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

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.

Advancing the tools needed for equity analysis of transportation investments requires new frameworks that consider the real world conditions of vulnerable communities and link to travel behavior analysis, transportation infrastructure, and policy assessment practices. 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 systematic constraints play in shaping opportunity spaces for certain travelers, which can skew assessments of transportation costs and benefits and drive inequitable and harmful transportation investments.

This research project will develop a methodological framework for extending travel demand modeling, to explicitly integrate constraints on traveler decision-making, such as racial and income disparities in access to travel alternatives. This framework requires new approaches of modeling traveler choice sets, and using non-traditional data sources, such as data on auto insurance premiums and auto loan availability. Developing methods to integrate such traveler constraints requires innovation in the measurement of latent effects that vary across communities and how best to associate these effects with the travel choice generation process.

The required research activities include a literature and data review, testing of measurement approaches and choice model structures for capturing traveler constraints, and performing a series of statistical and model checking tests, to arrive at clear recommendations for improvements in modeling practices.