UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs

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.

La mitologia popular de California, Ia cual nacio junto con su nombre en una novela romantica de caballeria del siglo XVI, sigue vigente. Alternando el paraiso terrenal pletorico de oro y naranjales con Ia pesadilla urbana de desastres ecologicos y violencia, los dos extremos son metaforas adecuadas para Ia region. Y no solo en Alta California, dado que Baja California juega un papel en Mexico parecido al de su vecino en el norte - el de una economia en creciente desarrollo paralela a condiciones de vida bastante desfavorables para muchos de sus pobladores, soberbios escenarios naturales a! frente a un medio ambiente devastado, y una presencia cultural importante en todo el pais.

The popular mythology about California that began with its name, in a 16'h century·chivalric romance novel, continues today. Alternating between an earthly parad.ie of gold and orange groves, and an urban nightmare of environmental disaster and violence, both extremes are appropriate metaphors for the region. And not only Alta California, as Baja California now holds a place in Mexico similar to that of its neighbor to the north - a rapidly growing economic engine with remarkably poor living conditions for many residents, breathtaking natural landscapes alongside environmental devastation, and an important cultural presence in the country.

In Fifty years of Change on the US-Mexico Border: Growth, Development and Quality of Life, Anderson and Gerber have carried out a fascinating quantitative exercise - the comparison of Mex•can border municipios and US border counties based on the standardization of various economic and social indicators - and integrated it into a book that gives an excellent overview of life along the U.5.-Mexico border and various trends during the last five decades.

Galvanized by the arguments of Hernando De Soto (1980 and 2000), the international development community and many academics have pushed land titling as an essential way to help the people of low-income settlements around the world. However, research has demonstrated that the act of defining property rights is problematic: there are often multiple property rights systems operating in any given place (Payne 2002) and the act of defining rights can generate conflict and violence (Alston et al. 1999). Thus, studying the process of land titling is especially important at the present time. Mexico has one of the longest running and most ambitious land regularization programs, making it an obvious place for research. In Legalizando la Ciudad, Tito Alegria and Gerardo Ordonez present an exemplary case study of land regularization in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. It is unfortunate that the book is only available in Spanish, as it is rich in data and historical analysis of the institutions of land regularization.

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.

Over the course ofthis century, public transit systems in the U.S. have lost most ofthe market share ofmetropolitan travel to private vehicles. The two principal markets that remain for public transit systems are downtown commuters and transit dependents- people who are too young, too old. too poor, or physically unable to drive. Despite thefact that transit dependents are the steadiest customers for most public transit systems. transit policy has tended to focus on recapturing lost markets through expanded suburban bus, express bus, andfued rail systems. Such efforts have collectively proven expensive and only marginally effective. At the same time, comparatively less attention and fewer resources tend to be devoted to improving well-patronized transit service in low­ income, central-city areas serving a high proportion of transit dependents. This paper explores this issue through an examination of both the evolving demographics ofpublic transit ridership, and the reasons for shifts in transit policies toward attracting automobile users onto buses and trains. We conclude that the growing dissonance between the quality of service provided to

inner-city residents who depend on local buses and the level of public resources being spent to attract new transit riders is both economically inefficient and socially inequitable. In light of this. we propose that transportation planners concerned with social justice (and economic efficiency) should re-examine current public transitpolicies andplans.

Economists tend to favour price-based approaches, such as gasoline and carbon taxes, to address the negative impacts of car travel, while urban planners tend to emphasise land use planning such as compact development. In this paper, we argue that the two approaches are synergistic. We use precinct-level data from two California referenda to show that land use planning makes pricing more feasible: voters in dense, transit-oriented neighbourhoods are more willing to support a carbon price and increased gasoline taxes. Political ideology is a more important determinant of voting patterns, but in a closely divided election, land use patterns, public transportation, and other aspects of the built environment can determine the success of a referendum on driving taxes. Our results also imply that the voluminous research on land use and transportation underestimates the long-run impacts of compact development on driving, through ignoring the ways in which urban form shapes the politics of taxation.