Herbie Huff, a Research Associate at the Lewis Center, and Madeline Brozen, Program Manager of the Lewis Center’s Complete Streets Initiative, recently co-authored a letter disagreeing with the measure of congestion used in a recent story about bike lanes and traffic on the popular blog site, FiveThirtyEight. In the original article, the FiveThirtyEight authors measure congestion by calculating the V/C ratio, the flow of cars over a period of time divided by the road capacity. Using this measure, they then analyze data from Minneapolis streets and a New York City street containing newly implemented bike lanes. This led the FiveThirtyEight authors to conclude that bike lanes did not greatly increase congestion on these streets. In their letter, Huff and Brozen point out that V/C ratio doesn’t measure congestion, so an analysis based on this ratio can’t draw conclusions about the effects of bike lanes on congestion. They note that traffic congestion could be measured with traffic speed, traffic density, or travel[…]

Professor Emeritus Martin Wachs and ITS Director Brian Taylor authored an article published in the Los Angeles Register in support of creating permanent high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on 14 miles of the Interstate 10 (the San Bernardino Freeway east of downtown) and 11 miles on the Interstate 110 (the Harbor Freeway, south of downtown). Currently, these lanes are part of an LA Metro pilot program. On Thursday, April 24, the Metro Board will vote on whether to continue the lanes, making them a permanent part of the region’s transportation system.  

Recently, Lewis Center and Institute of Transportation Studies Associate Director Juan Matute was quoted in a New York Times story on future plans to connect Los Angeles International Airport to L.A. Metro’s Green Line. Click here for the full story and Mr. Matute’s comments.

Madeline Brozen, manager of the Complete Streets Initiative, joined a lively group of presenters and participants in the Open Streets Summit, held in Los Angeles the weekend of April 6. She  joined Dr. Aaron Hipp of Washington University, the co-author of the report, Open Streets Initiatives: Measuring Success Toolkit and Ed Clancy of CicloSDias, to talk about how to collect data during open streets and how to use these data to evaluate the event. Brozen offered a variety of advice to the international audience, many of which are planning their first open streets events: Your data collection and evaluation plan should be tailored to the size of your event. If you are doing something the size of the Los Angeles event, a participant count wouldn’t be practical, for example. Think about any language barriers and get some data collectors that speak other languages. For the Wilshire route, the UCLA research team included members who speak Korean and others that spoke Spanish to do the[…]

On Tuesday, April 14, Dr. Ann Owens, Assistant Professor in the sociology department at USC, spoke to a full room of 60 about her research on the effects of federal housing policy on the deconcentration of poverty. To establish some context for her research questions and methods, Dr. Owens explained that housing policy has become the major urban policy, tasked with addressing racial and class-based inequities and deconcentrating poverty. Since the end of urban renewal, scholars and policymakers have come to a consensus that poverty concentration contributes to a negative cycle that harms individuals and communities. Urban housing policy since the ’80s has sought to decrease poverty concentration, with the demolition of public housing and the rise of dispersed forms of aid such as Section 8 vouchers and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Did this work? Dr. Owens finds little evidence that there is a relationship between the dispersion of assisted housing units and the deconcentration of poverty. Using Census data[…]

How is the ubiquity of smart phones, internet connectivity, and real-time information changing transportation? With innovators like Google and start-ups like Lyft entering the transportation arena, what role can government play? On March 20, 2014, planners, policymakers, and thought leaders convened at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles to explore these questions. The forum, entitled Digital Cities, Smarter Transportation, was arranged by the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. The forum’s audience was composed of a variety of professionals and thought leaders, including staff from the Mayor’s Office and various Council Offices in the City of LA, consultants, researchers, staff from regional agencies such as Metro and the Southern California Association of Governments, and local press outlet Streetsblog. Panelists discussed recent, far-reaching changes. Parking meters can now communicate with a central server to set prices, and streets can sense whether or not parking spaces are occupied and whether or not[…]

An ongoing research project on teens and travel led by Lewis Center Faculty Fellow Evelyn Blumenberg and Lewis Center Director Brian Taylor was referenced in a recent CBS story about declining automobile usage. Blumenberg, Taylor, and their research team find that young Americans today are traveling much fewer miles than previous generations. In support of the study, the CBS article mentions related research indicating that Americans overall are now driving less than in the past. Although the number of total trips taken by Americans rose in 2013, fuel consumption by Americans driving automobiles has declined. The recession, fuel economy, gas prices, and other economic factors appear to be partially responsible for the decline.

The Urban Institute recently released a report co-authored by Lewis Center affiliates Evelyn Blumenberg (Professor and Chair, UCLA Department of Urban Planning), Michael Smart (Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and former Lewis Center Post-Doctoral Researcher), and Gregory Pierce (Ph.D. candidate in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning). The report, Driving to Opportunity: Understanding the Links among Transportation Access, Residential Outcomes, and Economic Opportunity for Housing Voucher Recipients examines differences in residential location and employment outcomes between voucher recipients with access to automobiles and those without. Overall, the findings underscore the positive role of automobiles in outcomes for housing voucher participants. The principal investigator of the study, Rolf Pendall, Director of the Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, worked with Professor Blumenberg and her Lewis Center colleagues on the project, which has received attention in The Washington Post and The Atlantic Cities. For more information, click here.  

Proposed changes by the Los Angeles Metro Board have cut a number of programs, including bus lines that potentially impacts the Bus Riders Union, the elderly, and the lower-income population. These routes, that potentially assist disadvantaged groups, were part of a discussion on KCRW’s local radio show Which Way LA? with Warren Olney. Urban Planning Professor and Institute of Transportation Studies Director Brian Taylor explained why the Metro Board of Directors is making cutback and drastic choices. Listen to the complete story at KCRW.  

UCLA Transportation Policy & Planning Ph.D. student Kelcie Ralph has been selected to participate in the 22nd Annual Eno Leadership Development Conference hosted by the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C. on June 1-5, 2014. The program allows graduate students pursuing transportation-related degrees the opportunity to participate in an intensive program with prominent transportation executives in government, public, private, and non-profit organizations. The conference provides a first-hand look at the development and implementation of transportation policy, and will feature meetings with top government officials, leaders of associations, and members of Congress and their staff. Attendees will have a unique opportunity to learn how transportation policy is shaped and applied and become better equipped to understand and participate in the policy-making process involved in a career in transportation.