Public Health

Mitigating Exposure and Climate Change Impacts from Transportation Projects: Environmental Justice-Centered Decision-Support Framework and Tool

Horvath, Arpad
Greer, Fiona
Apte, Joshua
Rakas, Jasenka
2023

California must operate and maintain an effective and efficient transportation infrastructure while ensuring that the health of communities and the planet are not compromised. By assessing transportation projects using a life-cycle perspective, all relevant emission sources and activities from the construction, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life phases can be analyzed and mitigated. This report presents a framework to assess the life-cycle human health and climate change impacts from six types of transportation projects: (1) Roadways; (2) Marine ports; (3) Logistical distribution...

Quantifying the Resilience of the U.S. Domestic Aviation Network During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Bauranov, Aleksandar
Parks, Steven
Jiang, Xuan
Rakas, Jasenka
González, Marta C.
2021

This paper analyzes the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on the United States air transportation network between March and August 2020. Despite dramatic reductions in flight and passenger volumes, the network remained robust and resilient against perturbation. Although 24% of airports closed, the reduction in network efficiency was only 5.1%, which means airlines continued to serve most destinations. A deeper analysis of airport closures reveals that 1) small peripheral airports were the most likely to be closed; 2) socio-economic and epidemiological factors characterizing the airport’s region...

Early Pandemic Behaviors and the Role of Vaccines in Reversing Pandemic Mobility Trends: Evidence from a U.S. Panel

Obeid, Hassan
Anderson, Michael
Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Li, Meiqing
Parker, Madeleine
Hayes, Drake
Frick, Karen
Rodriguez, Daniel
Chatman, Daniel
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
2024

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted travel behavior and resulted in the emergence of new mobility trends. In this paper, we study the degree to which vaccines played a role in reversing pandemic-induced travel behaviors and contributed to a “return to normal.” Using five waves of original U.S.-based survey data combined with passive smartphone tracking data collected in 2020 and 2021, we show that in the early phases of the pandemic, the behavioral response of people in the United States was heterogeneous: individuals with low levels of concern about being infected with COVID-19 engaged in...

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

Marple, Tim
Post, Alison
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
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...

Public Transit Use in the United States in the Era of COVID-19: Transit Riders’ Travel Behavior in the COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Period

Parker, Madeleine E. G.
Li, Meiqing
Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
Chatman, Daniel G.
2021

COVID-19 has upended travel across the world, disrupting commute patterns, mode choices, and public transit systems. In the United States, changes to transit service and reductions in passenger volume due to COVID-19 are lasting longer than originally anticipated. In this paper we examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual travel behavior across the United States. We analyze mobility data from Janurary to December 2020 from a sample drawn from a nationwide smartphone-based panel curated by a private firm, Embee Mobile. We combine this with a survey that we administered to...

Public Transit Use in the United States in the Era of COVID-19: Transit Riders’ Travel Behavior in the COVID-19 Impact and Recovery Period

Parker, Madeleine E. G.
Li, Meiqing
Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
Chatman, Daniel G.
2021

COVID-19 has upended travel across the world, disrupting commute patterns, mode choices, and public transit systems. In the United States, changes to transit service and reductions in passenger volume due to COVID-19 are lasting longer than originally anticipated. In this paper we examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on individual travel behavior across the United States. We analyze mobility data from Janurary to December 2020 from a sample drawn from a nationwide smartphone-based panel curated by a private firm, Embee Mobile. We combine this with a survey that we administered to...

Rebuilding Common Purpose for the 21st Century with New Civic Infrastructure

Myers, Dowell
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
2022

Increasing polarization and division are the greatest challenges to the U.S. today, because they prevent cooperation in decision making about growing problems of major consequence. The related long swing in rising individualism is assessed for how it undermines common purpose. We survey the ideological divide and how it intersects with preferred urban development patterns, negotiation styles (compromise or hard line), and diverse views on mitigations for stemming the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tracking the State and Behavior of People in Response to COVID-19 Through the Fusion of Multiple Longitudinal Data Streams

Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Li, Meiqing
Parker, Madeleine
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
2025

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is therefore limited in addressing the complexities created by the interrelated impacts of the pandemic. Such research generally makes use of only one of either (1) actively collected data such as surveys, or (2) passively collected data from sources such as mobile phones or financial transactions. So far, only one other study collects both active and passive...

Tracking the State and Behavior of People in Response to COVID-1 19 Through the Fusion of Multiple Longitudinal Data Streams

Bouzaghrane, Mahamed Amine
Obeid, Hassan
Hayes, Drake
Chen, Minnie
Li, Meiqing
Parker, Madeleine
Rodríguez, Daniel A.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Frick, Karen Trapenberg
Sengupta, Raja
Walker, Joan
2022

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is therefore limited in addressing the complexities created by the interrelated impacts of the pandemic. Such research generally makes use of only one of either 1) actively collected data such as surveys, or 2) passively collected data. While a few studies make use of both actively and passively collected data, only one other study collects it longitudinally...

Fault Detection and Identification with Application to Advanced Vehicle Control Systems

Douglas, Randal K.
Chung, Walter H.
Malladi, Durga P.
Chen, Robert H.
Speyer, Jason L.
Mingori, D. Lewis
1997

This report continues work on the design of a health monitoring system for automated vehicles. The approach is designed to fuse data from dissimilar instruments using modeled dynamic relationships and fault detection and identification filters. Issues relating to sensor models, output separability, steady-state fault persistence and the spectral content of sensor faults are considered.