Martin Wachs

• UCLA

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected the ability of localities to pay for their transportation systems. We explore the effects of the pandemic on local option sales taxes (LOSTs), an increasingly common revenue source for transportation in California and across the U.S. LOSTs have many advantages over alternative finance instruments, includi...

The ability to drive is positively associated with workforce participation among older adults. However, residence in neighborhoods where destinations are easy to reach by public transit could potentially narrow the employment gap between older drivers and non-drivers. This study examines the relationship between driving, residential location charac...

The sharp reduction in travel caused by the COVID-19 pandemic quickly created a financial emergency in the transportation sector, as fees paid by travelers provide much of the revenue for transportation. This chapter reports on research that began late in the summer of 2020, a time when there was widespread recognition among transportation experts...

Automobiles are central to participation in economic, social, and cultural activities in the United States. The ability to drive as one ages is fundamental to the quality of life among older adults. Driving rates decline significantly with age. Researchers using cross-sectional data have studied the reasons former drivers have stopped driving, but...

Ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber have the potential to improve mobility for many older adults, especially those who cannot or prefer not to drive. We used survey data from 2,917 Californians 55 years and older to investigate (1) how older adults who currently ride-hail booked their trips, and (2) what personal characteristics, including att...

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected transportation systems, including the ability of localities to pay for them. We explore the effects of the pandemic and the associated economic turbulence on local option sales taxes (LOSTs), an increasingly common revenue source for transportation in California and across the U.S. LOSTs have many advanta...

Local and regional governments in the U.S. rely increasingly on voter-approved local option sales taxes (LOSTs) to fund transportation capital investments, maintenance, and operations. LOSTs typically present voters with lists of local transportation projects and programs to be funded by a ¼ to 1 percent sales tax increase. Most research on LOSTs a...

Problem, research strategy, and findings Most Americans live in communities in which automobiles are central to participation in economic, social, and cultural activities. Outside of dense central cities, the ability to continue driving as one ages is fundamental to the quality of life among older adults. Driving rates decline significantly with ag...

Older adults are delaying retirement and remaining in the paid workforce longer than in previous decades. There are many potential explanations for this trend. In this study, it is hypothesized that the ease or difficulty of traveling may significantly influence the labor force participation of older adults, just as it does for other working-age ad...

What’s a fair way to pay for urban transportation? Local option sales taxes (LOSTs) for transportation are an increasingly common mechanism for locally financing transportation in the context of declining federal and state funding. LOSTs are typically regressive, raising equity concerns. But their fairness also depends on who benefits from them, ba...

Federal infrastructure investment is receiving a great deal of attention, largely about money: how to finance capital investment, operations, and maintenance. Less discussed but very important is modernizing federal policy to support the mature and urban-centered economy of the United States—rather than the economy it had when most of the terms of...

Jurisdictions across the United States have increasingly turned to local option sales taxes, or LOSTs, to fund transportation projects and programs. California is an enthusiastic adopter of these measures; since 1976, residents in over half of the state’s 58 counties have voted on 76 LOST measures. As of 2017, 24 counties, home to 88% of the state’...

In 2010, California replaced its state sales tax on gasoline with an annually adjusted per gallon excise tax designed to produce as much revenue each year as the sales tax did previously. This gas tax swap was intended to (a) relieve the state's general fund during a period of fiscal emergency by circumventing the narrowly defined transportation pu...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Regional conservation initiatives struggle to meet funding needs when complying with the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1996 and need money early to pay for required planning and to acquire land to mitigate the impact of development. Transportation agencies struggle to comply with the ESA and have increasi...

After a 45-year career as a professor and practitioner of planning, the author reflects on relationships among research, professional practice, and teaching. While his efforts to directly influence public policy through practice often met with limited success at the time, he finds that practice greatly enriched his teaching and his work did eventua...

One of the most heavily traveled freeways in the United States closed for construction over weekends in 2011 and 2012. Some public officials publicized the closures by appealing to civic pride whereas others threatened nightmarish delays they dubbed “Carmageddon.” In 2011, contrary to many media predictions, traffic flowed freely at volumes far bel...

In the current environment, the recognition that planning is inherently about social morality does little to help to prepare better plans, become better planners, or even be more ethical people. Planning exists as a social function precisely because there is uncertainty about both ends and means, and the moral values associated with each. This chap...

Advance mitigation is a process through which the environmental impacts and required mitigation are assessed for one or more transportation projects early in project planning and development. The approach enables mitigation to be planned, commenced, and completed earlier; applies regionally or programmatically across multiple projects; and takes ec...

The development of transportation infrastructure requires a long planning, funding, and implementation cycle that often takes more than a decade for a particular project. Environmental mitigation is usually planned and implemented late in this process and on a project-by-project basis. Habitat conservation plans (HCPs), which provide an alternative...

Much has been made recently of Los Angeles's transformation to a transit-friendly city. A speaker at this spring's Transit & Cities conference at UC Berkeley, hosted by the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, lamented the increasingly prohibitive housing prices in Downtown LA, even as there is demand for commuters to live closer to work an...

Inflation and improved fuel economy have undermined revenue from federal and state excise taxes on gasoline and diesel; this situation has made it challenging to maintain and expand the nation's road network. With more stringent federal fuel economy standards and the emergence of alternative fuels threatening to accelerate this problem in future ye...

North American urban areas have changed dramatically over the last four decades. While downtowns were thought to be in long-term decline 40 years ago, central business districts are today the most vibrant residential and commercial centers throughout a largely suburban continent. This paper examines the role of transportation technology and policy...

We investigate the possibility of using a percentage tax on crude oil and imported refined oil products consumed in the United States to fund the nation’s transportation infrastructure. This tax on oil could replace existing gasoline and diesel taxes and, potentially, other transportation taxes, such as taxes on airline tickets. The revenues from t...

Performance-based accountability systems (PBASs), which link incentives to measured performance as a means of improving services to the public, have gained popularity. While PBASs can vary widely across sectors, they share three main components: goals, incentives, and measures. Research suggests that PBASs influence provider behaviors, but little i...

form only given. Modeling conduction heat transfer in electronic systems has gained some maturity over the past 3 decades. Although new modeling challenges were associated with 3D stacked dies or packages, some modeling approaches were proposed to handle this rather complicated multiple heat source problem. An even newer problem has started to emer...

Mobility and increased access to transportation are two of the most important global forces for the alleviation of poverty. This is especially true in rapidly developing areas of the world, exemplified by China and India. It is also true in the United States, where huge gaps in mobility between rich and poor remain. Growing concern over the need to...

Fuel efficiency improvements in the U.S. vehicle fleet are slowing growth in gasoline consumption. Although this is desirable with respect to goals for achieving energy security and environmental improvement, it has adverse implications for the current system of transportation finance. Reductions in gasoline consumption relative to the amount of dr...

The Congress in the United States should capture the opportunity to shift to a system of direct user fees to support transportation activities. User fees, imposed by all 50 states as well as the federal government, are intended to charge more to those who benefit from the transportation system and who also impose costs on the system by using it. Ma...

Recent high profile rail terrorism attacks have emphasized the need for increased public transit security. Rail transit systems are vulnerable to terrorist attacks because they are very public in nature and carry large concentrations of people. In many cities, rail systems are essential to the economic well-being of the community. Transit designers...

Recent efforts to implement regional-level funding sources in Las Vegas, Nevada; California's San Francisco Bay Area; and the state of Texas indicate that some states and regions are responding to transportation needs with institutional innovations that could allow greater metropolitan-level involvement in transportation finance. In light of the wa...

Sales tax measures passed at the local level and dedicated to transportation projects have become increasingly popular in the United States. While revenues from fuel taxes stagnate, growth of local transportation sales taxes (LTSTs), most approved in local elections, has led to a gradual shift of the financial base for transportation projects away...

This report explores how working families in seven major metropolitan regions (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas–Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Baltimore–Washington) tradeoff housing and commuting costs, and how their tradeoffs differ from those of wealthier families. It is organized into five sections. Beyond thi...

US Department of Transportation research funds historically have been awarded on the basis of competition and merit review. Over the last 15 years, however, transportation research programs have seen dramatic growth in earmarking, a practice in which Congress designates research funds for specific institutions named in legislation. This paper discu...

The author looks at changes in the imposition of local taxes to pay for transporation; he finds some movement away from user fees. Lawmakers have been reluctant to raise user fees to meet inflation. It has been easier to try new kinds of funding, such as sales taxes, the author says.

Motor fuel taxes at state and federal levels have traditionally been earmarked for transportation investments, supporting road construction, maintenance, operations, and increasing public transit. Recently, elected officials have been reluctant to raise fuel taxes despite increases in the cost of transportation programs. Other forms of support, esp...

Environmental justice is an increasingly important element of policy making in transportation. It is not specific to any mode of transportation, particular community, or single policy issue. It is fundamentally about fairness toward the disadvantaged and often addresses the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from decision making. The federal...

In August 2002, AC Transit began offering free bus passes to low-income middle and high school students. At the same time, the agency reduced the cost of its monthly youth pass from $27 to $15. This dramatic reduction in costs for student riders resulted from a grassroots advocacy campaign that successfully focused local political attention on scho...

A discussion of a paper entitled "Traffic 2042: Mosaic of a Vision" by H. H. Topp, published in this issue of this journal, is presented. This discussion provides a different view of what transportation may be like in the year 2042 than the vision given in Topp's essay. Both visions see most progress in transportation to be the result of technologi...

In this essay I examine the ways in which the future has evolved from sweeping vision to technocratic projection. I argue that despite the centrality of a focus on the future in all of planning, forecasting alone is an inadequate and unsatisfying way to arrive at a concept of the future that can truly guide planning. In fact, projections of future...

Winston Churchill once wrote an insightful analysis of architecture (1). According to Churchill, we first designed buildings to accommodate our behavior and our social and cultural patterns as we understood them. But our understanding of these things was imperfect, and different architects interpreted them differently. Moreover, buildings reflected...

As the director of a major university transportation research center, I am honored and pleased to have been included in this program in which we are exploring the contributions that research can make to the refocusing of transportation knowledge and planning practice. It is actually quite rare that line agencies or federal funding programs try to a...

Residential parking requirements specify the number of parking spaces that must be provided when new residential units are built. This paper examines the way such parking requirements influence housing affordability. The provision of parking spaces requires land, building materials and equipment which increase the price of housing. On the other han...

Factors affecting vehicle occupancy measurement were examined with the aim of improving state and local vehicle occupancy monitoring programs. A comparison was conducted of five data sets looking at the effects on average vehicle occupancy (AVO) of time of day, day of week, road types, HOV lanes, locational differences, and traffic volume. It was f...

Contracting out for services is a controversial issue in public transit. Proponents argue that contracting always saves money in comparison with public operation, whereas critics respond that cost savings through contracting are overstated and come almost exclusively at the expense of labor. In order to determine the medium-term effectiveness of co...

Three waves of data were collected on a panel of Southern California employment sites subject to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) Regulation XV, in force from 1988–1995. This regulation required public and private employers with ≥ 100 employees at any work site to develop and implement a trip reduction plan to achieve specif...

This report presents a short-run framework for analyzing the impacts of congestion pricing on commercial vehicles. The framework is based on microeconomics principles and past theoretical studies of congestion pricing. The relationship between value of time and the welfare gain/loss induced by using congestion pricing is identified. The social cost...

Los Angeles is well known around the world as an automobile-oriented low density community, yet recent transportation policies have emphasized greater capital investment in rail transportation than in highways, and recent policies have attempted to discourage automobile usage through transportation demand management. While these policies have accom...

Transportation planners are increasingly adopting policies aimed at changing travel choices made by citizens. Rather than trying to solve transportation problems by building highways and transit routes, transportation demand management relies on incentives and disincentives to promote carpooling, vanpooling, transit use, and changed work hours. The...

In Los Angeles emphasis in transportation planning has recently shifted from facility construction to transportation system management and the control of land use with the goal of slowing the growth in traffic congestion. This paper critically examines several recent transportation growth management strategies in Los Angeles, and concludes that tho...

Public transit in the United States has depended increasingly on public subsidies since the inception ofthe federal mass transit assistance program in the early 1960s. The subsidies are associated with declining efficiency and labor productivity, as urban transit systems have overcapitalized, simplified fare structures, and extended service into sp...

Legislation and regulation require cities to prepare forecasts of patronage and J. cost when they compete for federal funds with which to build urban rapid transit systems. Experience shows that these forecasts routinely overestimate patronage and underestimate costs. The explanation for this phenomenon is to be found not in technical shortcomings...

Conducted telephone interviews with 1,088 adult residents (aged 16 yrs and older) of west-central Los Angeles, California, and observed activity at 3 particularly dangerous bus stops to estimate the amount of bus crime and its impact on residents. The study was conducted by the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of California a...

Based on a large study of bus crime in Los Angeles, this article discusses a method for estimating the number of transit crimes and examines sources of information loss within existing transit crime statistics. Using data from a victimization survey of 1088 households in west central Los Angeles, it was estimated that there were about 23,000 bus an...

This paper documents victims of bus crime and examines the extent to which fear of personal security affects bus ridership. Using data from a victimization survey of 1088 households in west central Los Angeles, it was found that frequency of bus use was the most important correlate of being victimized. Examining moderate and heavy bus users only, i...

Some planners limit discussions of ethics to simple, though important, questions about the propriety of their daily activities. This approach to ethics restricts discussion of professional ethics to the propriety of everyday social and professional relationships. It ignores the broader ethical content of planning practice, methods, and policies. Wh...