Policy

The Changing Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Individuals and Households in the US

Bouzaghrane, M
Obeid, H
Parker, M
Li,. M
Hayes, D
Chen, M
Karen Trapenberg Frick
Daniel Rodriguez
Joan Walker
Sengupta, R
Daniel Chatman
2021

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...

Never Waste a Crisis: How COVID-19 Lockdowns and Message Sources Affect Household Emergency Preparedness

Marple, Tim
Post, Alison
Karen Trapenberg Frick
2022

Public institutions are facing natural and manmade hazards of increasing frequency and severity. While the costs of disasters can be greatly reduced when individuals prepare, successfully encouraging preparation is difficult for governments, given the low salience of such risks. We examine whether the increased salience of other types of risks can influence individual willingness to prepare for natural and manmade hazards, and whether message impact varies with recipients’ levels of trust in their source. We capitalize upon a rare policy experiment—the staged rollout of COVID-19...

Explaining the “Immigrant Effect” on Auto Use: The Influences of Neighborhoods and Preferences

Daniel Chatman
2014

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...

How Will Smart Growth Land-use Policies Affect Travel? A Theoretical Discussion on the Importance of Residential Sorting

Cao, Xinyu
Daniel Chatman
2016

Do policies to encourage compact, mixed use, pedestrian-friendly land-use patterns reduce driving? Not necessarily. Understanding how the built environment affects travel patterns is complex, not least because households may choose their neighborhoods on the basis of how they expect to get around. Some scholars have argued that ignoring this process of residential sorting, or ‘self-selection’, causes overestimates of built-environment influences and leads to false optimism about the efficacy of land-use policies in influencing travel. But others have suggested that residential self-...

Equity in Congestion-priced Parking: A Study of SFpark, 2011 to 2013

Daniel Chatman
Manville, Michael
2018

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...

SB 743 Implementation: Challenges and Opportunities

Barbour, Elisa
Daniel Chatman
Doggett, Sarah
Yip, Stella
Santana, Manuel
2019

California’s Senate Bill (SB) 743, enacted in 2013, marks a historic shift in how the traffic impacts of development projects are to be evaluated and mitigated statewide. To help achieve state climate policy and sustainability goals, SB 743 eliminates traffic delay as an environmental impact under the California Environmental Quality Act. State implementing guidelines for SB 743 instead require an assessment of vehicle miles traveled (VMT). The adoption of the guidelines sparked debate and raised far-reaching questions about development planning. Our research consisted of four parts. First...

Policies to Improve Transportation Sustainability, Accessibility, and Housing Affordability in the State of California

Daniel Chatman
Barbour, Elisa, PhD
Kerzhner, Tamara
Manville, Michael, PhD
Reid, Carolina, PhD
2023

This report presents analytical review of empirical research on the interactions between housing availability and production, and travel behavior, accessibility, land use policies, and transportation policies. It identifies lessons from this review for California state legislative efforts to improve housing and transportation linkages, and to increase both transportation sustainability and housing affordability. Relevant California state efforts include legislation to influence parking standards; to require up-zoning near transit stations; to influence regional housing and transportation...

Impacts of Commute Trip Reduction Programs, Rail Station Area Built Environment Changes, and Ride-Hailing Services on Traveler Behavior

Li
Daniel Rodriguez
Montilla, M
Daniel Chatman
Chen, P
Yang, X
Winters, P
2022

This project consists of three related studies investigating strategies to address urban congestion: a) employer-based travel demand management strategies, b) improvement of transit station area built environments, and c) understanding the impacts of ride-hailing. Collectively, the three studies represent complementary strategies to address urban congestion. However, each of them focuses on a particular approach from managing demand side incentives to supply side service disruptions.

Dual Influences on Vehicle Speeds in Special-Use Lanes and Policy Implications

Jang, Kitae
Michael Cassidy
2011

Slow speeds in a special-use lane, such as a carpool (HOV) or bus lane, can be due to both high demand for that lane and slow speeds in the adjacent regular-use lane. These dual influences are confirmed from months of data collected from all freeway carpool facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both influences hold for other types of special-use lanes, including bus lanes. New US regulation stipulating that most classes of low-emitting vehicles, or LEVs, be banned from slow-moving carpool lanes. While LEVs invariably constitute only about 1 percent of the freeway traffic demand in the...

From LOS to VMT, VHT and Beyond Through Data Fusion: Application to Integrate Corridor Management

Alexandre Bayen
Gan, Qijian
Gomes, Gabriel
2016

Traffic performance metrics such as delay and Level Of Service (LOS), which are well documented in the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM), have been widely used by most of the transportation consulting companies, public agencies, and etc. For arterial delay analysis, prevailing commercial tools like Synchro have adopted the method proposed by the HCM, which is rooted in the Webster’s delay calculation proposed more than 50 years ago. The LOS is obtained using a lookup table that assigns a certain grade (from A to F) to the estimated delay according to its value. Without knowing detailed...