Department of City and Regional Planning

The federal government, along with many states, has adopted policies favoring the provision of public transit by the private sector. During the 1980's, this turn to contracting to halt rising operating deficits prompted several studies into the impact of contracting on operating efficiencies.

Most research found that service contracting saves 10 to 60 percent over publicly operated services. However, no research has yet examined the long-term cost trends of private contracting vis-a-vis public operations. The evaluations done to date often make inappropriate comparisons between small single mode private carriers and large multi-service transit authorities with greater political and social obligations. As a result the findings from these studies are certain to show dramatic savings, yet do not address the underlying dynamics driving transit costs such as political pressures to provide service.

This study examined cost efficiency trends for 142 transit operators providing fixed-route bus transit between 1989 and 1993. This analysis produced no evidence that fully contracted operations cost less per revenue hour than publicly operated services doing no contracting. Vehicle and driver scheduling inefficiencies were found to contribute the most unit costs. Estimated elasticities indicate that a 10 percent reduction in vehicle scheduling inefficiency may produce a 19 percent improvement in cost efficiency. A 10 percent improvement in operator scheduling efficiency shows a 6 percent reduction in operating costs per revenue hour. These findings indicate that transit service contracting may not produce cost savings over the long-term and that strategies of decentralization and changes in the craft structure for labor may be more appropriate ways for relieving the fiscal crisis of public transit.

In this essay, I explore the linkages between my research and that of Professor Devin Fergus, who presented research from his upcoming book, Land of the Fee, at UC Berkeley this past year. Both Professor Fergus and I are concerned with the ways in which practices in the financial services industry contribute to the racial wealth gap and close off historical routes to economic mobility. The essay provides a brief overview of Professor Fergus’s talk and sets it into conversation with my own work on disparities in access to mortgage credit as a lens through which to view the wealth implications of living in the land of the fee. I also highlight some emerging practices in San Francisco that attempt to stem the rise of abusive financial services and help lower-income families and families of color build assets.

Much has been made recently of Los Angeles’s transformation to a transit- friendly city. A speaker at this spring’s Transit & Cities conference at UC Berkeley, hosted by the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, lamented the increasingly prohibitive housing prices in Downtown LA, even as there is demand for commuters to live closer to work and spend less time in their cars. Yet the traditional view of transit riders of “necessity” versus “choice” pits low-income bus riders against more affluent rail riders and raises questions about the much higher cost per rider of rail. What can planning scholars and practitioners do to inform and enlighten the political process around rail and bus development? What are the metrics by which we should evaluate investment in different forms of transit infrastructure before and after it is built? What should be the relationship between equity, cost, and political feasibility? The BPJ editors posed these questions to Professor Martin Wachs of UCLA and Professor Ethan Elkind of UC Berkeley after their recent IURD Transit & Cities lecture on Elkind’s 2014 book, Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail and the Future of the City (UC Press). The talk focused on the history of rail politics in LA and served as a useful springboard for further discussion in this journal on the role of planners today in promoting equitable mobility in cities.

Identifying how and to what extent the poor and most vulnerable in society are able to demand and access safe water as they define it is the practical realization of the human right to water. The explicit international recognition of the right to water and sanitation in 2010 is significant in that it obligates nations to recognize safe water for human consumption primarily as a social good, a significant point of contention after decades of global water politics. However, there remains a large gap between the international human right to water and on-the-ground determinants of water access and reliability. How can the right to water turn from being an abstract legal principle into policies and interventions that can be implemented and measured? This paper con- tributes to the considerable literature on the right to water and basic services delivery by assessing three critical mechanisms that inhibit the ability of the urban poor to exercise their right to water. Of particular concern in this paper is the prevalent role of small-scale providers and household co-production, the so-called non-state actors on whom much of the world’s poor depend to provide water and other basic services. Drawing from the normative content of the rights framework and literature on rights-based approaches to devel- opment against evidence of how states are undertaking water sector reforms and implementing the right to water and sanitation, this paper argues for the need to reconsider the concept of third-party duty bearers. Governments have an explicit role in maintaining dual systems of sanctioned and unsanctioned urban spaces and forms of service delivery that result in inequitable access to water and sanitation in violation of human rights.

Community Violence Intervention (CVI) involves recruiting likely gun violence offenders using street outreach and offering mentorship, social services and other supports to discourage future firearm violence. Grounded in public health, CVI interventions identify an individual’s risk factors and work to enhance protective and buffering factors that can help prevent a client from offending. This paper reviews evaluations of CVI interventions to understand how participants’ risk factors are defined and measured. We used keywords to identify 38 published evaluations of 32 different CVI interventions that recruited community members and used street-outreach as the primary mode of engagement. We then used the PRISMA scoping review methodology to identify categories of risk and protective factors to screen each published evaluation for whether and how they measured participants’ risk, protective and buffering factors at program onset. We found that 56% (18/32) of evaluations included some demographic information about participants and 44% (14/32) provided additional details about their educational or employment status. The criminal justice history was reported in 59% (19/32) and gang or group affiliation in 47% (15/32) of the evaluations we reviewed. The CVI participants’ history related to gun violence was documented in 53% (17/32). Far fewer evaluations documented potential assets, buffering or protective factors of CVI participants: only 16% (5/32) reported on whether any clients were receiving social services at intake and only 6% (2/32) documented any clients’ strengths or protective factors. We also found that no two programs captured the same information about gang, criminal justice, gun violence or social risk factors. Preliminary findings suggest that many CVI programs may not be capturing whether clients face known risk factors for future gun use, and that these programs rarely capture potential protective and buffering factors that might inform program service delivery and potentially enhance the likelihood that interventions will help prevent future gun use. This study aims to support the emerging field of CVI as it works to build evidence that these interventions successfully address the specific needs of urban young people and prevent them from engaging in firearm offending.

Local governments working in partnership with communities can institutionalize practices that promote health equity. We offer a case study of how one city in the US is implementing Health in All Policies (HiAP) with the explicit aim of promoting health equity. We use participant observations, original document reviews and interviews to describe how Richmond, California, is building new partnerships, programs and practices with community-based organizations and within government itself as part of the implementation of its HiAP Ordinance. We also report on indicators that were identified by community and government stakeholders for tracking progress toward improving place-based determinants of population health. We find that the responsibility for implementing Richmond's HiAP Ordinance rests on a new institution within local government and this entity is building new partnerships, promoting innovative policies and augmenting practices toward greater health equity. We also reveal how city governments and community partners can collaboratively track progress toward health equity using locally gathered data.

Air pollution, specifically PM2.5, has become a significant global concern owing to its detrimental impacts on public health. Even so, the high-resolution monitoring of air pollution is still a challenge on a global scale. To cope with this, machine learning (ML) techniques have been utilized to infer the concentration of air pollutants at a fine scale. In this study, we propose DeepAir, a learning framework for estimating PM2.5 concentrations at a fine scale with sparsely distributed observations. DeepAir integrates a pre-trained convolutional neural network with the LightGBM method. This framework estimates the PM2.5 concentration of a given patch, utilizing a synergy of geographical information, meteorological conditions, and satellite observations. We select California as the focal region and train the model with data from 2014 to 2017 provided by 130 PM2.5 observation stations in the state. Upon training, the model can be applied to estimate the daily PM2.5 concentrations at 1 km resolution across California. Our methodology meticulously incorporates meteorological variables, with a particular emphasis on wildfire propagation, and contemplates the complex interplay of various features. To ascertain the efficacy of our model, we employ the 10-fold cross-validation technique, which confirms that our model surpasses traditional ML and standalone deep learning methods.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328780.].

BACKGROUND: Gun violence is a critical public health issue, contributing to the disproportionate burden of health inequities among racially and economically marginalized populations. Advance Peace, a community-driven gun reduction program that integrates street outreach workers to interrupt conflicts with trauma-informed programming to provide mentorship and support for young people at the center of urban gun violence, may be a strategy to reduce gun violence and build healthy communities. We assessed whether the implementation of Advance Peace in Fresno, California was associated with a reduction in gun-related violence, including homicides and assaults. We hypothesized that post-implementation of Advance Peace, there would be a reduction in both gun-related homicides and assaults. METHODS: Leveraging crime statistics from the Fresno Police Department on gun-related homicides and assaults between January 2014 and June 2023, we evaluated the impact of Advance Peace programming, implemented beginning in July 2021, on gun violence in Fresno. Descriptive analysis assessed average gun violence rates over time. We used interrupted time series models to assess the rates of gun violence associated with the implementation of Advance Peace in Fresno. RESULTS: In Fresno, there was evidence of a reduction in crime rates following the introduction of Advance Peace intervention. Two years post-intervention, there was a 46% decrease in the rate of all gun-related crimes, including both homicides and assaults (rate ratio: 0.54, 95% CI: 0.36-0.81). The intervention was also associated with a reduction in the rate of gun-related homicides (RR = 0.45, 95% CI: 0.21-0.95) and the rate of gun-related assaults (RR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.38-0.89). CONCLUSION: Findings from this study demonstrate that Advance Peace may be an effective strategy to reduce gun violence.