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More than 500,000 people experience homelessness in the United States, and many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. We present findings from a survey of 115 U.S. and Canadian transit operators that inquired about homelessness on transit systems. We find that homelessness is broadly present, though more concentrated on central hotspots, and worsened during the pandemic. In response, transit agencies often initiate a combination of punitive and outreach strategies. Based on our findings, we argue for better data collection, establishment of policies and protocols, engagement in outreach strategies, and partnering with service providers.

U.S. freeways have come under scrutiny for their adverse impacts on low-income neighborhoods of color, primarily in urban centers. This article offers a comparative historical analysis of the impact of freeways on two communities in Southern California, which were ethnically diverse suburbs. Planning authorities in Pasadena and Pacoima chose freeway routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than the proposed alternatives. Meanwhile, neighboring white, wealthier communities successfully influenced routing decisions in consequential ways. Beyond the visible and immediate effects of the freeways, social inequity and environmental degradation persist in both neighborhoods today.

This study discusses the potential economic and development impacts that high-speed rail (HSR) may bring to California. The research reviews the reported impacts of HSR implementation in various countries, particularly in Europe, and case studies of selected HSR station-cities in France, Spain, and Italy. The analysis suggests that HSR could bring economic development to the state and stimulate population growth but might eventually lead to gentrification in certainlocations. Not all station-cities experience the same impacts, and certain conditions may foster greater economic development. Station location and connectivity to downtown areas would be particularly important in influencing these impacts, while peripheral stations would be less able to attract land use development and relocation of activities. The availability of rail service to larger cities (and connections to other major markets) and the coordination with urban planning and policy are key to determining the development of areas around HSR stations. The study indicates that for HSR to bring about desired economic development, the planning and design of stations and services must be integrated with the vision and urban plans of each station-city.

In this study, we use the concept of “sidewalk ecologies” to highlight the complex interaction between spatially situated social and material features of sidewalks that influence youth mobility. We use a range of interdisciplinary strategies, emphasizing youth-centered research methods and mapping to capture a rich portrait of the independent travel experiences, perceptions, and ideas of youth, in their own voices. This research was conducted in partnership with Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), a communitybased organization in Westlake that provides after-school programming to thousands of neighborhood youths, and yielded important findings.

Each day, youth in Los Angeles venture out on their own to move to and from home, school, and after-school activities. Their travels represent important pathways to autonomy, agency, and urban citizenship, which a city can support with safe, pleasant paths that offer reassuring familiarity and opportunities for socializing.

The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population's or community's overall vulnerability to wildfires. We identify how those factors subsequently affect an individual's or community's agency to enact change, and highlight that many of the current paradigms for reducing wildfire vulnerability fail to acknowledge and address the importance of inequalities that create differential vulnerability. We suggest that paying attention to the systems and conditions that give rise to such vulnerability can ameliorate these shortcomings by centering solutions which address adaptation equity rather than landscape outcomes.

In recent decades, homelessness has become an increasingly major challenge in the U.S., reaching about half million unhoused people. Many of them seek shelter in settings such as freeways, underpasses, and rest areas. State departments of transportation (DOTs) are responsible for the health and safety of these settings and their occupants, housed and unhoused. This study synthesizes existing literature and findings from interviews with staff from 13 state DOTs and eight service providers and organizations responding to homelessness. Homelessness represents a recognized and common challenge for DOTs, which face jurisdictional, financial, and legal hurdles in addressing it. DOT staff employ both “push” and “pull” strategies, the most common of which is encampment removals (“sweeps”). However, the effectiveness of such removals is limited, as encampments often reappear in nearby sites. Other strategies include “defensive design” and, more proactively, establishing or partnering with low-barrier shelters, providing shelters and sanitation on DOT land, and coordinating rehousing and outreach efforts. Our findings suggest that DOTs should acquire better data on homelessness on their lands, create a homelessness coordinating office, establish formal partnerships with nonprofits/service providers, and evaluate the necessity of encampment removals, through the development and utilization of prioritization criteria.

California's freeways have come under increasing scrutiny for their disproportionately adverse impacts on lowincome populations and populations of color. This study uses empirical research to not only understand but also quantify and describe in detail the historical impacts of freeways on communities of color in four California cities and areas: Pasadena, Pacoima, Sacramento, and San José. In these neighborhoods, freeways displaced many residents, significantly harmed those that remained, and left communities divided and depleted. The four cases differ in notable ways, but they share a disproportionate impact of freeway construction on communities of color. In Pasadena and Pacoima, decision-makers chose routes that displaced a greater share of households of color than proposed alternatives.Demolition and displacement were the most visible and immediate effects of the freeways, but toxic pollution, noise, economic decline, and stigmatization remained long after. In suburban areas, white, affluent interests often succeeded in pushing freeways to more powerless neighborhoods. Massive roadway construction complemented other destructive governmental actions such as urban renewal and redlining. Freeways and suburbanization were key components in the creation of a spatial mismatch between jobs and housing for people of color, with few transportation options to overcome it. Understanding the history of racism in freeway development can inform restorative justice in these areas.

In recent decades, homelessness has become an increasingly major challenge in the U.S. Of the half million unhoused people in the U.S., many seek shelter in settings under the auspices of state departments of transportation (DOTs), such as freeways, underpasses, and rest areas. DOTs are responsible for the health and safety of these settings and of their occupants, housed and unhoused.This study synthesizes existing literature and findings from interviews with staff from 13 state DOTs and eight service providers and organizations responding to homelessness. Homelessness represents a recognized and common challenge for DOTs, but the numbers and location of unhoused individuals in state transportation settings vary and fluctuate. As DOTs face jurisdictional, financial, and legal hurdles in responding, DOT staff employ both “push” and “pull” strategies, the most common of which is encampment removals. However, the effectiveness of such removals is limited. Other strategies include “defensive design” and, more proactively, establishing or partnering with low-barrier shelters, providing shelters and sanitation on DOT land, and coordinating rehousing and outreach efforts. Our findings suggest that DOTs should acquire better data on homelessness on their lands, create a homelessness coordinating office, establish formal partnerships with nonprofits/service providers, and evaluate the necessity of encampment removals, through the development and utilization of prioritization criteria. DOTs should coordinate with other bodies as they work towards broader housing solutions.

Buses, bus stops, trains, and train platforms represent sites of shelter for many of the over 500,000 Americans who are unhoused every night. This study seeks to understand how transit agencies are responding to them. Based on interviews with staff members and partners at 10 different transit agencies and on program performance data, where available, we provide detailed case studies of four sets of strategies taken in response to homelessness on transit systems: hub of services, mobile outreach, discounted fares, and transportation to shelters. We analyze each strategy’s scope, implementation, impact, challenges, and lessons learned. Reviewing these strategies, we note that they may differ depending on the context, need, and available resources. We find value in transit agencies fostering external partnerships with social service organizations and other municipal departments and keeping law enforcement distinct from routine homeless outreach. We also underline the key need for funding from other levels of government to allow transit operators to adopt, expand, and refine homelessness response programs.

More than half a million people in the U.S. experience homelessness every day. Lacking other options, many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also ride public transit to reach various destinations. With affordable housing scarce and the numbers of unhoused individuals often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets and support systems, transit operators face homelessness as a pressing issue on their systems and must implement policy measures from other realms beyond transportation to address it. Because of the health and safety implications for transit of the COVID-19 pandemic and the anticipated further rise in homelessness from the resulting economic downturn, studying and responding to the needs of these vulnerable travelers is critical.We conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify articles discussing homelessness in transit systems. While only a handful of articles exist from the 1990s, there is an emerging literature in the last 20 years that examines different aspects of homelessness in transit systems. We identify and review 63 articles on homelessness in transit systems and other public settings to better understand the extent of homelessness in the U.S., and how transit agencies perceive its impacts. We also summarise literature findings on the travel patterns of unsheltered individuals, which show that public transit represents an important and common mode of travel for them. Lastly, we focus on responses to homelessness from the part of transit operators. We find two types of responses: 1) punitive, in which criminalisation, policing and enforcement of laws and codes of conduct prevail, and 2) outreach-related, which aim towards providing help and support to unsheltered individuals. We conclude by summarising our findings as well as the existing gaps in the literature.

Transit settings represent sites of visible homelessness, especially since the advent of COVID-19, for many of the over 500,000 Americans unhoused each night. This report seeks to understand the scale of homelessness on transit and how transit agencies are responding to the problem. Part I describes the extent of homelessness on transit in several areas by using count data and synthesizing prior research. We find that transit serves as shelter for a high, though quite variable, share of unsheltered individuals, who are more likely than their unhoused peers elsewhere to be chronically unhoused and structurally disadvantaged. Part II provides detailed case studies of strategies taken by transit agencies around the country: hub of services, mobile outreach, discounted fares, and transportation to shelters. We summarize each strategy’s scope, implementation, impact, challenges, and lessons learned. Reviewing these strategies, we find value in collecting data more systematically, fostering external partnerships, keeping law enforcement distinct from routine homeless outreach, educating the public, and training transit staff—all in the context of a broader need for more housing and services.

More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every night in the U.S. With the scale of the crisis often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets—all the more so since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also use transit to reach destinations such as workplaces, shelters, and community service centers. This report investigates the intersections of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness, presenting the results of a survey of 115 transit operators on issues of homelessness on their systems. We find that homelessness is broadly present across transit systems, though concentrated on larger operators and central hotspots, and has reportedly worsened on transit during the pandemic. The perceived challenges of homelessness are deepening, and data, dedicated funding, and staff are rare. However, a number of responses, including external partnerships and outreach and service provision, are growing, and agencies are adapting quickly to the pandemic. All told, centering the mobility and wellbeing of unhoused riders fits within transit’s social service role and is important to improving outcomes for them and for all riders.

As central cities in California continue their renaissance, commercial gentrification is often identified by residents as a concern. For many, commercial gentrification means the intrusion of new businesses that force out a favorite food shop or a longstanding retail store because of higher rents. For others, it means an influx of hip cafés, trendy retail boutiques, and gourmet fast food restaurants - places that change the fabric of their familiar neighborhood, for better or for worse. For many merchants, commercial gentrification can have implications for economic survival, as increased rents may lead to displacement and business closures. This report was born out of these concerns, which we uncovered when interviewing community stakeholders as part of our earlier research on residential gentrification in Los Angeles and the Bay Area (See Chapple, Loukaitou-Sideris, Waddell, Chatman, & Ong, 2017). Over the course of this past work, interviews with community members and planners revealed rapidly-changing storefronts to be a recurring concern. As we looked deeper into this phenomenon, we found that potential relationships between commercial gentrification and transit-oriented development (TOD), transit ridership, and traffic safety were relatively unexplored. This report focuses on the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles regions and addresses gaps in our understanding of the relationship between commercial gentrification and TOD, rail transit ridership, and traffic safety. The primary elements of this report are: ● A literature review of research on commercial gentrification. ● The development of a quantitative metric that defines commercial gentrification based on four objective parameters. ● Statistical analyses that explore associations between commercial gentrification and rail transit stations, changes in transit ridership, and traffic safety. ● Qualitative examinations of four case study neighborhoods: two in Los Angeles and two in the Bay Area. Using these methods, we produced the following research findings: ● Commercially gentrified stations are generally characterized by an influx of eateries, cafés, and bars. ● Proximity to a transit station is likely not associated with commercial gentrification. More important factors that may relate to commercial gentrification are the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood, particularly the percent of non-Hispanic black, foreign born, and renter residents, as well as overall population density. In some contexts, residential gentrification may lead to commercial gentrification. Commercial gentrification may contribute to increases in total, cyclist-involved, and pedestrian-involved average annual crashes around rail transit stations. It is unclear if this is directly due to the phenomenon of commercial gentrification or if it is related to an increase in traffic that occurs in commercially gentrified areas. ● Commercial gentrification does not appear to have a significant effect on rail transit ridership. Residential gentrification in Los Angeles, on the other hand, may lead to reduced rates of transit ridership in the decade after the residential gentrification occurs. 5 ● Merchants generally indicated that rising rent costs were the most prominent aspect of neighborhood change putting pressure on their businesses’ bottom line. Following these conclusions, we recommend the following as prudent municipal, state, and regional policies to mitigate traffic crash impacts and empower transit-oriented development: ● While our quantitative research does not find a significant relationship between a neighborhood’s proximity to transit and commercial gentrification, this may not represent a universal truth, and this issue certainly requires further probing. Policymakers should not simply assume that transit neighborhoods are not susceptible to commercial gentrification. ● The relationship between residential and commercial gentrification also needs further exploration. The results of this study are rather mixed, and it is not clear when and where one type of gentrification follows the other, or which comes first. We suspect that there may not be a universal pattern, and this relationship may change from one neighborhood to the other. ● Our findings indicate that commercial gentrification is context-specific. Policymakers, therefore, should not only rely on aggregate data but also seek to identify what is happening on the ground in specific commercial transit neighborhoods. Commercial neighborhood stakeholders, such as merchants, property owners, and realtors can provide good information about gentrification trends, business closures, relocations, rent increases, etc. ● Commercial gentrification in a transit neighborhood is often accompanied by an increased incidence of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists. This may well be because more pedestrians and cyclists are present in the neighborhood, increasing rates of exposure. Regardless of cause, the increased occurrence of crashes tells us that policymakers should focus resources towards traffic calming, safe streets infrastructure provision, and other proven traffic safety improvements.

Scholarly interest in the relationship between public investments and residential displacement dates back to the 1970s and the aftermath of displacement related to urban renewal. A new wave of scholarship examines the relationship of gentrification and displacement to public investment in transit infrastructure. Scholarship has generally conflated gentrification and displacement; however this review argues for a clearer analytical distinction between the two. Although the displacement discussion in the U.S. began with the role of the public sector and now has returned to the same focus, it will be necessary to overcome methodological shortcomings to arrive at more definitive conclusions about the relationship.

Decades of research have contributed to the development of standards and models to guide pedestrian-friendly transit station designs, although it is not at all clear from the literature how these tools are collectively used in practice. To address this, we interviewed 15 experts in transit station design. Based on the themes identified in these interviews, we conducted an online census of all 16 transit agencies in North America with rapid rail transit systems with below-grade stations. We found that although standards and codes are most likely to guide design decisions, the three types of tools (published standards, deterministic models, and microsimulation models) are as likely to complement as substitute for one another. We recommend that such analytical models of passenger flow should consider explicitly how practitioners employ them in practice to better link future refinements to the more “pedestrian” world of engineering and design practice.

Fear and anxiety about personal security are important detractors from using public transit. Empirical research in different cities of the Western world has confirmed that fear about crime affects transit ridership. Surveys of the perceptions of transit passengers have revealed a number of issues related to their anxiety about personal security. For one, fear of transit is more pronounced in certain social groups than others. Gender emerges as the most significant factor related to anxiety and fear about victimization in transit environments. Almost every fear of crime survey reports that women are much more fearful of victimization than men. This fear has some significant consequences for women and leads them to utilize precautionary measures and strategies that affect their travel patterns. These range from the adoption of certain behavioral mechanisms when in public, to choosing specific routes, modal choices, and transit environments over others, to completely avoiding particular transit environments, bus stops and railway platforms, or activities (e.g., walking, bicycling) deemed as unsafe.Women’s fear of crime in public spaces has been adequately documented. Research of transit passengers’ perceptions of transit safety has also intensified in response to the recognition that anxieties about crime are impeding travel choices and affect transit ridership and revenue, and guidelines for safer cities and transit environments have been drafted. Some studies incorporate an analysis of gender differences in perceptions of safety on transit; however, the focus is not specifically on women and safety. In contrast, a small subset of studies has focused on women’s concerns and fears about personal safety in transit environments. Criminologists complain, however, that our increased knowledge about the causes of fear has not necessarily translated into nuanced policy responses tailored to the particularities of different groups and physical settings. Additionally, there remains a general lack of knowledge regarding specific female requirements for urban and transit environments. Researchers have argued that this is partly due to the imperceptibility of women and the assumption that women and men are in the same situation and have the same needs.This study focuses on the safety concerns and needs of women riders. The research tasks undertaken included: 1) A review of the literature on women’s fear in public settings; 2) a compilation of survey findings (mostly from Canada and the United Kingdom) presenting the concerns of women passengers on issues of transit safety; 3) a compilation of an inventory of strategies followed in these countries that target women’s safety; and 4) a web-based survey of U.S. transit operators to document the programs and activities they have implemented to make their systems safer for women riders as well as their assessments of the efficacy of these programs. The survey targeted all 249 transit agencies in the United States that operate at least 50 vehicles in peak period service

Past research has shown that transit passengers’ fears and concerns about safety influence their travel decisions. While the relationship between women’s fear of crime and public space has been the focus of considerable research, transit environments—which are especially threatening to female passengers—have received much less attention. This study examines the issue of women’s safety on transit through a survey of U.S. transit operators. The findings show that most respondents believe women have distinct safety and security needs, but most do not think agencies should put specific programs into place to address these needs. In addition, only a handful of agencies currently have programs that target the safety and security needs of women. This survey suggests that there is a significant mismatch between the safety and security needs and desires of female passengers and the types and locations of strategies that transit agencies use.

This research explores the spatial distribution of pedestrian-automobile collisions in Los Angeles and analyzes the social and physical factors that affect the risk of getting involved in such accidents. More specifically, this study investigates the influence of socio-demographic, land use, density, and traffic characteristics on pedestrian accident rates.We first provide an exploratory spatial and statistical analysis of pedestrian collision data in the city of Los Angeles to identify preliminary relationships between accident frequency and socio-demographic and land use characteristics at the census tract and block group levels. This aggregate level analysis also helps us identify major concentrations of pedestrian collision data which are used at a second stage of the research for more qualitative and detailed analysis of specific case studies of intersections with high frequency of pedestrian-automobile accidents. The study uses pedestrian accident data provided by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, traffic volume data provided by Caltrans, socio-demographic data from the U.S. Census 2000, land use data from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and pedestrian volume and built environment data from fieldwork research.

Los Angeles is a city shaped by its freeway system. Superimposed on the physical and social landscape of the city, the freeways have tended to split and destroy the fine grain of residential neighborhoods. The design and implementation of the freeway system exemplifies the dictum of top-down planning, envisioned by transportation engineers and city fathers with little or no input from the affected communities. Emblematic of this treatment of the urban landscape is the “first freeway of the west,” the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles. Located within the Arroyo Corridor, the freeway includes in addition to the transportation artery, a sub-watershed of the Los Angeles River, which has also been channelized and built upon. The article discusses recent grassroots efforts that offer a ‘counter-strategy’ to the narrative of hegemonic, top-down planning, by allowing participation, input and action from the neighboring communities. The goal is nothing less but to make the freeway a connector rather than a separator of the diverse neighborhoods along its banks and to craft a core strategy for urban environmental renewal in a region long characterized as hostile to environmental goals.

A predecessor of the modern freeway and a celebrated transportation model of the early 20th century, the urban parkway has fallen on difficult times. Designed for uninterrupted and pleasurable driving through park-like surroundings and a visual connection to the communities the driver passed through, parkways were once hailed as marvels of transportation innovation and design, and as safe and efficient alternatives to non-limited access arterials and boulevards. By the 1950s, however, the goals of pleasurable driving and visual connection had progressively faded in favor of engineering efficiency and higher capacity use. In the meantime, existing parkways became tangled in a web of problems. Originally designed for fewer cars at lower speeds, parkways like the Arroyo Seco Parkway had to accommodate significant increases in vehicles at much higher speeds. This led to traffic congestion (the ten minute trip of 1941 along the Arroyo Seco might now take as long as 40 minutes), bottlenecks, and a major increase in traffic accidents.Today, the Arroyo Seco Parkway stands as a representative example of an urban parkway still in use but fraught with problems due to its disjuncture between its original conception and ultimate evolution. These changes also symbolize some of the problems and challenges in a freeway-centered transportation system. In what follows we will revisit the history and goals of early parkways, focusing in particular on the “first freeway of the West,” the celebrated Arroyo Seco Parkway. We will examine the forces that brought about its painful evolution and transformation from a visually appealing roadway to an accident-ridden freeway. Drawing from the specific example of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, our investigation will trace the change of the parkway model over time. At the core of our discussion lies the desire to examine if early parkways have indeed become “dinosaurs,” obsolete roadways incapable of accommodating contemporary traffic demands, or if they can be revamped and reclaimed as successful elements of an integrated urban transportation network.

This chapter deals with an important citizen right: the ability to walk from home or work to the transit stop, or wait at a bus stop or on a station platform without the fear of being victimized. Crime and fear of crime unfortunately affect many aspects of everyday life in our cities. Transit crime is a rather persistent but underreported trend that scares and intimidates riders – particularly women. The majority of incidents represent public nuisance crimes. The majority of the victims are captive transit riders, frequently immigrant and poor. In Los Angeles some of the victims are even afraid to report transit crimes to the authorities lest they expose their illegal-resident status.In this chapter, we want to argue that planners and policy makers need to often scratch beyond the surface of official numbers and crime statistics. At the same time, relying on one theory to understand a complex urban phenomenon, such as crime, may often prove inadequate. In our case, we found two seemingly antithetical theories useful, but still needing validation with empirical data: compositional theories that cast attention on offenders, and ecological theories that focus on the context of crime. We discovered that to understand a problem that is largely invisible to authorities, we had to rely not only on crime reports but also extensive fieldwork, to combine quantitative and qualitative techniques, and go from the macro to the micro, from census data to first-hand observation, and surveys of riders.