Economics and Finance

The San Francisco Bay Area regularly experiences some of the most severe traffic congestion in the U.S. This past year both Inrix and the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) ranked the Bay Area third only to Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in the time drivers spend stuck in traffic. The TTI estimated that traffic congestion cost the Bay Area economy a staggering $3.1 billion in 2014 (Lomax et al., 2015). Such estimates are based on the premise that moving more slowly than free-flow speeds wastes time and fuel, and that these time and fuel costs multiplied over millions of travelers in...

This report documents the second year of a project using economics experimental techniques to investigate novel approaches for mitigating congestion caused by non-recurring traffic incidents. The first year demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and carried out a number of experiments using University of California, Irvine (UCI) undergraduates as experimental subjects. The experimental platform is described in Section 3 of this report. Most of the experiments conducted during the first year examined different variable message sign (VMS) wording, and later experiments examined...

In 2013, The California Department of Transportation-District 11 (Caltrans) launched the California Integrated Border Approach Strategy (CA-IBAS) in response to a need for a better-integrated border transportation system that reduces impacts on border communities. Work was conducted in two phases to identify ways to better address regional mobility needs and the traveler experience in California’s communities along the California-Mexico border. During Phase 1, led by METRANS, the team conducted a preliminary assessment of key institutional and policy issues at CaliforniaMexico land POEs,...

This report examines equity among local option sales tax (LOST) measures for transportation in California between 1976 and 2016. Since the first was enacted in 1976 in Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), 76 LOST measures have appeared on county ballots, 48 of which (63%) were approved by voters. These measures have proven to be popular methods to finance transportation system construction, operations, and maintenance over the past four decades, increasing in number even after a 1995 ruling in Santa Clara County Local Transportation Authority v. Guardino required that LOSTs secure two-...