Recent uclaspa_urbnplan_oapdeposits items

On Books and Book Reviews in Planning

Thu, 4 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Books and Book Reviews in Planning

Comparing age-friendly city and community policies from China and the world: a systematic review

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Population aging is a growing global policy and health challenge. The World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCCs) framework has guided efforts to create supportive environments for older adults. Methods: This study conducts a systematic review of AFCC literature and policies in China and global contexts. The goal is to examine how China-a developing country with the world's largest older population and unique challenges from rapid urbanization-compares to other global contexts in its response to aging. Results and discussion: The review reveals key differences of AFCC policies between China and other global regions, which include varying priorities in mobility, employment, and education policies; divergent implementation approaches; broad visions versus specific standards. Some of the differences in context-specific issues are tied to different urbanization phases. On the other hand, shared challenges include financial issues that constrain...

Disaster recovery for whom? insurance, zoning, and the exclusionary geographies of wildfire resilience

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disaster recovery after wildfires is often framed as rebuilding to restore communities to their pre-disaster condition. We argue that recovery following a disaster can also function as a mechanism of spatial governance that produces exclusionary development by shaping who is able to return. Focusing on recovery after the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, we combine 35 semi-structured interviews with residential insurance data and neighborhood-level changes in housing and labor characteristics. We show that post-fire rebuilding is increasingly structured by the interaction of fire-adaptive regulations, building codes, and insurance market behavior, which together raise the financial thresholds for reconstruction. As recovery proceeds, informal, low-cost, and ad-hoc housing is displaced by formal, risk-managed, and insurable development, reshaping both the physical geography and the social composition of wildfire-affected neighborhoods. In the context of increasingly catastrophic...

How urban environments structure running behaviour in Beijing during winter, spring, and summer 2024: spatiotemporal patterns and configuration-specific interactions from running trajectory data

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

BackgroundUnderstanding how urban environments stimulate routine physical activity is a central issue in public health. Running, as a low-threshold and widely accessible exercise, serves as a sensitive indicator of environmental influence. Yet, few studies have used methods capable of capturing the non-linear and context-dependent interactions through which multiple built-environment factors jointly shape running. This study investigates the spatiotemporal patterns of running and identifies how combinations of environmental features across different urban scenarios affect behavioural activation.MethodsWe analysed 83,302 GPS-tracked running trajectories from Beijing. Built-environment indicators were integrated across five dimensions and examined using Light Gradient Boosting Machine with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). To enhance behavioural interpretability, variables were grouped into scenario-informed contexts representing commuting, restorative, and training environments....

Encampment geographies: Refuge, return, and refusal

Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking from Los Angeles, amid the expanding criminalization of homelessness, we advance a conceptual framework of encampment geographies. We argue that the homeless encampment must be understood in relation to state power, specifically the state as landlord. As residents of state spaces—sidewalks, shelters, interim housing—encampment dwellers are institutionalized. This includes interpellation in humanitarian exchange, notably through forms of mutual aid that emerge in the interstices of state violence. Drawing on ethnographic research and movement histories at Aetna Street, we present three encampment geographies: return, refuge, and refusal. We conceptualize the encampment as a site of enforced return and a space of refuge whose residents are akin to refugees. In doing so, we situate the homeless encampment in a global geography of camps, drawing on literatures that are attentive to expulsion, containment, and asylum. Yet encampment residents refuse enclosure, in particular,...

COMMON SENSE LAW: Making Right/s in the Liberal City

Fri, 1 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract This article, co‐authored by encampment and university scholars, is concerned with how homeless persons challenge rightlessness. We do so by advancing a conceptual framework of common sense law, arguing that such contestations take place not only in courtrooms but also in the lived spaces of homelessness. Drawing on five years of ethnography, we foreground how homeless persons become proficient in the law as well as in self‐advocacy, navigating and resisting state power, be it the edicts of criminalization or the labyrinth of bureaucratization. In doing so, we seek to understand housing justice as rights from below as well as a process of making right, a form of redress for perceived injuries. Our conceptual framework of common sense law derives from the specificity of the North American context where homeless personhood is constituted both within and against liberal arrangements of property. Often deployed in spaces such as the street, where property arrangements are...

Is the curb 80% full or 20% empty? Assessing the impacts of San Francisco’s parking pricing experiment

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The city of San Francisco is undertaking a large-scale controlled parking pricing experiment. San Francisco has adopted a performance goal of 60–80% occupancy for its metered parking. The goal represents an heuristic performance measure intended to reduce double parking and cruising for parking, and improve the driver experience; it follows a wave of academic and policy literature that calls for adjusting on-street parking prices to achieve similar occupancy targets. In this paper, we evaluate the relationship between occupancy rules and metrics of direct policy interest, such as the probability of finding a parking space and the amount of cruising. We show how cruising and arrival rates can be simulated or estimated from hourly occupancy data. Further, we evaluate the impacts of the first two years of the San Francisco program, and conclude that rate changes have helped achieve the City’s occupancy goal and reduced cruising by 50%.

A century of sprawl in the United States

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The urban street network is one of the most permanent features of cities. Once laid down, the pattern of streets determines urban form and the level of sprawl for decades to come. We present a high-resolution time series of urban sprawl, as measured through street network connectivity, in the United States from 1920 to 2012. Sprawl started well before private car ownership was dominant and grew steadily until the mid-1990s. Over the last two decades, however, new streets have become significantly more connected and grid-like; the peak in street-network sprawl in the United States occurred in ∼ 1994. By one measure of connectivity, the mean nodal degree of intersections, sprawl fell by ∼ 9% between 1994 and 2012. We analyze spatial variation in these changes and demonstrate the persistence of sprawl. Places that were built with a low-connectivity street network tend to stay that way, even as the network expands. We also find suggestive evidence that local government policies impact...

Getting around a license-plate ban: Behavioral responses to Mexico City’s driving restriction

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

License-plate-based driving restrictions are among the highest profile policies for local governments to address congestion and air pollution. Cities as varied as Sao Paulo, Paris, Tianjin, and New Delhi have enacted temporary or permanent restrictions to improve local air quality. Using household travel survey data and a research design based on the abrupt shift in how the policy applies to 10-year-old vs. 9-year-old vehicles, we evaluate the impact of Hoy No Circula, one of the earliest and most studied driving restrictions, in Mexico City. In line with previous studies, we find that Hoy No Circula has done little to reduce overall vehicle travel, but we reject the prevailing theory that its lack of success is due to perverse incentives for households to buy second cars. Instead, we highlight the range of other, less costly ways that people adjust behavior to avoid the restrictions. Although no single behavior dominates, most households — particularly those that own older, higher-polluting...

The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the completeness of OSM road data in each country in the world. First, we undertake a visual assessment of OSM data against satellite imagery, which provides the input for estimates based on a multilevel regression and poststratification model. Second, we fit sigmoid curves to the cumulative length of contributions, and use them to estimate the saturation level for each country. Both techniques may have more general use for assessing the development and saturation of crowd-sourced data. Our results show that in many places, researchers and...

Phantom trips: Overestimating the traffic impacts of new development

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Trip Generation Manual is the standard reference for assessing the impacts of new development on traffic congestion and the environment in the United States. However, a comparison to household surveys suggests that the Trip Generation Manual overestimates trips by 55 percent—likely because its data represent a biased sample of development in the U.S. Moreover, the data in the Trip Generation Manual are ill suited to many analyses of traffic impacts, development impact fees, and greenhouse gas emissions because they do not account for substitution effects. Most trips “generated” by new developments are not new, but instead involve households reshuffling trips from other destinations. These twin problems—theoretical and practical—are likely to lead to the construction of excessive roadway infrastructure and to the overestimation of the congestion, fiscal, and environmental impacts of new development.

More connected urban roads reduce US GHG emissions

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near-permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options.

Cap-and-trade, crowding out, and the implications for municipal climate policy motivations

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cities have emerged as important actors in climate change policy, implementing measures to reduce emissions from transportation, buildings, and waste. More recently, states such as California have implemented cap-and-trade programs to control greenhouse gases. However, a state-level cap handcuffs cities: by fixing emissions at the level of the cap, it precludes local governments from further reducing aggregate emissions. In this paper, we examine whether cities respond to the changed incentives presented by state-level programs. We find no evidence for crowding out: cities plan their emission reductions in similar ways regardless of state-level cap-and-trade programs. Our results suggest that cities likely have a range of motivations for their climate policy efforts- not simply a altruistic desire to improve the global environment.

Digital Transformation of Retail Work: The Rise of Chaotic Rationalisation

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We examine how new digital technologies are transforming labour processes in frontline jobs in United States (US) store‐based retail, examining the US as an extreme case of labour market liberalisation. Research on technological change presents three scenarios: job displacement, job enrichment and ‘digital Taylorism’ involving heightened surveillance and control. However, this research typically overlooks the role of customers and the frequency of technology failure. Drawing on interviews with frontline employees and managers supplemented by other sources, we find little evidence for job enhancement and limited evidence of job displacement. Retailers have used digital technologies to heighten Taylorisation, speedup and surveillance in some frontline jobs. However, interviews reveal multiple sources of chaos in the jobs, including unpredictable customer interactions, staffing patterns that make it hard for retail workers to rely on co‐workers, and flaws in digital technologies...

Fire Resilient LA: Solano Canyon

Fri, 6 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fire Resilient LA: Solano Canyon

Vehicle access and falling transit ridership: evidence from Southern California

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We examine pre-COVID declines in transit ridership, using Southern California as a case study. We first illustrate Southern California’s unique position in the transit landscape: it is a large transit market that demographically resembles a small one. We then draw on administrative data, travel diaries, rider surveys, accessibility indices, and Census microdata for Southern California, and demonstrate a strong association between rising private vehicle access, particularly among the populations most likely to ride transit, and falling transit use. Because we cannot control quantitatively for the endogeneity between vehicle acquisition and transit use, our results are not causal. Nevertheless, the results strongly suggest that increasing private vehicle access helped depress transit ridership. Given Southern California’s similarity to most US transit markets, we conclude that vehicle access may have played a role in transit losses across the US since 2000.

Political ideology and scientific communication shape human perceptions of pollen seasons

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Climate change is altering the timing and intensity of pollen seasons, increasing human exposure to allergenic pollen. Climate-driven changes in pollen seasons present a unique opportunity to craft messaging that communicates how climate change is affecting biological systems. However, it is unclear how pollen seasons are experienced and understood by the public, including how well we detect pollen seasons and what factors we view as responsible for changes in pollen seasons. Here, we use social media data (Twitter) in the United States from 2012 to 2022 to assess public perceptions of pollen seasons across the country. We find that pollen seasons detected by social media users are consistent with natural pollen seasons. Attribution of changing pollen seasons, however, varies based on political ideology: liberal users are more likely to attribute changing pollen seasons to climate change when compared with conservative users. Mass media and scientific experts shape communication...

State Preemption in Theory and Practice: The Case of Parking Requirements

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California's 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. We find that the law's complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpretations, in all jurisdictions, leading to heterogeneous implementation across cities. Local interests also motivated strategic responses to the law, which we present in a threefold taxonomy: cities interested in parking reform used it as a springboard; cities interested in parking reform but facing local resistance used it as a protective shield; recalcitrant cities treated it as an obstacle or subverted the law. Our analysis shows that preemption is not as clear cut as it seems, and what conditions help and hinder changes in actual outcomes.

A global assessment of street-network sprawl

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disconnected urban street networks, which we call "street-network sprawl," are strongly associated with increased vehicle travel, energy use and CO2 emissions, as shown by previous research in Europe and North America. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and globally commensurable measures of street-network sprawl based on graph-theoretic and geographic concepts. Using data on all 46 million km of mapped streets worldwide, we compute these measures for the entire Earth at the highest possible resolution. We generate a summary scalar measure for street-network sprawl, the Street-Network Disconnectedness index (SNDi), as well as a data-driven multidimensional classification that identifies eight empirical street-network types that span the spectrum of connectivity, from gridiron to dendritic (tree-like) and circuitous networks. Our qualitative validation shows that both the scalar and multidimensional measures are meaningfully comparable within and across countries, and...

Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor

Putting Automobile Debt on the Map: Race and the Geography of Automobile Debt in California

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most U.S. metropolitan areas developed alongside the automobile, producing neighborhoods of relatively low density. Consequently, access to opportunities in these neighborhoods is predicated on having an automobile, yet many households do not have the resources to purchase one outright, relying on automobile loans to spread out the purchase price. While automobile loans can enable automobile ownership, they also significantly increase the vehicle purchase price, particularly for non-white consumers subject to discriminatory lending practices.In this study, we rely on data from the University of California Consumer Credit Panel from Experian to examine the determinants and geography of automobile debt and its consequences in California, testing whether various automobile debt measures disproportionately affect non-white neighborhoods.We find that, controlling for other factors associated with automobile lending including income, Black and Latino/a neighborhoods have higher total...

State of the BART: Analyzing the Determinants of Bay Area Rapid Transit Use in the 2010s

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peaking on public transit—the concentration of ridership in peak times and directions into and out of central areas—has waxed in the U.S. over the past century, as public transit has lost more mode share at off-peak times, in off-peak directions, and among non-commute trips. A notable pre-pandemic manifestation of this chronic problem was on Bay Area Rapid Transit, the San Francisco Bay Area’s regional heavy rail system. While BART staved off an absolute ridership decline longer than most American transit operators in the mid- and late-2010s, it did so almost entirely due to peak gains in riders offsetting off-peak losses. As a result, the system experienced worsening passenger crowding at some times and places, expanding underutilization of capacity at many others, and the prospect of enormous expenditures to accommodate rising transbay passenger demand. To examine the factors driving transit use in the 2010s, we model peak and off-peak BART trips as a function of station...

Transit's Financial Prognosis: Findings from a Survey of U.S. Transit Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic occasioned significant financial distress and uncertainty for many U.S. transit operators. In the face of this crisis, the federal government provided substantial supplemental operating support. To understand how this fiscal turmoil and relief have affected U.S. transit systems, we conducted two nationwide surveys of transit agency staff in 2020 and 2021-2022. While pandemic-induced financial shortfalls affected service in 2020, with capital projects delayed too, these effects became much more muted by 2021/2022. Most systems reported moderate to substantial increases in federal funding during the pandemic, more so than other funding categories. However, nearly half foresee financial shortfalls once federal relief funding expires. Agencies with higher pre-pandemic ridership and farebox recovery are particularly affected by fare revenue losses and more likely to anticipate shortfalls. In the near term, difficulty hiring and retaining front-line workers was...

Climate Change and Health Disparities in California's Latino Neighborhoods

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate Change and Health Disparities in California's Latino Neighborhoods

Identifying misalignments in wildfire management: Opportunities for plan integration and stakeholder collaboration

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wildfire management across different planning mechanisms remains a growing yet understudied policy challenge worldwide. California's Wildfire Resilience Plan Alignment Guide is meant to leverage collaboration among different local planning mechanisms to build wildfire resilient communities. Referring to this toolkit, we identified six themes of plan alignment opportunities among three primary local planning mechanisms: the General Plan, Hazard Mitigation Plan, and Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Building on a Wildfire Planning Effectiveness protocol and evaluation, we developed a model measuring degrees of plan alignment among these planning mechanisms. We find that overall plan alignment among the three plans is low, particularly as related to vulnerability assessments. We also find that regional, private sector, federal, state, and tribal stakeholders are inadequately involved in local planning processes. We further investigate the relationship between plan alignment evaluation,...

Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Autonomous vehicles, popularly known as self-driving cars, have the potential to transform travel behavior. However, existing analyses have ignored strategic interactions with other road users. In this article, I use game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks. Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave with impunity, and autonomous vehicles may facilitate a shift toward pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhoods. At the same time, autonomous vehicle adoption may be hampered by their strategic disadvantage that slows them down in urban traffic.

Parking behaviour: The curious lack of cruising for parking in San Francisco

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Parking behaviour: The curious lack of cruising for parking in San Francisco

Map-matching poor-quality GPS data in urban environments: the pgMapMatch package

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Map-matching poor-quality GPS data in urban environments: the pgMapMatch package

Global health and climate benefits from walking and cycling infrastructure

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We use a globally consistent dataset-Google Environmental Insights Explorer-to quantify how urban form and transport infrastructure affect walking and cycling rates in 11,587 cities from 121 countries across six continents. At the city level, population density has the largest effect on walk mode share and has a positive impact on cycling too, as higher densities bring destinations within feasible walk and cycle distances. Density has the strongest effects in wealthier countries where travelers often have more travel choices, while in lower-income places, walking and cycling may be primarily driven by financial constraints. We also find positive effects of bicycle lanes (proxying for a wider array of street design practices) on both walking and cycling. In the median city, each new km of bicycle lanes is associated with ~13,400 additional km yr^-1 of bicycle travel. If every city increased the extent of its bicycle network to the level of Copenhagen, Denmark, our simulations...

Exposing Freeway Inequalities in the Suburbs: The Cases of Pasadena and Pacoima

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

U.S. freeways have come under scrutiny for their adverse impacts on low-income neighborhoods of color, primarily in urban centers. This article offers a comparative historical analysis of the impact of freeways on two communities in Southern California, which were ethnically diverse suburbs. Planning authorities in Pasadena and Pacoima chose freeway routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than the proposed alternatives. Meanwhile, neighboring white, wealthier communities successfully influenced routing decisions in consequential ways. Beyond the visible and immediate effects of the freeways, social inequity and environmental degradation persist in both neighborhoods today.

A gendered perspective on ride-hail use in Los Angeles, USA

Wed, 9 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A gendered perspective on ride-hail use in Los Angeles, USA

Sex or sexuality? Analyzing the division of labor and travel in gay, lesbian, and straight households

Wed, 9 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People make tradeoffs between paid and unpaid labor, and in straight households women typically do the lion's share of unpaid labor, including household-serving travel. Nearly all of the previous research on this topic is limited to married heterosexual households with children, a surprisingly small and shrinking portion of the population. Using pooled data from the 2003–12 American Time Use Surveys, we explore how household-serving labor and travel vary across household types in the U.S. We examine the paid and unpaid labor tradeoffs made by partnered same-sex couples with and without children, and find that their division of paid and unpaid labor, as well as household-serving travel such as chauffeuring children, occupies a statistical middle ground between straight men and women. This suggests that the gendered nature of paid and unpaid work and travel is muted in the absence of a two-sex household structure, though some gendered differences persist.

City of courts: excavating the future in West Los Angeles

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

City of courts: excavating the future in West Los Angeles

Urban development & street-network sprawl in Tokyo

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Urban development & street-network sprawl in Tokyo

The autonomous vehicle parking problem

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The autonomous vehicle parking problem

Electric Vehicle Charging and Car Dependency

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We explore whether policies to promote electric vehicles (EVs) impede efforts to reduce vehicle travel. We hypothesize that the presence of EV chargers reduces respondents’ willingness to support (i) the removal of on-street parking to make space for bicycle lanes, and (ii) infill development on surface parking lots. We also hypothesize that the availability of EVs reduces public support for broader vehicle travel reduction policies. Using a randomized survey-based experiment, we find no evidence to support any of these hypotheses.

Land Value Creation and Land Value Capture: Designing an Inclusionary Housing Ordinance Consistent with State Law