California has a strong interest in reducing the externalities of vehicle travel. Parking policy offers one possible lever. When parking is abundant and free, theory and evidence both suggest that driving will be more attractive, and transit use less so. Taking steps to make free parking less prevalent, therefore, could nudge travel behavior in a more desirable direction. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, moreover, there is interest in the future of telework. Here too, parking could play a role, although its influence is more ambiguous a priori. This project draws on the 2010-2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) to revisit the potential of parking policy to influence travel behavior. Across thousands of users and a broad spectrum of built environments, the CHTS records if a given trip used parking, if the driver paid for it and (if they did) its price, if the parking was on or off-street, and so on. Specifically, the project team analyzed the associations between parking availability and decisions to work from home, drive, and use public transportation were analyzed. The data confirms something that has long been anecdotally intuitive, but never empirically verified that the vast majority of California vehicle trips end in a parking space, and most of those spaces, both on- and off-street, are unpriced. The project team also estimated regressions demonstrating that, even controlling for a host of other factors, the presence of free parking is strongly associated with more vehicle ownership, more driving, and less transit use.

See Project 2022-13 for abstract. This project was combined with 2022-13

What will California’s transportation and land use future look like? Will Californians gain more mobility and housing options that support the state’s economic, social, and climate goals? Or will the car continue to shape what cities look like and how people get around in them? These questions are important because how Californians live and move in the future will be shaped by investments and policies made today. In this project, the researchers investigated the future of transportation, land use, and planning in California by exploring four transportation/land use scenarios for 2050 with a panel of 18 experts. The four scenarios were: (1) more city living and lots of traffic, (2) easy to get around without a car, (3) you’ll need a car to get around, and (4) lots of travel choices, but most will drive. Their consensus opinion was that the most desirable scenario (“Easy to Get Around without a Car”) is also the least likely to materialize, due to faults in the political planning process. Despite promising state policies to increase transportation choices, problematic local land use politics and patterns appear likely to yield a future scenario (“Lots of Travel Choices, but Most Will Drive”) that continues car dependence and chronic congestion, absent a significant rebuilding of government trust and capacity.d

Advancing the tools needed for equity analysis of transportation investments requires new frameworks that consider the conditions of vulnerable communities and link to travel choice behavior measurement, transportation systems infrastructure, and policy. Large-scale urban travel demand models (made up of a system of linked discrete choice models) are widely used to evaluate the costs and benefits of transportation investments and are employed during the transportation decision-making process). Yet, absent from this classic framework is the role that discrimination plays in constraining opportunity spaces for certain travelers, which then skews assessments of transportation costs and benefits and drives inequitable and harmful transportation investments.

This research project will develop a methodological framework for travel demand modeling that explicitly integrates social-political attitudes, such as discrimination in transport services like ride hailing or in economic activity opportunities such as the labor market. This new framework requires new approaches of latent variable measurement of spatially varying discrimination effects, and development of a choice set generation process that links discrimination with restriction of opportunities. Developing methods to integrate social-political attitudes with the travel behavior modeling framework requires innovation in the measurement of latent spatial discrimination effects and how best to associate these effects with the choice generation process. The required research activities include a literature and data review, testing of approaches for integrating discrimination effects in travel choice models, estimating two-mode destination models for LA County, and performing a series of statistical and model checking tests.

California has increasingly turned to place-based, community-driven programs such as Transformative Climate Communities (TCC), the Community Air Protection Program (CAPP), and Regional Climate Collaboratives (RCC) to address the twin priorities of climate change and environmental justice. Transportation improvements are at the heart of these programs because of the potential to mitigate air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and inequities in access to transportation. However, these efforts are inherently difficult to evaluate as they often involve a diverse set of projects with different timelines and locations. Moreover, evaluators often face the challenge of isolating the effects of individual programs. Carefully selected control sites can support this effort, but no two communities are exactly alike, limiting the ability of evaluators to make meaningful comparisons. This research addresses how place-based climate action efforts are being evaluated, and what insights from the broader policy and plan evaluation research literature might inform evaluation design. The focus is on place-based, community-driven programs in California that encompass multiple interventions to address intertwined issues of transportation justice, climate change, and air pollution. While TCC, RCC, CAPP, and the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP) are the most high-profile programs, the project will also consider planning grants such as Sustainable Communities Planning Grants and Community-Based Transportation Plans. For each funded program site the research team will review planning and evaluation documents and annual reports to compile a dataset of data collection and evaluation activities classified by (1) type of activity being assessed (planning vs. implementation), (2) evaluation indicator (e.g. air quality, transportation accessibility), (3) data source (e.g. interviews, air sensors), and program design (e.g. cross-sectional vs. longitudinal, inclusion of control sites). The research team will complement the review of these documents with 10-20 key informant interviews with staff from state and local agencies to help understand how the evaluations are proceeding in practice, and which aspects of place-based program evaluations have proved most valuable, challenging, and scalable to other programs.

Inner-city youth often walk to school and are likely to encounter unsafe streets with higher proportions of pedestrian-automobile crashes. Despite Vision Zero and Safe Routes to School programs, they remain disproportionately represented among traffic fatalities, which are the highest in a decade. But the idea of safe streets goes beyond pedestrian-traffic relationships. As one study of inner-city fifth graders in Los Angeles found, “dangers in their social milieu are a much greater concern for them than the physical milieu, which the walkability research typically emphasizes.” These social dangers influence youth’s choice to frequent traffic-heavy streets like those included in Vision Zero’s high-injury network, as these arterials are perceived safer for walking than more quiet but desolate residential streets. Thus, youth’s urban paths to and from school are informed by “hot spots” (where crime and crash data indicate danger) as well as “safe spots” (where data indicate safety from crime). Therefore, enhancing safety among inner-city youth requires attention to both physical and social relationships. The researchers will work with youth (aged 12-15) to study their journey from school to after school activities in the LA neighborhood of Westlake. This neighborhood falls within the city’s high injury network as defined by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) Vision Zero Plan and includes two Safe Route to School areas. The researchers have built strong community partnerships over a two-decade long history of working in this neighborhood. While their preliminary work with youth in Westlake has found traffic speed to be a top concern among middle-schoolers, youth also carry mental maps of local “sidewalk ecologies” that include bus stops, lighting, social activity, shade, unhoused residents, and vendors, among other factors that shape their routes. This concept of “sidewalk ecology” will be used to emphasize the interaction of both positively and negatively perceived social and physical features that affect mobility. Together with their community partner, the HOLA after-school program, the researchers will prepare walking audits, perform cognitive mapping, document sidewalk ecologies, and conduct follow-up youth interviews. The research will be supported by LADOT pedestrian safety data serving as reference points in mapping the varied routes taken by study participants. By thoroughly documenting and interpretating youth route choices and experiences this research will provide insights into how neighborhood youths perceive streets, and how planners and policymakers can make them safer.

Status: In Progress