How do increasingly rationalized or bureaucratic structures affect a growing organization’s retention of characteristics that are felt to be critical to the organization and its output? Most organizational research and theory suggest that as organizations develop, their structures inevitably undergo rationalization or bureaucratization, regardless of the organizations’ initial structures. This dissertation examines which bureaucratic structures destroy, enhance, or have little discernable effect upon an expanding organization’s essential characteristics.

This chapter examines how a developing organization has nurtured certain characteristics while undergoing growth and some aspects of Weberian bureaucratization. Past researchers have examined how some organizations have striven to exist, and even thrive, based on value-rational structures constructed explicitly to counteract the presumed pitfalls of rational-legal bureaucratic structures. When subjected to both internal coordination issues and environmental pressures associated with organizational growth, many of these organizations drastically changed their structures and ethics or “died.” This chapter adds to the organizational literature by analyzing how one such alternatively structured organization has, for the most part, managed to maintain certain aspects of its value-rational structures while adopting some rational-legal structures. Another chapter further discusses how the organization has successfully negotiated and even shaped environmental pressures while gradually adopting certain rational-legal characteristics.

UC Berkeley SafeTREC, in collaboration with California Walks, launched the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program (CPBSP) to reduce pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities and serious injuries in California. We partner with communities across California to discuss, plan, and implement safety improvements and projects. The CPBSP prioritizes working in communities that are at disproportionate risk for road traffic injuries and addressing the safety needs of people who are underserved by traditional transportation resources and planning.

This report provides highlights from the 2023 CPBSP.

The Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST) is a collaborative effort between the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at the University of California Berkeley and California Walks (Cal Walks) with funding from the California Office of Traffic Safety. Its main objective is to promote pedestrian and bicycle safety by educating residents and safety advocates, empowering community partners to advocate for safety improvements in their neighborhoods, and fostering collaborations with local officials and agency staff.

Since 2009, the program has conducted 126 community workshops across California. The program works with a planning committee of local stakeholders to plan a workshop tailored to the community’s needs and priorities. The Planning Committee recruits participants for the workshop, and together, the planning committee and workshop participants create a customized action plan that includes a comprehensive assessment of pedestrian and bicycle conditions in areas of interest within the community and identifies short-, mid-, and long-term projects to address safety concerns discussed during the workshop.

SafeTREC conducted our annual CPBST survey in the spring of 2024 with planning committee members from communities that had hosted CPBST workshops over the past five years (2019-2023). The objective of the survey was to evaluate the progress of the action plans formulated during each workshop and to determine if the communities needed additional support from the project team.

The Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST) is a joint effort of the University of California Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (UCB SafeTREC) and California Walks (Cal Walks). Founded in 2009, the Community Pedestrian Safety Training program was expanded in 2016 to include bicycle safety improvements. The purpose of the CPBST is to:

1. Educate local residents and safety advocates on how to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety;

2. Empower community partners to advocate for safety improvements in their neighborhoods; and

3. Strengthen collaborations with local officials and agency staff to make California neighborhoods safer and more pleasant for walking and bicycling.

The Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST) is a joint effort of the University of California Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (UCB SafeTREC) and California Walks (Cal Walks). Founded in 2009, the Community Pedestrian Safety Training program was expanded in 2016 to include bicycle safety improvements. The purpose of the CPBST is to:

Educate local residents and safety advocates on how to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety; Empower community partners to advocate for safety improvements in their neighborhoods; and Strengthen collaborations with local officials and agency staff to make California neighborhoods safer and more pleasant for walking and bicycling.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of a housing affordability crisis in the United States threatened a growing number of families with displacement from their homes and communities, with minoritized and low-income families at highest risk. Vulnerable individuals may also experience a sense of displacement pressure even without moving, if circumstances in their neighborhood contribute to social and cultural conflict and exclusion. Relatively little is known about how residential displacement and displacement pressure affect health at the population scale.

This dissertation explores the health implications of displacement and displacement pressure from the lens of unaffordable housing and gentrification. The first study analyzed population health survey data to show that moving in search of less expensive housing was associated with worse self-rated general health, greater psychological distress, less walking for leisure, fewer preventive visits, and more emergency department visits among California renters, relative to not having moved. The second study leveraged longitudinal data from a large, integrated health care system to assess relationships between gentrification and hypertension and diabetes control. Findings suggested that gentrification may support—or at least not harm—cardiometabolic health for some residents, but inconsistent associations across population subgroups emphasized the need to ensure that neighborhood development does not exacerbate health disparities. The third study systematically reviewed health associations of interventions to improve housing affordability and stability, finding moderate-certainty evidence that eviction moratoriums were associated with reduced COVID-19 cases and deaths, but certainty of evidence was low for health associations of most included interventions.

Taken together, results suggest that while displacement due to unaffordable housing is tightly linked to poor health, gentrification may have health benefits that outweigh the harms of displacement and displacement pressure for some residents, and interventions to promote housing affordability and stability may be necessary but not sufficient to support improved health. Better understanding how housing and neighborhood supports and stressors originate from urban planning and social policies and go on to impact population health and well-being can help inform more effective policies to improve equity in both housing and health.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusions

The Community Pedestrian Safety Training Program (CPST), funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS), was established in 2009 to help promote informed community awareness, advocacy, planning, and programming in reducing pedestrian injuries and fatalities. Originally considering pedestrian safety only, the program was expanded to include bicycle safety in 2016 and became known as the Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program (CPBST). The program is a statewide project of the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), a research center created in collaboration with the Institute of Transportation Studies and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and California Walks (Cal Walks), a nonprofit organization that specializes in promoting communities that are more just, inclusive, and walkable. SafeTREC and Cal Walks have worked with dozens of communities across California to develop localized recommendations to improve the safety of walking and biking in their respective communities. The CPBST includes a series of planning meetings and site visits that culminate in a community-centered workshop that details crash data trends, walking and biking assessments and includes programmatic and infrastructure strategies to ameliorate traffic safety concerns.

Over 3,600 people died in traffic crashes in California in 2019; more than one in four people who died was a pedestrian or bicyclist (NHTSA). The burden of death and injury is unequally distributed - based on mode type, on race and ethnicity, and on income - as a consequence of historic and structurally inequitable funding and policy decisions (Archer, Sandt, Santana). Our current road network is a dichotomy of areas that connect people to things they need and underserved communities with restricted mobility. The Safe System approach offers transportation professionals with a new way of approaching safety and to improve roadways and mobility.

Originally introduced in Sweden in 1997, the Safe System approach has been gaining momentum in California and nationally with severalhigh visibility reports and publications by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Towards Zero Foundation, the Safe System Consortium, and the National Safety Council. This approach views human life and health as the paramount consideration when designing a road network (Towards Zero Foundation). The goal of a Safe System is to eliminate fatal and serious injuries for all road users by proactively putting safeguards in place and working towards sustainable mobility.

Traditionally, human behavior was considered to be the primary variable associated with traffic injury. The Safe System approach refocuses efforts to emphasize transportation system design and operation. It inherently places an emphasis on non-motorized users who are at a higher risk of death or serious injury. Most resources, including the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), identify the key components of a Safe System as some combination of safe road users, safe vehicles, safe speeds, safe roads, and post-crash care. This Safe System further anticipates that people will make mistakes or have momentary lapses of attention, and acknowledges that the human body has a limited injury tolerance. This approach works to improve safety for all road users through multiple layers of protection, where no individual layer is 100% protective, but when several layers are combined, the overall risk is reduced.

Few resources, if any, address how to apply the Safe System framework in community engagement and planning efforts. As written, this approach relies primarily on transportation agencies to commit to a paradigm shift and adapt their work accordingly. Through our Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Training Program, UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) and the nonprofit agency, California Walks (Cal Walks), adapted FHWA’s Safe System elements and principles to not only make it more applicable for grassroots community engagement but also to strengthen the impact of the approach. This brief will provide an overview of our thought process and set the stage for future efforts.