In response to a worsening homelessness crisis, Los Angeles City and County have recently looked to accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — small second homes on the same lot as a single-family home — as a part of the solution. Pilot programs in both jurisdictions offer homeowners subsidies for ADU construction in exchange for housing a person experiencing homelessness for between three and 10 years. In this paper, I evaluate the scalability, longevity, efficacy, political feasibility, and cost-effectiveness of these programs compared to traditional multifamily supportive housing. In doing so, I employ the metric of cost per year of affordability, to compare cost- effectiveness for programs of varying duration. I find that while ADU programs may be more politically feasible and have moderate potential to be scaled up, they will encounter significant difficulties in reaching that potential. They lack the longevity of traditional supportive housing, will either prove less cost-effective or will depend on homeowner contributions that may not materialize, and will have mixed effects on quality of life for formerly unhoused residents, among other hurdles. With private lenders still wary of the ADU market, greater scale and cost-effectiveness may be achieved by fostering private ADU investment, offering fee waivers to homeowners who agree to house a person experiencing homelessness, and supporting unhoused residents more directly with housing vouchers.

Transit ridership is on the wrong track across America. Yet until 2016, the San Francisco Bay Area appeared immune to the ridership declines plaguing most other cities. However, in 2017, Bay Area ridership began to fall, both regionwide and on almost all major transit operators. But this decline has not occurred uniformly. Thus, to help explain why transit ridership has changed, this report elucidates how, where, and when it has changed across the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission region in the past decade. To answer these questions, I analyze ridership data for the region as a whole and for three of its largest operators in depth. Following this, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis that simultaneously considers the various factors that have influenced ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).While the landscape of transit use in Northern California is varied and shifting, I find and detail three significant trends. First, while the Bay Area had appeared to have stronger ridership than much of the rest of the country until recently, gains at major Bay Area transit agencies masked longer-term declines in the rest of the region. Second, the region’s largest operators are suffering from severe and deepening peaking problems: ridership during off-peak periods and in off-peak directions has cratered, while ridership at peak periods and in peak directions remains steady. Finally, I find that jobs, and particularly concentrated employment, explain far more of variation in ridership than any other determinant analyzed, including factors like service provided. Policymakers must therefore make the difficult decision of whether to channel resources towards the most crowded trip types, to alleviate crowding and double down on their strongest market, or towards slumping trips types, to shore up the weakest parts of the transit network despite their limited control over them.

Public investment in transit increased following the Great Recession, yet transit use nationally mostly fell, even prior to the 2020 pandemic. We investigate this troubling disjuncture by comparing transit ridership trends during the 2010s in two of America’s largest regions: Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. While both California regions lost transit riders, we see substantial differences in the scale, timing, geography, and modes of these declines. In the LA area, ridership fell longer and further, spread more across routes, times, and sub-regions and concentrated on the region’s dominant operator. In both regions, increasing auto access appears to have played a central role, albeit in different ways. Greater LA saw increased automobile ownership, particularly among high-propensity transit riders. In the Bay Area, as jobs and housing have dispersed, ridehail services like Lyft and Uber may have eroded non-commute transit use.

This report presents and reviews the available sources of data on public transit riders and ridership. We intend it to be a resource for those who manage or simply wish to understand U.S. transit. In conducting this review, we consider the advantages and disadvantages of publicly available data on transit from a variety of public and private sources. We consider as well the relatively scarcer and less available sources of data on other providers of shared mobility, like ride-hail services, that compete with and complement public transit, as well as pieces we see as missing from the transit analytics pie. We conclude by discussing how data gaps both align with existing inequities and enable them to continue, unmeasured, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has made closing these gaps all the more important.

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 a pressing concern, while very few had plans to maintain pandemic fare suspensions.