This dissertation explored the ways private-sector transport operators in African cities make individual and collective decisions on the change and expansion of transport networks, based on a comparison of Lilongwe, Kampala and Nairobi. This network geography underpins crucial accessibility questions, including the equity, affordability and usefulness of mass transportation services available to different people across the space of cities. Governance of informal transport remains disjointed, and planning processes within the sector itself are rarely engaged with. Informal transport is often described as flexible, reactive, demand responsive, niche-filling, and in-tune with passenger needs. This paper proposes expanded definitions of flexibility in the operations of informal transport networks and presents a theoretical framing for understanding the growth and change in the locations of routes and terminals.Using surveys and interviews in four African cities, this dissertation argues that spatial planning is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but that different forms of internal organization, the role and power of workers, and the geographic scope and level of organization in the industry affect the planning practices of operators and the ways and locations to which they expand their services. Where there is little route-level organization, independent vehicles have difficulty creating services to new destinations. Where route-level organizations take the initiative and invest capital to start new services, whether vehicle owners or frontline workers such as drivers and conductors are more involved leads to different levels of dialogue with communities and different willingness to tolerate internal conflict, creating different types of transport networks and different mobility patterns. These studies further argue that individually competing vehicles encounter coordination failures that limit their incentives for searching out niche services. Meanwhile, in cities with localized, route-based associations, organizations of multiple vehicles are able to take on the initiative and riskof developing new service locations and responding to passenger demand. This is done through a complex, gradual process that includes temporary subsidies to drivers and operators, testing and measuring potential demand, and advertising the new route. The key mechanism is in competition not between individual drivers, who manage internal competition carefully with a variety of mechanisms to distribute income opportunities fairly, but between firms and associations over territorial coverage. This not only opens potential for engaging transport associations in planning and policymaking, but also reveals limitations to the coverage and equity of access offered by existing networks and incentive structures Finally, this dissertation considers the effectiveness of services from the passenger and resident point of view. Mobility across urban space circumscribes urban residents’ opportunities and experiences, and a mixed-methods study explores im/mobilities in Lilongwe, Malawi, a mid-sized African capital city, focusing on mobility options, barriers and frictions. We particularly consider latent demand, or missed travel and unreachable destinations, and the physical, mental and emotional experiences of travel. A sense of constraint and limited agency emerges strongly from urban residents, in which expensive, difficult and ineffective travel is linked to a dually conceptualized immobility. This is experienced both as curtailed physical movement, and as a deprivation of agency, sapping choice, opportunity, and time. The constant tradeoffs, calculations and sacrifices required daily to navigate the city drive a layered sense of exclusion, frustration, and disempowerment for urban residents. There are significant gaps and inaccessibility both across the city, and within different neighborhoods, and also a high cost to the travel which can be conducted, in terms of money, time, fear and physical pain. All transport options in Lilongwe are privately provided, “informal” systems, and this study considers the effects and limitation of for-profit, market services in shaping the urban daily experience in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Contemporary American streets are dominated by the automobile, both its movement and storage, which took root in the early 20th century and has been supported by transportation planners in the decades since. Pedestrian fatalities remain stubbornly high – even in cities with “Vision Zero” goals – and cars generate significant levels of both local air pollution and globally-relevant greenhouse gasses. Moreover, the default use of curbside lanes as on-street parking precludes a number of other street designs, such as wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes, transit bulbs and islands, parklets, rain gardens, and street trees. This dissertation probes these long-standing and consequential street layouts with methods that are both highly granular (accurate to the block level), and at the same time, comprehensive to an entire municipality. San Francisco, California, a dense, high-income, and nominally “progressive” American city serves as the case for three separate analyses: an in-person census of roughly 3,000 municipal bus stops, and review of satellite-imagery of nearly 6,400 intersections for the presence or absence of marked crosswalks, and the provision of on-street parking and its obstruction of a growing bike-lane network. Chapter 1 demonstrates that crosswalk provision varies dramatically across San Francisco, from Census tracts with 100% of intersections exhibiting marked crosswalks, to others with less than 10% coverage. Chapter 2 entails the largest bus-stop census of its kind, covering the entire SFMTA system. This approach finds that one third of all bus stops are blocked by on-street parking, and two thirds lack seating of any kind, as well as spatial clusters of stop amenities. Indeed, both high-quality bus stops and marked crosswalks are present to a far greater extent in the city’s northern half, unexplained fully by transit service, density, or pedestrian volumes. Lastly, Chapter 3 identifies fifty miles of angled parking in San Francisco, a format that roughly doubles on-street parking capacity, and decreases the opportunity for high-quality bicycle lanes. These studies provide both salient datasets to guide San Francisco’s street improvements (of which some progress at City Hall has already occurred), and serve as proof of concepts for planners and researchers elsewhere to probe their own blocks granularly and at scale. Indeed, this dissertation demonstrates new frontiers in applied urban analytics, and broadens and challenges the academic literature on transportation equity. It does so by expanding the types of street elements to be spatialized across neighborhoods, and demonstrates how the provision of seemingly-mundane features such as bus stops, crosswalks, and on-street parking can mirror (and exacerbate) other long-running investment disparities.

Immigrants now comprise the largest share of the population of the United States since 1850, with continued increases projected into the foreseeable future. Most foreign-born residents come from Latin America and other developing countries. Nationwide, they tend to travel by cheaper and more sustainable modes of transportation upon arrival, gradually adopting American habits of driving over time. A challenge for planners concerned with reducing the impact of automobile travel and providing an equitable transportation system is to understand and capitalize on the motivations for immigrant travel that would allow them to meet their travel needs without relying on cars. In this mixed-methods dissertation, I investigate three questions about the nature of how immigrants travel in the San Francisco Bay Area, a fairly transit- and bicycle-friendly metropolitan region, with these sustainability and equity questions in mind:

1. How do travel patterns differ between low-income immigrants and other population subgroups?

2. What influences cycling among immigrants and non-immigrants? More specifically, to what extent do individual factors, the social environment, and the built environment predict bicycling, and how do their effects differ between immigrants and non-immigrants?

3. What factors contribute to the cycling experience for low-income Latino immigrants?

First, how do travel patterns differ between low-income immigrants and other population subgroups? I use a custom-designed intercept survey to describe the frequency of travel by each mode of transportation, in addition to individual perceptions and personal experiences related to public transit and bicycling. I find fairly small but statistically significant differences in mode use between immigrants and non-immigrants: immigrants travel up to a day per week less frequently than non-immigrants by each mode of transportation except walking. When controlling for socioeconomic and certain built environment characteristics, many differences between immigrants and non-immigrants diminish. Most significantly, however, Latin American immigrants substantially reduce their transit use as incomes rise, while Latina women of all income groups very rarely ride a bicycle. Certain perceptions and attitudes about transportation also differ significantly among nativity groups. Low-income immigrants are least likely to perceive bicycling as an option to meet their travel needs. They are also less likely to take transit or ride a bicycle when they have an option to drive.

Second, to what extent do individual factors, the social environment, and the built environment predict bicycling, and do their effects differ between immigrants and non-immigrants? This question uses the dissertation conceptual framework to test how each of those three factors influence one another, and how they affect cycling. Relying on a subset of the same survey results as in the previous chapter, I use a set of structural equations models to estimate the likelihood of bicycling based on socioeconomic characteristics, including nativity, perceptions and attitudes, social networks, and urban form, accounting for the endogeneity of these influences. I find many similarities in what influences cycling among immigrants and non-immigrants. Unexpectedly, once perceptions and social factors are accounted for, objective measures of the built environment matter little in predicting bicycling. However, cycling is associated with positive perceptions of how the built environment supports cycling. Bicycling itself influences both perceptions of the difficulty of cycling and cycling social networks. Findings suggest two keys to supporting cycling: addressing how people view neighborhood safety and how well infrastructure meets cyclists' needs.

Third, what factors contribute to the cycling experience for low-income Latino immigrants? Interviews with about two dozen Latino immigrants reveal that a number of factors beyond cost, safety, and urban form encourage people to bicycle. People described cycling emotionally, empowering in the face of life obstacles. New immigrants can use bicycling as a means to learn their way around a new city, though some find it difficult to navigate when directions and information are not readily available in their native languages. But more than anything, benefits of bicycling were tied to certain social values that many interviewees held, such as a desire to protect future generations by traveling more sustainably. Some have the perception that bicycle planning has been fundamentally unfair to their community and other communities of color. Cycling investments that tie into social networks present in immigrant neighborhoods may motivate others to establish a bicycling habit.

Each chapter of this dissertation contributes to a different component of the literature on immigrants and travel. As a whole, the dissertation leads readers from a discrete choice view of travel behavior to one influenced by psychology and social and cultural elements of human environments. I argue that planning for sustainability and equity in transportation requires adoption of measures that address the soft influences on travel. While investing in infrastructure is important, it is not enough: increasing neighborhood and traffic safety and improving perceptions of transit and cycling relative to driving will help facilitate immigrant travel.