Transportation Equity

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

Chatman, Daniel G.
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...

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

Chatman, Daniel G.
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...

Equity Implications of TNC Fare Variation: A Case Study of Didi Chuxing, Shanghai, 2015

Xu, Ruoying
Chatman, Daniel G.
2019

The rise of transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing has been well documented, and is viewed with concern by some policy makers and planners. Some have advocated regulating TNCs to address perceived problems, which include unfair competition with existing taxis, a perception that TNCs may be less safe than conventional taxis, road congestion caused by a proliferation of ride-hailing vehicles, and a belief that TNCs may reduce transit ridership. Possible regulations to address these problems include background checks for drivers, safety standards,...

Does Transit-Oriented Gentrification Increase Driving?

Chatman, Daniel G.
Xu, Ruoying
Park, Janice
Spevack, Anne
2019

Do transit-oriented development (TOD) programs cause people to drive more by displacing poorer households from transit-rich neighborhoods? We analyzed the California Household Travel Survey and the Nationwide Household Travel Survey along with selected Census data and found that higher income households reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) more when living in TODs than do poorer households. Results from controlled analysis were similar. In addition, gentrifying neighborhoods near rail stations in California have usually become more densely populated in the last two decades. Thus, in many...

Developing a New Methodology for Analyzing Potential Displacement

Chapple, Karen
Waddell, Paul
Chatman, Daniel
Zuk, Miriam
Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia
Ong, Paul
Gorska, Karolina
Pech, Chhandara
Gonzalez, Silvia R.
2017
In 2008, California passed Senate Bill 375, requiring metropolitan planning organizations to develop Sustainable Communities Strategies as part of their regional transportation planning process.While the implementation of these strategies has the potential for environmental and economic benefits, there are also potential negative social equity impacts, as rising land costs in infill development areas may result in the displacement of low-income...

Assessing the Quantification Methodology for the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program

Chatman, Daniel G.
Rodynansky, Seva
Boarnet. Marlon
Comandon, Andre
Snyder, Breitling
Patel, Kieran
Atkins, Jon
2025

Do affordable housing projects in high-quality transit-oriented development areas reduce auto use? By how much? Under what conditions? These questions are complex but highly relevant for the state of California. Its Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program estimates reductions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) associated with project applications, and scores applications partly on this basis. Building on a large set of existing empirical literature, we carried out a new analysis of how the built environment affects travel in California. We relied on several data sources...

Strategizing Equitable Transit Evacuations: A Data-driven Reinforcement Learning Approach

Tang, Fang
Wang, Han
Delle Monache, Maria Laura
2025

As natural disasters become increasingly frequent, the need for efficient and equitable evacuation planning has become more critical. This paper proposes a data-driven, reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework to optimize public transit operations for bus-based evacuations in transportation networks with an emphasis on improving both efficiency and equity. We model the evacuation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) solved by RL, using real-time transit data from General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and transportation networks extracted from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The RL agent...

Charging Ahead: How Income and Home Access Shape Electric Vehicle Adoption among Ridehailing Drivers

Shaheen, Susan
Martin, Elliot
Ju, Mengying
2025

Transportation network companies (TNCs), also known as ridehailing, such as Uber and Lyft, have contributed to increased vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and associated emissions in California’s urban areas over the past decade. In response, Senate Bill (SB) 1014 – the Clean Miles Standard – requires TNCs to achieve 90% electric vehicle (EV) miles traveled and zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per passenger mile by 2030. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) oversee implementation and enforcement of these targets.

Zero-emission Mobility Strategies: Innovation, Diversity, and Integration

Du, Bo
Liu, Wei
Song, Ziqi
Shaheen, Susan A.
2025

The transportation sector accounts for a substantial proportion of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions globally. Electrification of transportation systems has emerged as a promising pathway to achieve sustainability, especially with the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in recent decades. Various types of EVs, particularly battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), have gained considerable attention in research, spanning diverse domains, such as battery management, charging infrastructure planning...

Driving Equity: Can Electric Vehicle Carsharing Improve Grocery Access in Underserved Communities? A Case Study of BlueLA

Yassine, Ziad
Deakin, Elizabeth
Martin, Elliot W.
Shaheen, Susan A.
2025

Carsharing has long supported trip purposes typically made by private vehicles, with grocery shopping especially benefiting from the carrying capacity of a personal vehicle. BlueLA is a one-way, station-based electric vehicle (EV) carsharing service in Los Angeles aimed at improving access in low-income neighborhoods. We hypothesize that BlueLA improves grocery access for underserved households by increasing their spatial-temporal reach to diverse grocery store types. We test two hypotheses: (1) accessibility from BlueLA stations to grocery stores varies by store type, traffic conditions,...