UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

The Northeastern San Fernando Valley is a historic, passionate, and diverse equestrian community in suburban Los Angeles. It hosts approximately three-quarters of the equestrian population of the City of Los Angeles. Though the region has an extensive network of equestrian trails, many of these trails are unofficial, not clearly mapped, or lacking in safe infrastructure. Additionally, many community members have expressed concerns about future access to the trails given proposed land use changes. In response, the City of Los Angeles and the Office of Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, who represents the Seventh Council District encompassing many of these neighborhoods, are working to improve equestrian mobility throughout this region and to other key recreational areas. To supplement this effort, I conducted a safety project to both understand the existing activity patterns of equestrians and to identify potential improvements to the network. This project seeks to answer the question: “What transportation safety improvements can be made to the equestrian network in the Northeastern San Fernando Valley?” In order to identify equestrian transportation safety improvements, I analyzed GIS data and qualitative information from equestrian community stakeholders, and reviewed equestrian best practices from official guidelines and from other equestrian communities. I then constructed a list of potential improvements which will aid Council District Seven in creating and maintaining a safer equestrian transportation network.

Biking is a crucial mobility option for cities as it is dramatically more space-efficient than cars. Los Angeles, however, has failed over the last ten years to increase the viability of biking, as the number of cyclist deaths and serious injuries has not changed, while ridership has stagnated, and may be decreasing. One reason for this may be that LA’s bike infrastructure planning does not take into account where people are actually biking. This project examines the many benefits that an understanding of bike ridership patterns can provide for bike infrastructure planning. In order to estimate LA’s bike ridership, several data sources are analyzed through spatial, temporal, and longitudinal lenses. One key source of data was recorded trip data from Metro Bike Share, Los Angeles’s rentable bike share program. I find that bike share users exhibit travel patterns that closely resemble those of other cyclists within the same areas, suggesting that bike share data can serve as a useful proxy for broader ridership trends. Further, this report shows how bike ridership data can enable cities to invest proactively in areas where ridership is growing, build adaptively around shifting time-of-day trends, prioritize important connectivity bottlenecks, and identify interventions that will impact the greatest number of cyclists. For two examples, Koreatown exhibits the most nighttime ridership and areas around UCLA and USC exhibit the fastest-growing ridership compared to all other LA neighborhoods. Finally, ridership volume is a key factor in understanding cyclist risk, and in strategically leveraging the “safety-in-numbers” phenomenon for cyclists.

This capstone examines how Indian Railways allocates scarce track time between train operations and track maintenance. The same track that carries passenger and freight trains must also be made available for inspection, repair, and renewal. The study asks how institutional design and departmental incentives shape this allocation, and what changes can better align Operations and Maintenance with the wider goals of safety, reliability, and efficiency.The report uses a focused case-study method. It reviews Indian Railways’ rules on rolling block planning, line capacity, and maintenance access. It then studies six heavily used corridors through six indicators: passenger punctuality, freight speed, maintenance blocks granted against demand, block productivity, block overruns, and track-related failures. It also draws lessons from Britain, Japan, and India’s Dedicated Freight Corridor experience.The main finding is that the current system produces a stable but inefficient outcome. Trains continue to run and maintenance continues to happen, but both take place under congestion, rationing, repeated adjustment, uneven productivity, and weak commitment to planned blocks. The evidence shows that the problem is not simply too many trains or too few maintenance blocks. It is a governance problem. Departments work with different information, face different targets, and often protect themselves through defensive behavior.The report recommends a corridor-level pilot to make track-time decisions more credible. The pilot would require clearer maintenance requests, stronger commitment as execution approaches, visible tracking of deviations, recovery of lost maintenance time, and KPIs that measure not only block grants but also execution quality and corridor outcomes.

Caltrans District 7 freeway corridors require evaluation to determine their capacity to support effective, high-capacity regional bus-based trunk service. While freeways serve as the region’s mobility backbone, transit performance remains uneven due to institutional fragmentation and infrastructure constraints. This analysis identifies the conditions required for reliable, all-day service and applies them to a regional screening framework.The study uses a comparative case study approach, examining U.S. freeway corridors and international high-capacity busway systems using a consistent unit of comparison: Type 1 all-day trunk services. Quantitative performance indicators, including ridership, reliability, and cost efficiency, are paired with agency documentation and practitioner input to identify recurring drivers of performance.Five core factors govern corridor outcomes: right-of-way continuity, trunk consolidation, station interface and throughput, governance coordination, and terminal capacity. Right-of-way continuity defines the operating baseline, while station interface often becomes the primary constraint as demand increases.These findings are applied through a District 7 screening framework that evaluates segments based on Market Potential and Implementation Feasibility. The framework can be used to prioritize corridors for deeper technical study. Implementation requires coordinated governance across operators and early corridor-level branding to maintain service clarity and network legibility.

This capstone evaluates the effectiveness of three residential intersection treatments, all-way stop control, neighborhood traffic circles, and mini-roundabouts, in reducing vehicle speeds, a key factor in traffic safety. In response to growing cut-through traffic on residential streets and the City of Los Angeles’ efforts through Vision Zero and the Mobility Plan, this study combines a literature review with a before-and-after analysis of 33 intersections across the city using weighted averages and paired t-tests. Results show mixed outcomes for all-way stop conversions, with some intersections showing reduced speeds and others showing little change or increases, likely due to limited driver compliance. Neighborhood traffic circles, on the other hand, consistently reduced both average and 85th percentile speeds, especially at locations with greater physical deflection, confirming their effectiveness as a traffic calming tool. Mini-roundabouts, while promising in the literature, showed modest results in this study due to a limited sample size. Overall, the analysis finds that physical design features, such as center island size and narrower travel paths, more reliably slow traffic than signs and paint alone. Based on these findings, the capstone recommends coupling all-way stops with midblock treatments, expanding the use of traffic circles with improved geometric design, and piloting additional mini-roundabouts on higher-volume Neighborhood Enhanced Network corridors. These strategies can help Los Angeles retrofit its residential streets to reduce vehicle speeds, improve safety, and better support walking and biking, especially in neighborhoods facing growing traffic impacts from cut through drivers.

This report examines the growing yet understudied phenomenon of urban vehicle residency, wherein economically active individuals, including professionals, retirees, and students—reside in personal vehicles due to housing constraints and shifting employment norms. Despite their stable engagement in urban economies, these residents are systematically excluded from infrastructure access through restrictive parking policies and service models misaligned with their needs. Using ethnographic interviews and spatial analysis, the study identifies three distinct resident typologies: Strategic Budgeters, Lifestyle Optimizers, and Self-Sufficient Nomads. While their motivations vary, all emphasize the need for legal, safe parking and basic infrastructure, while expressing resistance to institutionalized or service-heavy programs. The report reframes vehicle residency as a form of housing innovation and proposes the adaptive reuse of underutilized municipal parking garages as a scalable, infrastructure-based intervention. Garages provide environmental protection, utility access, and operational advantages over street parking or crisis-response models. A user-informed, three-tiered service model is introduced, alongside a spatially driven site selection strategy. A policy framework, drawing from carshare parking regulation, outlines steps for regulatory integration, stakeholder engagement, and interagency coordination. This model offers a cost-effective, inclusive alternative to enforcement-centric approaches. By leveraging existing infrastructure to accommodate diverse housing strategies, the findings contribute to urban planning literature on informal housing, mobility, and infrastructure adaptation.

This policy brief examines the potential for land value capture (LVC) strategies to fund the completion of the Los Angeles River Bikeway (LARiverWay) through the San Fernando Valley, a critical gap in the city’s active transportation network. Despite strong regional momentum around river revitalization, several segments remain unfunded. This report analyzes three incomplete segments—4, 5, and 7—through a one-mile radius land use, demographic, and zoning study. Findings reveal divergent development patterns north and south of the river. The north side exhibits more flexible zoning, higher renter-occupancy rates, and stronger housing demand, suggesting greater LVC feasibility. In contrast, the south side is constrained by single-family zoning and lower growth. The report recommends tailoring LVC tools, such as commercial linkage fees, to fit neighborhood conditions. It also proposes reclassifying the bikeway as a transit corridor to unlock Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) incentives and revising outdated overlays to support higher-density development. Additionally, the report advocates for expanding or supplementing the existing Project Impact Assessment (PIA) fee and forming public-private partnerships with commercial stakeholders. If implemented, these strategies could equitably finance the bikeway while fostering mixed-use growth and improved access to transit, recreation, and housing.

California faces significant challenges related to housing affordability and climate vulnerability, especially in rural and disadvantaged communities. The Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) grant program, administered by the California Strategic Growth Council, seeks to address these issues by funding affordable housing projects near public transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This research critically examines the AHSC program’s scoring and selection methodologies, highlighting structural biases that disadvantage rural applicants due to lower scores on greenhouse gas reduction metrics. Utilizing quantitative analysis of historical application data from four recent funding cycles and qualitative insights from semi-structured interviews with program administrators and stakeholders, the study identifies key areas of imbalance, such as geographic allocation practices leading to suboptimal environmental outcomes and scoring methodologies inadequately capturing the long-term benefits of affordable housing. The analysis demonstrates no significant differences in greenhouse gas reduction between projects from disadvantaged versus non-disadvantaged communities, underscoring effective integration of equity objectives. To enhance equity and effectiveness, the research recommends adopting a revised greenhouse gas efficiency metric, refining geographic goal implementation, and extending evaluation periods. These strategic adjustments can improve fairness, transparency, and overall effectiveness of the AHSC program, enabling better alignment between housing affordability, geographic equity, and environmental goals. The Strategic Growth Council can utilize these findings and recommendations to ensure equitable distribution of funding and to optimize the environmental and social impact of public investments in sustainable housing and transportation solutions.

In 2016, the City of Los Angeles Planning Commission produced the Mobility Plan 2035, an element of the General Plan, which includes bicycle path projects. The city of Los Angeles has struggled to implement the Green Network (Class I Bicycle Path Network) included in the Mobility Plan 2035 and disproportionately distributes cycling infrastructure and green space to more affluent, White neighborhoods. This project aims to answer two research questions: What is the state of existing bicycle path infrastructure in the city of Los Angeles? Given the city’s goals and plans related to bicycle path infrastructure, how should the agency prioritize projects? To answer these questions, I draw on other infrastructure prioritization models and the goals of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to develop a model for prioritizing projects. The model most heavily weights the Equity, Safety, and Network Expansion aspects of projects. It also prioritizes bicycle path segments that would score well on competitive state grants such as the Caltrans Active Transportation Program. The final weighted model better prioritized bicycle path segments crossing through census tracts with high Equity Index scores. Even with this priority, the bicycle path segments with priority scores in the top quintile are still evenly distributed across the city of Los Angeles.This modeling effort highlights the importance of translating the city’s goals into quantifiable measures that provide LADOT with the information necessary to strategically prioritize its infrastructure investments. To improve future prioritization models, I recommend that LADOT focus on collaborating with other departments and community stakeholders to better understand each path segment, including cost-benefit analyses as part of the planning process, and expanding this modeling effort to other assets included in LADOT’s Capital Infrastructure Plan.

Transportation is often necessary for accessing food, medical care, income, and other essential services. This study examines how nine major benefit programs serving low-income households in Los Angeles County, including CalFresh, Medi-Cal, CalWORKs, and transportation-specific programs like Metro LIFE and Metrolink Mobility-4-All, currently support transportation access. Within each program, this analysis evaluates transportation support, enrollment accessibility, and opportunities for integrating transportation across benefit programs. The results show that seven of the nine programs offer some form of transportation benefit, but the level and nature of support for mobility needs vary widely. This analysis defines meaningful transportation access as the ability to use multiple modes of transportation and reach various types of destinations. While most programs offer some form of mobility assistance, these benefits are typically limited to a single mode or destination type, and therefore do not achieve comprehensive transportation access. Without this level of access, low-income individuals, in particular, are left with limited, and often inadequate, options for reaching essential services such as food, healthcare, or employment. This paper concludes with near- and long-term policy recommendations to improve coordination, enhance communication, and draw on other pilots that consolidate transportation benefits into a more coherent, accessible system. The findings highlight how aligning mobility with benefit delivery is essential for building an equitable and effective support system.