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.
Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of individuals. Many scholars have studied people living in homeless shelters and outdoors in tents. An overlooked population is the growing number of the unhoused living in vehicles. We draw on data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Demographic Survey to understand the characteristics of people living in vehicles and the extent to which they differ from the nonvehicular unhoused population. Compared to those living in tents, in makeshift shelters, and in public spaces, people living in vehicles are more likely to be women and to live in larger households with children, and are less likely to be chronically unhoused. These findings will help effectively target policies and services. Safe parking programs can provide temporary relief to those living in vehicles and, if done well, the interventions necessary to transition into permanent housing.
More than 500,000 people experience homelessness in the United States, and many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. We present findings from a survey of 115 U.S. and Canadian transit operators that inquired about homelessness on transit systems. We find that homelessness is broadly present, though more concentrated on central hotspots, and worsened during the pandemic. In response, transit agencies often initiate a combination of punitive and outreach strategies. Based on our findings, we argue for better data collection, establishment of policies and protocols, engagement in outreach strategies, and partnering with service providers.
Problem, research strategy, and findingsLocal governments sometimes approve multifamily housing through a discretionary process, meaning a public body must vote to entitle the proposal before it can seek a building permit. By-right entitlement, in contrast, allows developers to apply directly for a building permit. We tested the hypothesis that by-right approvals are faster. Faster approval can make multifamily development more feasible, which can in turn improve housing affordability. Analyses of approval pathways are often confounded by project size and complexity, but we exploited a provision in the Los Angeles Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) program that allowed many large projects to use by-right approval. Using data from roughly 350 multifamily projects permitted in Los Angeles (CA) from January 2018 through March 2020, we compared approval timelines for both by-right and discretionary projects. We found that by-right projects were permitted 28% faster than discretionary projects, controlling for project and neighborhood characteristics. By-right projects also had less variance in their approval times, suggesting that by-right approval offers not just more speed but more certainty.
Takeaway for practicePlanners should create more opportunities for multifamily housing to be permitted by-right. Despite some selection bias in our study, evidence from the TOC program suggests that creating a by-right option would accelerate approval time and thus substantially benefit housing production. The faster approval timelines, moreover, have been accompanied by an increase in average project size and the number of units reserved for low-income households.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended transit use, finance, and management. To investigate these effects two years into the pandemic, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with senior managers at transit agencies in the most populous U.S. state, California. We found that the pandemic generated many operational and managerial challenges for transit agencies. Ridership plummeted, then slowly recovered, but is still well below pre-pandemic levels at most agencies. Commuter trips to and from major job centers were especially slow to return. In response to decreased demand, public health concerns, and uncertain finances, many agencies cut services and spending early on. As a result, fare revenues declined, in some cases precipitously. However, federal pandemic relief funds proved essential in filling budgetary gaps, stabilizing finances, preventing layoffs, and maintaining services. Other transit subsidies mostly bounced back robustly. Our interviews suggest that, though California transit agencies experimented with free fares, few fareless programs were made permanent. Their challenges include considerable uncertainty associated with future travel demand, looming financial shortfalls at systems that formerly had high farebox recovery and are still drawing on federal pandemic funds to backfill their fare revenue losses, and protracted labor shortages of drivers and mechanics that are preventing many systems from providing desired levels of service.
Traffic impact analysis (TIA), which estimates the traffic impacts of proposed land development, tends to bias against higher density developments in urban areas where traffic is often congested and travel alternatives plentiful. This has important implications for housing supply and affordability, suburban sprawl, and private vehicle dependence. We examine the understudied implication of TIA on housing by drawing on empirical evidence from distinct bodies of research in the transportation and land use planning literatures to describe the mechanisms through which TIA may affect housing market conditions. We conclude that TIAs likely have negative effects on urban housing production and affordability.
The width of street rights-of-way is normally determined by traffic engineering and urban design conventions, without considering the immense value of the underlying land. In this article, I develop an economic framework that can inform decisions on street width, and I use tax parcel data to quantify the widths, land areas, and land value of streets in 20 of the largest counties in the United States. Residential street rights-of-way in the urbanized portion of these counties average 55 ft wide, far greater than the functional minimum of 16 ft required for access. The land value of residential streets totals $959 billion in the urbanized portion of the 20-county sample. In most counties, subdivision regulations are binding. That is, few developers choose to build streets that are wider than code requirements, implying that softening requirements would mean more land devoted to housing and less to streets. Although I highlight the potential for narrower street rights-of-way, I did not consider detailed design issues. Nor did I analyze how any windfall from reduced land requirements would be divided among landowners, developers, and house purchasers.
Traffic-related pollutant concentrations are typically much higher in near-roadway microenvironments, and pedestrian and resident exposures to air pollutants can be substantially increased by the short periods of time spent on and near roadways. The design of the built environment plays a critical role in the dispersion of pollutants at street level; after normalizing for traffic, differences of a factor of ~5 have been observed between urban neighborhoods with different built environment characteristics. We examined the effects of different built environment designs on the concentrations of street-level ultrafine particles (UFP) at the scale of several blocks using the Quick Urban and Industrial Complex (QUIC) numerical modeling system. The model was capable of reasonably reproducing the complex ensemble mean 3D air flow patterns and pollutant concentrations in urban areas at fine spatial scale. We evaluated the effects of several built environment designs, changing building heights and spacing while holding total built environment volumes constant. We found that ground-level open space reduces street-level pollutant concentrations. Holding volume/surface area constant, tall buildings clustered together with larger open spaces between buildings resulted in substantially lower pollutant concentrations than buildings in rows. Buildings arranged on a ‘checkerboard’ grid with smaller contiguous open spaces, a configuration with some open space on one of the sides of the roadway at all locations, resulted in the lowest average concentrations for almost all wind directions. Rows usually prohibit mixing for perpendicular and oblique wind directions, even when there are large spaces between them, and clustered buildings have some areas where buildings border both sides of the roadways, inhibiting mixing. The model results suggest that pollutant concentrations drop off rapidly with height in the first 10 m or so above the roadways. In addition, the simulated vertical concentration profiles show a moderate elevated peak at the roof levels of the shorter buildings within the area. Model limitations and suggestions both for urban design are both discussed.
Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies attracted extensive attention in the past decade. As CAV brings convenience to travel, people's travel behaviors and patterns might change significantly. Existing models, however, cannot comprehensively evaluate the impacts on transportation systems. This study adopted an activity-based approach to evaluate the comprehensive CAV impacts on the transportation system in Southern California. A stated-preference survey was conducted, and captured people's behavior changes associated with CAV deployment. The model prediction demonstrated that the total trip number increased by 9%, with an 13% growth in total car-like mode travel distance. Among all trip purposes, work trips contributed to 49% of total trip number growth and 75% of the increased car-like mode travel distance. The advanced CAV technology alone wouldn’t directly benefit future transportation systems and it is still critical to have appropriate policy interventions in place.
Examination of Key Transportation Funding Programs in California and Their Context assesses the congruence between funding programs and state goals for transportation. Particular attention is given to major funding sources, such the State Operation and Protection Program, and programs designed to promote key state goals, including the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities program, the Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program, the Transformative Climate Communities program, and the Sustainable Transportation Planning Grant program.
