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New transportation options like ride-hail can expand accessibility without the costs of car ownership. Ride-hail's potential is particularly salient for lower-income and zero-car households. We used interviews and a national (U.S.) survey to examine how and why lower-income travelers in the United States use ride-hail. Survey and interview responses provided a temporal snapshot and thus reflect, in part, travel challenges specific to COVID-19. Findings suggest that lower-income travelers, particularly those without personal cars, use ride-hail in ways distinct from those typically reported in broader travel surveys. Individuals without cars are more likely to use ride-hail, and use it more often, compared with people with cars, particularly to fill spatial and temporal gaps in public transit service and to access medical care and groceries. Costs and price unpredictability remain significant barriers limiting travelers' use of ride-hail services. This research demonstrates a latent need for car access among lower-income travelers. Substantial gaps in alternative modes pose challenges for travelers seeking reliable and timely transportation. Planners should invest in transit, biking, and walking to provide robust alternatives to car ownership. Such investments, however, take time. In the meantime, cities and agencies should consider subsidizing ride-hail trips to bridge existing gaps in the transportation network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support for transportation policies and investments is increasingly shaped by partisan ideals. Less well documented is the role of partisanship relative to potential mediating factors like transportation-related values, beliefs about the possibility of change, self-interest, and knowledge. We surveyed a representative sample of 600 U.S. adults about these factors, their political ideology, and their willingness to change the automobile-oriented transportation status quo. We found considerable support for change but also deep partisan divides. In exploring the pathways between partisanship and policy preferences, we found that values and beliefs about change are both deeply partisan and closely associated with policy preferences. By contrast, the results were mixed for self-interest and transportation-related knowledge. Ultimately, we found that these four pathways explain much, but not all, of the partisanship in transportation policy preferences. Very conservative respondents opposed reform efforts above and beyond what we would expect from their values, beliefs, self-interest, and knowledge, indicating continuing salience of partisanship. Our results suggest that transportation reforms enjoy broad public support in urban areas with moderate and left-leaning populaces but may struggle to win approval at the regional, state, or federal level due to partisan geographic sorting. Some planners, policymakers, and advocates may choose to embrace partisanship, but doing so may exacerbate tensions and hamper progress. Others may prefer to tackle the pathways between partisanship and preferences without deepening partisan divides. For instance, practitioners may seek to increase support for reform by tackling widespread misunderstandings about induced demand or by installing pilot projects to help the public understand that it is possible to quickly and inexpensively change infrastructure and travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates differences in the adaptation process of immigrant commute distance and commute mode across and within three racial/ethnic groups—white, Hispanic, and Asian—in the United States to explore policies that facilitate immigrant travel in an efficient and sustainable way. A two-step analysis is conducted: the first step uses all US-born as the reference group, and the second step uses US-born of the same race/ethnicity as the reference. The second step overcomes a potential problem in existing research on immigrant travel adaptation: When all US-born are used as the reference group, the statistics mainly reflect the travel behavior of US-born white people, masking intrinsic travel differences among US-born racial/ethnic groups. Based on multi-level regression analysis of the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data, our results support existing findings of initial difference but eventual convergence of immigrant commute behavior with US-born, while highlighting white immigrants' persistence and Hispanic immigrants' low propensity in using non-automobile modes. Comparison results based on the two reference groups suggest that segmented assimilation due to racial/ethnic group membership is limited. Still, nuanced findings denote distinctive spatial mechanisms that affect immigrant and US-born Asians and highlight the short time window after immigrants' arrival in the U.S. during which policies might contribute to a continuation of their sustainable travel patterns. • We investigate differences in travel adaptation across and within immigrant groups. • Segmented assimilation to the behavior of US-born of the same race is limited. • Immigrant commuting behavior eventually converges with that of US-born. • Hispanic immigrants commute by automobile at similar rates as US-born. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine changes in travel behavior in the Philadelphia region between 2000 and 2012. We use two household regional travel surveys over a decade apart, the 2000 and 2012 surveys, from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). Previous research, at the national scale, has highlighted changes among the Millennial cohort. We use these two regional datasets to examine the changing travel behavior among Millennials and to put these changes in context by comparing them with changes among other social groups of interest: women and minorities. We find that the travel behavior of young people did not change substantially between 2000 and 2012. Where there are changes, these pale in comparison to the changes among women and black residents. And finally, we find that the built environment factors appear to influence travel more in 2012 than in 2000. Taken together, our findings fit an overarching narrative about urban gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty, rather than a story of Millennials’ changing travel behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans are driving less. The changes are most pronounced among Millennials, those born in the 1980s and 1990s. Much ink has been spilled debating whether these changes in travel behavior are due to changing preferences or economic circumstances. In this paper, we use eight waves of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine recent changes in auto ownership among US families with a particular focus on Millennials. We find that today's young adults do own fewer cars than previous generations did when they were young. However, when we control for whether young adults have become economically independent from their parents, i.e. left the nest, we find that economically independent young adults own slightly more cars than we would expect, given their low incomes and wealth. We caution planners to temper their enthusiasm about “peak car,” as this may largely be a manifestation of economic factors that could reverse in coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Same-sex partnered individuals are far more likely to use transit, walk, and cycle, and to a lesser extent, use carpools than are people in straight couples. As society becomes more tolerant, gay and lesbian populations are an increasingly visible social group, yet they have received scant attention by transportation scholars. This paper builds on this nascent literature by documenting and attempting to explain these dramatic differences by controlling for factors known to influence mode choice. We perform two separate analyses employing two distinct datasets. The first analysis examines journey-to-work data from the American Community Survey. The second analysis focuses in specifically on non-motorized (walking, biking) travel using use self-reported walk and bike frequency from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey. In both, we find that characteristics of the neighborhoods in which gays and lesbians live, as well characteristics of the individuals themselves, only explain part of the increased propensity to use “alternative” modes of transportation; a strong residual effect remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent immigrants to the United States drive autos less than the US-born, with rapid increases in their ownership and use of autos over time, and a persistently lower level of auto use even when controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and time in the US. Quantitative studies have not yet explained these phenomena. Given that population growth in the US is largely dependent on immigration, understanding auto ownership and use among immigrants is important for transportation sustainability. We conducted six focus groups with US residents born in India, the Philippines, and Latin America. Our findings confirm, complicate and contradict the existing literature explaining differences in auto use among immigrants and the US-born, and we identify some new hypotheses with implications for policy-relevant research. More difficult driving conditions in the US and remittances back home may contribute to the initially lower auto ownership and use among immigrants. The rapid transition to auto use may be a function of household changes having more dramatic effects among immigrants given their initially high-density residential locations. The growth of non-English speaking transit riders, an increase in private transit services, and different residential location priorities may all contribute to the persistently lower auto use by immigrants even after many years in the US. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Pedestrian casualties are analyzed using a spatial negative-binomial regression. [•] Comparison models of motor-vehicle casualties are also analyzed. [•] Individual level data is analyzed to determine risk for those with lower income. [•] Lower income areas have more pedestrian and motor-vehicle casualties. [•] Lower income individuals are also at greater risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights from the article: , by Friss, Evan, Chicago, Evan Friss' recent book Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s is a surprisingly rel- Friss argues that for many cyclists, bicycles were not simply away to travelbut awayto form a As bicycles became cheap and popular, bikes lost their.

Transportation scholars are keenly interested in the relationship between transportation and subjective well-being. To date, this body of scholarship has not addressed feelings of time pressure. We use the time crunch index from Canada's 2015 General Social Survey (GSS) to analyze the role that transportation resources, travel behavior, and social demographics play in respondents' self-reported experiences of time pressure. We find that resources and daily travel strongly affect the time crunch index and are compounded by the large effect of sociodemographic vulnerability, namely being a woman, immigrant, or member of an ethnic minority, and having a condition of disability. Our analysis presents a new approach for transportation scholars to measure the relationship between social well-being and transportation grounded in several decades of social science research on time use and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]