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The cost of transportation can present challenges for low-income Washingtonians: making it harder to get a job, maintain a job, access social services, obtain healthcare, and care for their families. Building on the District’s efforts to address cost as a barrier to transit equity—such as Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2019 Free Circulator trial and Kids Ride Free program—the District of Columbia government and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are conducting a randomized evaluation of free and discounted transit fares. We will measure the impact of transit cost on low-income residents’ mobility, employment, and well-being. The findings may help shape initiatives to make public transit more affordable to low-income residents.

When should we expect neighbors to collectively share information, organize, and solve local problems, with or without the local government? Based on observations from our fieldwork, we propose a theory of collective action infrastructure, in which by overcoming the fixed costs of organizing around one very important issue, citizens make investments that lower the cost of organizing around other, orthogonal issues in the future. We register two conjoint experiments aimed at measuring how communities’ past experience with neighborhood problems and organizing might shape the perceived difficulty of organizing in the future, embedded in an online survey with additional observational analysis on the same question.

I present three survey experiments which test how citizen perceptions of public service quality might inform their decisions to make claims about those services. The first experiment considers the tradeoffs between service frequency, predictability, and price. The second experiment evaluates a “satisficing” hypothesis. The third experiment asks whether seeing other citizens protest about service quality might update one’s own views or decisions to take action.

Every year there are hundreds of thousands of dangerous driving violations in the District. As part of the Mayor’s Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic-related deaths, we are developing a statistical model to identify drivers who are at a high risk of being involved in a serious crash in the District. We will then design and evaluate whether tailored messages to these drivers can curb red-light and speeding violations with the goal of decreasing their involvement in serious crashes. These findings may inform future policies and programs to reduce serious crashes in the District.