisms that have relevance to Metro’s network of TOCs within a subset of the 29 cities that Metro’s rail and high-capacity bus network serves (with a list of prioritized municipalities to be developed in coordination with Metro).

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Vision Zero, the dominant traffic safety framework in the United States, typically includes as a strategy increased enforcement of traffic laws. Activists concerned with overpolicing of communities of color are often skeptical of this strategy and have tried to push cities to minimize police involvement in traffic safety plans. To help planners understand this complex issue, my research will address the following question: “How have Vision Zero planning efforts addressed the relationship between traffic enforcement and communities of color?” People of color are disproportionately likely to be pulled over while driving, but planners continue to include traffic enforcement in Vision Zero plans. For this project I will interrogate the planning process through case studies of Vision Zero cities, interviewing planners, policy makers, and community members to address the following question: “How have Vision Zero planning efforts addressed the relationship between traffic enforcement and communities of color?”

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Over the past 5 years, ride-sourcing platforms have experienced tremendous growth in American cities. Despite indications by recent studies that ride-sourcing vehicles substitute for vehicle travel and reduce parking demand, policymakers and academics have ignored the implications of ride-sourcing use for curb space allocation, which traditionally favors long-term vehicle occupancy. This thesis will examine whether designation of curb space for long-term vehicle occupancy induces ride-sourcing pick up and drop off activity in travel lanes through observation of curb use on two arterial corridors in Los Angeles perceived to have a high level of ride-sourcing activity. Comparative analysis of curb occupancy with the number of passengers ride-sourcing and other vehicles transport to the curb can reveal the extent to which ride-sourcing pick ups and drop offs make for a more productive use of the curb than vehicle parking (potentially justifying the re-designation of curb space used for vehicle parking as ride-sourcing pick up zone(s)).

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As the market share of zero-emissions hydrogen and electric vehicles increases in California, the motor vehicle fuel tax becomes less applicable as a user fee, and declining revenues could produce shortfalls for maintaining the transportation system. The authors of SB1 sought policy options to raise usage-based revenues from electric and zero-emissions transportation system users.This research was specified in SB1 as a study for the University of California at Davis. Professor Martin Wachs, an internationally-renowned transportation finance expert member of the SB 1077 Road User Charge Technical Advisory Committee, is assisting research at UC Davis with this study.

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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.

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