Policy

With political polarization challenging forward progress on public policy and planning processes, it is critical to examine possibilities for finding common ground across difference between community participants. In my research on contentious planning processes in the United States, I found four areas of convergence between participants over transportation policy and process related to public process and substantive matters. These convergences warrant planners’ attention because they united stakeholders coming from different vantage points.

This brief describes findings from a research effort to understand the changing impacts of the pandemic upon households from different places and backgrounds living in the United States. We investigated the effects of the pandemic along with pandemic-based restrictions and rules on people’s behavior along with their mental and emotional health, social relations, and livelihoods. Unlike other research efforts, as far as we are aware this effort is the only one to join passive data from cell phones with survey information collected from the same individuals over time. We combined these data...

Since immigrants will account for most urban growth in the United States for the foreseeable future, better understanding their travel patterns is a critical task for transportation and land use planners. Immigrants initially travel in personal vehicles far less than the US-born, even when controlling for demographics, but their reliance on autos increases the longer they live in the US. Cultural or habitual differences, followed by assimilation to auto use, could partly explain this pattern; and it may also be partly due to changes in locations and characteristics of home and work...

Cities could reduce or eliminate cruising for parking by correctly setting parking meter rates, but would doing so harm lower-income drivers? We examined the question using data on more than 17,000 parked vehicles and their drivers from SFpark, a federally funded market-priced parking experiment in San Francisco. But we found that lower-income parkers are more likely to use street parking and meter rates had small effects on usage. Raising prices did not increase sorting across blocks by income. Controlled analysis yielded mixed and weak evidence that lower-income parkers may be less...