Economics and Finance

Assembly Bill (AB) 285 (Friedman, 2019) requires the California Strategic Growth Council (SGC) to submit a report to the Legislature by January 31, 2022, that includes the following:An overview of the California Transportation Plan (CTP). An overview of all regional Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) and any alternative planning strategies, as needed. An assessment of how the implementation of the CTP and regional plans “will influence the configuration of the statewide integrated multimodal transportation system.”  A “review of the potential impacts and opportunities for...

Advances in the sharing economy – such as transportation network companies (e.g., Lyft, Uber) and home sharing (e.g., Airbnb) – have coincided with the increasing need for evacuation resources. While peer-to-peer sharing under normal circumstances often suffers from trust barriers, disaster literature indicates that trust and compassion often increase following disasters, improving recovery through additional resources and support. We hypothesize that trust and compassion could trigger willingness to share transportation and sheltering resources during an evacuation.

Inflation and increased fuel economy have reduced the buying power of the revenues collected from state and federal motor fuel taxes. Because fuel taxes are almost always collected on a per-gallon basis, in most states they must be raised by specific acts of the legislature and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find the political support necessary to raise them. A number of states have experimented with fuel taxes that adjust automatically by being indexed to the price of gasoline, to the consumer price index, or to some indicator of highway construction and maintenance costs. This...

Urban planners are increasingly concerned about the sprawling suburban development in metropolitan areas around the world, which they often blame for growing traffic congestion and excessive highway investment needs. This dissertation seeks to shed light on this issue by studying the relationship between morning commute congestion and urban form. The causes and consequences of traffic congestion have been extensively studied in the economics and engineering literatures. Unfortunately, most conclusions have been drawn from very idealized models, which either fail to consider adequately the...