UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

We ask how place-based transportation plans are being evaluated, and what insights from the broader policy and plan evaluation research literature might inform evaluation design. We complement a review of the evaluation literature with six expert interviews with 15 people. We find that California agencies and their community partners have high expectations for evaluations of place-based transportation plans. So far, however, those evaluations have been less successful in providing detailed information on outcomes and the causal impact of interventions. This does not reflect the shortcomings of the evaluation teams, but rather the inherent challenges in holistically assessing a diverse set of projects on different implementation timelines in a project area with porous boundaries. There is also a fundamental difficulty with the evaluation scale. California’s place-based transportation plans have often been evaluated individually. But in general, evaluations, particularly quantitative causal inference methods, are most effective with a larger number of projects or sites. We suggest a two-pronged approach to addressing the tensions that we identify between place-specific knowledge and generalizable conclusions. The first prong, at the site level, would emphasize process evaluations and assessment of outputs and outcomes. The second prong would focus on impacts across multiple sites and the extent to which place-based transportation programs have a causal role.

This study discusses the potential economic and development impacts that high-speed rail (HSR) may bring to California. The research reviews the reported impacts of HSR implementation in various countries, particularly in Europe, and case studies of selected HSR station-cities in France, Spain, and Italy. The analysis suggests that HSR could bring economic development to the state and stimulate population growth but might eventually lead to gentrification in certainlocations. Not all station-cities experience the same impacts, and certain conditions may foster greater economic development. Station location and connectivity to downtown areas would be particularly important in influencing these impacts, while peripheral stations would be less able to attract land use development and relocation of activities. The availability of rail service to larger cities (and connections to other major markets) and the coordination with urban planning and policy are key to determining the development of areas around HSR stations. The study indicates that for HSR to bring about desired economic development, the planning and design of stations and services must be integrated with the vision and urban plans of each station-city.

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. Workers have made notable gains in recent contract negotiations. Nonetheless, working conditions, which worsened during the pandemic, have driven away existing workers and potential recruits. While health and retirement benefits represent a significant perk of the job, operators face slow wage and seniority progression, two-tiered pensions, high housing costs, grueling schedules andovertime, and security and discipline concerns, atop daunting initial barriers to hiring. 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, andunions will need to rethink and expand transit operations funding, raise wages, and implement a variety of reforms: reducinghiring hurdles, expanding outreach, making scheduling fairer, improving facilities and support offerings, removing enforcement duties from operators, and creating career pathways for advancement. Ultimately, the pandemic underscored that transit workforce issues are transit rider issues.

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. Stockton underwent spatial restructuring in the decades after the Second World War, and state and local government contributed and responded to these changes by implementing connected freeway and urban renewal programs. Historical and contemporaneous xenophobia and racism placed Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila in their path, with these enclaves deemed blighted and subject to “slum clearance.” 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. The findings can help reform and improve professional practice within the transportation arena to ensure racial fairness and equity.

In this study, we use the concept of “sidewalk ecologies” to highlight the complex interaction between spatially situated social and material features of sidewalks that influence youth mobility. We use a range of interdisciplinary strategies, emphasizing youth-centered research methods and mapping to capture a rich portrait of the independent travel experiences, perceptions, and ideas of youth, in their own voices. This research was conducted in partnership with Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), a communitybased organization in Westlake that provides after-school programming to thousands of neighborhood youths, and yielded important findings. 

California and its regional and local governments have invested heavily in public transit over the past half-century to provide an alternative to driving, ease traffic congestion, reduce emissions, slow climate change, steer new development, and provide mobility for those without. As a result, bus service has improved and expanded, and many parts of the state’s metropolitan areas are now served by rail transit.

Yet today, many of the state’s transit systems are struggling operationally and financially. Ridership began eroding in the half-decade leading up to 2020 and plummeted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three federal pandemic relief bills provided a critical lifeline to keep struggling transit systems afloat early on, but these funds are running out. Meanwhile, operating costs have risen, ridership and fare revenues have only partially returned, and some transit systems face “fiscal cliffs,” where they will need substantial new infusions of funding, substantial cuts in costs and service, or some combination of the two.

Against this backdrop, this report examines the current state of California transit finance: why ridership and fare revenues are down and their prospects for recovery; what lessons the successful federal relief bills provide; why commuter-oriented systems are struggling financially much more than those that primarily service transit-reliant riders; and what the financial managers at transit systems have done to cope with this turbulent time and how they see their future financial prospects.

This research synthesizes literature on the relationship between working from home and travel. This relationship is a pertinent one because transportation planners and policymakers have long hoped that increased remote work, sometimes called telecommuting or telework, will reduce driving, traffic congestion, and vehicle emissions. This question is especially pertinent today because working from home increased dramatically early in the COVID-19 pandemic and has remained at substantially elevated levels since then. To examine this issue, we review nearly 100 research articles, reports, and some popular accounts of telecommuting and travel prior to and during the pandemic. In conducting this review, we arrive at five principal findings. First, remote work increased dramatically with the onset of the pandemic and appears likely to remain elevated for many years to come. Second, while not everyone can work remotely, for those who have the option to do so, at least part-time, this hybrid option is extremely popular with most workers. Third, employers tend to be skeptical of the benefits of remote work, but the research does not support fears of declining productivity in the near term, and the tight post-pandemic labor market has given workers leverage to insist on remote work options. Fourth, telecommuting has long been touted as a potential solution to chronic transportation problems like traffic congestion and vehicle emissions, but the research has consistently found that it is more likely to increase, rather than decrease, overall driving among remote workers. This extra driving is due both to hybrid workers living farther from work, on average, than non-remote workers and to all remote workers making more household-serving and personal trips when they work from home. And fifth, public transit systems, in contrast to street and highway systems, have been dramatically affected by the pandemic, likely due substantially to the rise in remote work it has engendered. The future of many public transit systems, which draw an outsized share of their riders from commuters to downtowns and other major job centers, will depend on whether and to what extent those job centers re-densify with workers in the months and years ahead.

California's freeways have come under increasing scrutiny for their disproportionately adverse impacts on lowincome populations and populations of color. This study uses empirical research to not only understand but also quantify and describe in detail the historical impacts of freeways on communities of color in four California cities and areas: Pasadena, Pacoima, Sacramento, and San José. In these neighborhoods, freeways displaced many residents, significantly harmed those that remained, and left communities divided and depleted. The four cases differ in notable ways, but they share a disproportionate impact of freeway construction on communities of color. In Pasadena and Pacoima, decision-makers chose routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than proposed alternatives.

Demolition and displacement were the most visible and immediate effects of the freeways, but toxic pollution, noise, economic decline, and stigmatization remained long after. In suburban areas, white, affluent interests often succeeded in pushing freeways to more powerless neighborhoods. Massive roadway construction complemented other destructive governmental actions such as urban renewal and redlining. Freeways and suburbanization were key components in the creation of a spatial mismatch between jobs and housing for people of color, with few transportation options to overcome it. Understanding the history of racism in freeway development can inform restorative justice in these areas.

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. DOTs are responsible for the health and safety of these settings and of their occupants, housed and unhoused.This study synthesizes existing literature and findings from interviews with staff from 13 state DOTs and eight 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. Our 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. DOTs should coordinate with other bodies as they work towards broader housing solutions.