While much attention in the literature has focused on wildfire evacuation disparities tied to transportation and communications infrastructure and policy needs, limited focus has been on the transportation- and infrastructure-related [...]
Most existing studies of wildfire evacuations focus on vehicle-owning households and assume that evacuees will use their personal vehicles while evacuating. However, no studies have collected near real-time data on [...]
The goal of this project is to review and synthesize existing research on the challenges faced by older adults with disabilities during and after wildfire evacuations. This includes an examination [...]
A race to rebuild transportation infrastructure may preclude or increase the cost of other community-defined priorities that could emerge during the long recovery process. Once roadway repairs and reconstruction are [...]
Introduction Fast-moving wildfires pose significant challenges to evacuation, especially for transportation-insecure households with limited access to personal vehicles. The January 2025 Los Angeles fires marked a rare and alarming shift in wildfire events: blazes spread into highly populated urban areas across Los Angeles County, forcing tens of thousands of residents in the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and parts of Hollywood communities to flee with little notice. Smoke from the fires created widespread health risks, especially for transit riders and people with preexisting health conditions. Yet because no-notice wildfire events have seldom struck urban areas, little is known about how people without reliable access to vehicles evacuate — or the health challenges they face when doing so. In response, this policy brief highlights key findings from a survey conducted through the Transit app in February 2025, collected among transit riders who did and did not evacuate. By centering the experiences of Los Angeles’s transit-riding populations amid unprecedented wildfire smoke and mobility disruptions, the findings offer urgent evidence to inform equitable, health‑conscious emergency and evacuation planning for cities across the United States facing future climate-exacerbated wildfire threats. Research Approach An online survey was distributed through the Transit app, a mobile [...]
Wildfires disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, such as low-income families, older adults, people with disabilities, and rural residents. Wildfires not only cause direct destruction, but also intensify existing social inequities (Davies et al., 2018). The primary challenges these groups face lie in inadequate transportation resources to carry out evacuations, non-resilient infrastructure, and inequitable allocations of recovery resources. This brief synthesizes news reports, academic research, and practical case studies and recommends three priority strategies to support efforts to recover from the recent wildfires in Los Angeles County: 1) developing an inclusive evacuation system, 2) allocating resources for community recovery in a fair and equitable manner, and 3) building resilient community transportation systems for the future. These strategies can reduce social inequalities in disaster response and recovery. Background The January 2025 Eaton and Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles County were the first and second most destructive in California’s history (Hanna Park et al., 2025). They caused unprecedented destruction, resulting in 29 fatalities, the loss of 18,000 homes, and forced more than 200,000 residents to evacuate from the affected areas. The wildfires also caused power outages for 414,000 households, and resulted in economic damages exceeding $50 billion (Albani-Burgi, 2025). Although neither [...]
Issue The connectivity of local streets shapes travel choices for residents and the long-term resilience of cities. In neighborhoods with connected streets — characterized by a grid or similar pattern with direct walking routes and few dead ends — residents walk more and own fewer cars. Where streets are disconnected — for example, in hillside canyons or gated communities — the private car is typically the only option. And once laid down, street patterns rarely change, even after wartime bombing, fires, earthquakes, and other disasters. We quantified the connectivity of streets worldwide using a composite indicator — the Street-Network Disconnected index (SNDi) — that quantifies and captures the circuity of walking routes, the fraction of dead ends, and other network characteristics of street connectivity. Higher values of SNDi mean less connected (more disconnected) streets such as those in a gated community or cul-de-sac neighborhood, while lower values are found in grid-like and similar patterns. Here, we focus on some of the trends and the implications for urban resilience, especially for wildfire risk in California. Key Research Findings Neighborhoods with the highest wildfire risk have the least connected streets. Previous research shows that connected streets help residents [...]
