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Refereed Journal Articles
2022
Cohort Analysis of Driving Cessation and Limitation Among Older Adults
TransportationAndrew Schouten, Martin Wachs, Evelyn Blumenberg, Hannah King
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 few have followed individuals over time to examine changes in relationships among driving cessation, socio-demographics, and health conditions. We used longitudinal data from a national sample of 20,000 observations from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine relationships among demographic variables, health conditions, and driving reduction and driving cessation. Longitudinal data allow analysis of generational differences in behavior, a major advantage over cross-sectional data which only allow comparisons of different people at one point in time. We found, like many other studies, that personal decisions to limit and eventually stop driving vary with sex, age, and health conditions. In addition, unlike most previous studies, we also found that those relationships differ by birth cohort with younger cohorts less likely to stop and limit their driving than their older counterparts. The findings indicate an evolution in the association between driving cessation and its causes.
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Rating the Composition: Deconstructing the Demand-Side Effects on Transit Use Changes in California
Travel Behaviour and SocietyAndrew Schouten, Evelyn Blumenberg, Brian D. Taylor
Transit use in the U.S. has been sliding since 2014, well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The largest state, California, was also losing transit riders despite substantial public investment and increased service in the pre-pandemic period. This downturn prompted concern among transit managers and planners interested in service-side interventions to reverse the decline. However, relatively little is known about changes in the demand for public transit and how shifts in demand-side factors have affected patronage. Drawing on California data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys, we quantify demand-side changes as a function of two factors—changes in ridership rates of various classes of transit riders (“rate effects”) and changes in the composition of those rider classes (“composition effects”). Statewide, we find that while shifts in the population composition were in some cases associated with lower levels of ridership, the largest declines in transit patronage were associated with falling ridership rates. Specifically, those with limited automobile access and Hispanic travelers rode transit far less frequently in 2017 compared to 2009. Transit ridership rates and rider composition in the San Francisco Bay Area were relatively stable during the study period, while both rate and compositional changes in the Los Angeles area were associated with much lower levels of total ridership. Overall, our findings demonstrate the important role of demand-side factors in understanding aggregate transit use, and suggest that planners and managers may have limited policy tools at their disposal when seeking to bolster ridership levels.
Reports
2021
Access to Child Care in Los Angeles County: Recent Trends and COVID-19 Implications
Samikchhyal Bhusal, Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Jobs–Housing Balance Re-Re-Visited
Journal of the American Planning AssociationEvelyn Blumenberg, Hannah King
Problem, research strategy, and findings
In many U.S. metropolitan areas housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years relative to average incomes. A worsening shortage of affordable housing in these metros may push households away from job-rich cities and expensive neighborhoods into outlying areas, where housing is cheaper but jobs are more distant. To examine this issue, we revisit the jobs–housing balance, a popular topic of research in the 1990s, with a focus on the relationship between housing and the spatial location of workers relative to jobs. Our analysis draws on data from the Longitudinal Employer–Household Dynamics Origin–Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) for cities in California in 2002 and 2015. In contrast to earlier jobs–housing balance research, we find that California cities are becoming less self-contained over time, defined as a decline in the number of workers who both live and work within a jurisdiction relative to the number of commuters who travel either into or out of a city for work. Statistical models show that self-containment was higher in cities with lower housing costs and, in 2015, in cities with a greater balance between jobs and employed residents.
Takeaway for practice
The deepening housing affordability crisis in many metropolitan areas like those found in California are pushing workers and jobs farther apart, increasing the economic, social, and environmental costs of commuting. Policies to increase the supply of housing in job-rich and high–housing cost areas could help reverse this troubling trend, though they are likely to meet with considerable resistance. Our findings also underscore the importance of efforts that include but extend beyond housing production, such as policies to better match job skills and housing prices to the characteristics of workers.
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Regional Differences in the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Food Sufficiency in California, April–July 2020: Implications for Food Programmes and Policies
Public Health NutritionEvelyn Blumenberg, Miriam Pinski, Lilly A. Nhan, May C. Wang
Objective:
To evaluate regional differences in factors associated with food insufficiency during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic among three major metropolitan regions in California, a state with historically low participation rates in the Supplementation Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation’s largest food assistance programme.
Design:
Analysis of cross-sectional data from phase 1 (23 April–21 July 2020) of the US Census Household Pulse Survey, a weekly national online survey.
Setting:
California, and three Californian metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), including San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley, Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim and Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario MSA.
Participants:
Adults aged 18 years and older living in households.
Results:
Among the three metropolitan areas, food insufficiency rates were lowest in the San Francisco–Oakland–Berkeley MSA. Measures of disadvantage (e.g., having low-income, being unemployed, recent loss of employment income and pre-pandemic food insufficiency) were widely associated with household food insufficiency. However, disadvantaged households in the San Francisco Bay Area, the area with the lowest poverty and unemployment rates, were more likely to be food insufficient compared with those in the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim and Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario MSA.
Conclusions:
Food insufficiency risk among disadvantaged households differed by region. To be effective, governmental response to food insufficiency must address the varied local circumstances that contribute to these disparities.
Policy Briefs
2021
Jobs-Housing Balance in California Cities
Evelyn Blumenberg, Hannah King
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Travel in the Digital Age: Vehicle Ownership and Technology-Facilitated Accessibility
Transport PolicyEvelyn Blumenberg, Julene Paul, Gregory Pierce
Despite their negative externalities, cars provide many benefits. Chief among these is the ability to travel to destinations within a reasonable time budget. Consequently, in the U.S. most households—even low-income households—own and use automobiles. But technological innovations may be altering this dynamic. New technology-facilitated services and activities may reduce the advantages of private vehicle ownership, potentially allowing households to live car-free or downsize their household vehicle fleets. In this study we use data from the 2017 U.S. National Household Travel Survey to investigate the relationship between these innovations and vehicle ownership. We find a positive relationship between the use of ridehail and carshare services and the likelihood of being a zero-vehicle household. The data also show a positive relationship between online shopping and working from home and the likelihood of having fewer household vehicles than adults. Combined, the findings suggest that new technology-facilitated activities may allow some households to eliminate or reduce their dependence on privately-owned vehicles. For other households, new technology-facilitated services may not directly affect their decisions about automobile ownership, but rather increase their access to opportunities while easing the financial burden of vehicle ownership. Agencies and organizations should explore opportunities to better connect households—particularly households with travel and financial constraints—to technology-facilitated services and activities that enable improved access.
Refereed Journal Articles
2021
Who’s on Board? Examining the Changing Characteristics of Transit Riders Using Latent Profile Analysis
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research BoardAndrew Schouten, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg
Subsidies of public transit have more than doubled since the late 1980s, with a disproportionate share of funds going to rail services. These investments have important implications, including how they affect both the composition of transit users and their travel behavior. To investigate how transit users and use are changing, we use Latent Profile Analysis and data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys to examine changes in transit users in the U.S. and in five major metropolitan areas. Nationwide, we find that the share of Transit Dependents grew by 17% to account for two-thirds of all transit users in 2017. These least advantaged riders were more likely over time to reside in very poor households and to be carless. There was a corresponding decline in Occasional Transit Users, for whom transit is part of a multi-modal travel profile. Higher-income, mostly car-owning Choice Transit Riders increased slightly over time but accounted for less than one in ten transit riders in 2017. Their growth was concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas where densities and land use are most transit-supportive. While increased rail transit service has shifted riders away from buses, transit’s role as a redistributive social service that provides mobility to disadvantaged travelers has grown over time. Efforts to draw more multi-modal and car-owning travelers onto transit have been less successful. As transit systems struggle to recover riders following the pandemic, transit’s waxing role of providing mobility for those without will likely become even more prominent.
Reports
2021
Access to Opportunities Primer
Samikchhyal Bhusal, Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Transportation allows people to reach the opportunities that they need to participate in social and economic life. It enables workers to get to jobs to earn a living, students to get to school to obtain an education, or people to see a doctor to get healthy. But for people who lack transportation, whether it be because they do not own vehicles or because public transit does not get them to where they need to be when they need to be there, these opportunities can cease to exist. This concept — the role of transportation in helping people reach essential destinations — is what is meant by the term “access to opportunity.” This primer seeks to help policymakers, public officials and their staff, and advocates understand access to opportunity — why it is an important concept, its determinants, and how it relates to other adjacent issues and policies in housing and economic development. As readers will find, untangling disparities in transportation access from the legacy of racist policies like redlining and discrimination is difficult, if not impossible. Addressing disparities in access to opportunities, therefore, cannot be done through transportation planning and policy alone. However, increasing transportation access is an essential part of this effort. We hope that this primer will be used to better inform and more effectively target transportation planning and policies to increase access to opportunity and reduce existing disparities. Presented in the pages that follow are a series of questions and answers to provide readers with a baseline understanding of transportation and its role in access opportunities. A focus on accessibility is essential to making transportation investments that engender more equitable regions for all.
Reports
2021
Vehicle Availability Patterns and Trends Commuting in America 2020
Evelyn Blumenberg, Julene Paul, Gregory Pierce
This report examines trends in vehicle availability in the U.S. from 2000 to 2017; presents overall trends, with a focus on zero-vehicle households; and assesses the commute mode patterns of workers by their household automobile availability. The analysis draws on three different data sources comprised of multiple associated datasets—the Public Use Microdata Samples of the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey (ACS), and the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS).
Refereed Journal Articles
2020
Driven to Debt: Social Reproduction and (Auto)mobility in Los Angeles
Annals of the American Association of GeographersJane Pollard, Evelyn Blumenberg, Stephen Brumbaugh
Since the financial crisis of 2008, subprime lending in the United States has flourished in auto loan markets. This article charts, for the first time, some of the contours of this underresearched part of the subprime landscape. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it widens and resituates debates about subprime lending by building on a suite of feminist political economic scholarship to argue that the sites, practices, and agents of social reproduction provide an essential—and largely neglected—perspective on the endurance and deepening of subprime markets. Second, the article leverages the intrinsically geographical, place-bound nature of social reproduction to provide a more holistic treatment of the financialization of everyday life. The article uses (auto)mobility as a novel vantage point from which to connect hitherto disparate social science literatures on financialization, transportation planning, welfare, and urban form. Drawing on secondary data and qualitative fieldwork in Los Angeles, the research explores the proliferation of subprime auto lending and the gendered, raced, and classed inequalities in mobility that mediate everyday life—the daily commute, the school run, the grocery shopping trip—and the demand for subprime debt.
Policy Briefs
2020
Vehicle Ownership Trends and Their Implications for Transit Ridership
Evelyn Blumenberg, Andrew Schouten
Newspaper
2020
Op-Ed: You Shouldn’t Need a Car to Get Tested for COVID-19
Los Angeles TimesEvelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen
Refereed Journal Articles
2020
Does Lacking a Car Put the Brakes on Activity Participation? Private Vehicle Access, Time Use and Subjective Well-Being Among Low-Income Adults
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and PracticeEric A. Morris, Evelyn Blumenberg, Erick Guerra
Private vehicle travel entails costs to society. However, in a world designed around the automobile, adults who lack access to a vehicle for economic reasons may experience a significant handicap due to constrained mobility and accessibility. This paper examines whether private vehicle access is associated with the quantity and quality of out-of-home activities in which low-income individuals participate. We use pooled data from multiple time use surveys drawn from the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and employ Cragg two-part hurdle modeling to determine whether there is an association between household vehicle access and participation in twelve out-of-home activity types. As a robustness check, we also estimate multiple discrete continuous extreme value (MDCEV) models. Further, we examine travel time by mode for those with and without vehicles. Finally, we use American Time Use Survey data and fixed-effects panel models to determine the subjective well-being that is associated with our out-of-home activity types. A lack of private vehicle access is associated with significantly less frequent out-of-home activity participation, both in the aggregate and for seven of the twelve individual activities. Moreover, the activities most likely to be foregone are generally associated with high subjective well-being, suggesting that constrained mobility comes with significant emotional costs. We find a greater “activity penalty” for rural residents and for Canadian residents without vehicle access; urbanites without vehicles in the U.K. are the only geographic group which do not exhibit an activity penalty. Finally, respondents with vehicle access spend more total time traveling, although those without private vehicles partially offset spending less time in them with higher use of alternative modes. Overall, the findings suggest that the lack of a private vehicle is deleterious for quality of life, raising troubling questions about inequity possibly arising when people are denied access to vehicles for economic reasons.
Reports
2020
Transit Blues in the Golden State: Analyzing Recent California Ridership Trends
Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, Jacob L. Wasserman, Mark Garrett, Andrew Schouten, Hannah King, Julene Paul, Madeline Ruvolo
Transit patronage plunged staggeringly, from 50 to as much as 94 percent, during the first half of 2020 amidst the worst global pandemic in a century. But transit’s troubles in California date much earlier. From 2014 to 2018, California lost over 165 million annual boardings, a drop of over 11 percent. This report examines public transit in California in the 2010s and the factors behind its falling ridership.
We find that ridership gains and losses have been asymmetric with respect to location, operators, modes, and transit users. Transit ridership has been on a longer-term decline in regions like Greater Los Angeles and on buses, while ridership losses in the Bay Area are more recent. While overall transit boardings across the state are down since 2014, worrisome underlying trends date back earlier as patronage failed to keep up with population growth. But reduced transit service is not responsible for ridership losses, as falling transit ridership occurred at the same time as operators instead increased their levels of transit service.
What factors help to explain losses in transit ridership? Increased access to automobiles explains much, if not most, of declining transit use. Private vehicle access has increased significantly in California and, outside of the Bay Area, is likely the biggest single cause of falling transit ridership. Additionally, new ridehail services such as Lyft and Uber allow travelers to purchase automobility one trip at a time and likely serve as a substitute for at least some transit trips. Finally, neighborhoods are changing in ways that do not bode well for public transit. Households are increasingly locating in outlying areas where they experience longer commutes and less transit access to employment. At the same time, a smaller share of high-propensity transit users now live in the state’s most transit-friendly neighborhoods.
While the 2010s proved a difficult decade for public transit in California, and the opening of the current decade has been an even bigger challenge, transit remains an essential public service. Effectively managing transit recovery in California will require a clear-eyed understanding of the substantially altered environment within which these systems large and small must now operate.
Book Chapters
2020
Why Women Still Need Automobiles
Engendering Cities. Designing Sustainable Spaces for AllEvelyn Blumenberg
Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time. In the first section, a number of chapters in the book assess past, current, and projected conditions in cities vis-à-vis gender issues and needs. In the second section, the book assesses existing policy, planning, and design efforts to improve women’s and men’s concerns in urban living. Finally, the book proposes changes to existing policies and practices in urban planning and design, including its thinking (theory) and norms (ethics).
The book applies the current scholarship on theory and practice related to gender in a planning context, elaborating on some critical community-focused reflections on gender and design. It will be key reading for scholars and students of planning, architecture, design, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers, providing discussion of emerging topics in the field.
Policy Briefs
2020
The Bay Area is Losing Transit Ridership—But Transit Commuting is Growing
Jacob L. Wasserman, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett
Reports
2020
What’s Behind Recent Transit Ridership Trends in the Bay Area?
Volume II: Overview and Analysis of Underlying FactorsJacob L. Wasserman, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett, Hannah King, Julene Paul, Madeline Ruvolo, Andrew Schouten
Transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area is falling. Yet some operators, areas, times, directions, routes, modes, and services have fared better than others. These differences help reveal the causes of the Bay Area’s overall ridership slump and inform policy and service decisions that aim to restore Bay Area transit use. To investigate these temporal and spatial trends, we analyze ridership on the eight largest Bay Area transit operators in considerable detail in Volume II of our report.
Overall, we find a significant level of “peaking.” Ridership losses at off-peak hours, on weekends, on outlying routes, in non-commute directions, and on smaller operators account for a large and disproportionate share of the whole region’s patronage decline. Downtown San Francisco and commute-oriented rail lines like Caltrain have gained ridership as less central, lower-service routes have lost patronage. These patterns match our statistical modeling of BART ridership, on which station-area jobs had the greatest influence, one that has grown over time. The most significant exceptions to the Bay Area’s peaking problem are operators in urban cores, like Muni and AC Transit, where residential and employment density throughout the network have blunted peaking, though not necessarily overall losses.
Absolute patronage declines and peaking are intertwined but distinct problems, with cross-cutting divisions. Yet on all agencies, we see at least some evidence of peaking. The resulting dependence on peak trips both incurs high costs and depresses passenger satisfaction.
Reports
2020
What’s Behind Recent Transit Ridership Trends in the Bay Area?
Volume I: Overview and Analysis of Underlying FactorsEvelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett, Hannah King, Julene Paul, Madeline Ruvolo, Andrew Schouten, Brian D. Taylor, Jacob L. Wasserman
Public transit ridership has been falling nationally and in California since 2014. The San Francisco Bay Area, with the state’s highest rates of transit use, had until recently resisted those trends, especially compared to Greater Los Angeles. However, in 2017 and 2018 the region lost over five percent (>27 million) of its annual riders, despite a booming economy and service increases. This report examines Bay Area transit ridership to understand the dimensions of changing transit use, its possible causes, and potential solutions. We find that: 1) the steepest ridership losses have come on buses, at off-peak times, on weekends, in non-commute directions, on outlying lines, and on operators that do not serve the region’s core employment clusters; 2) transit trips in the region are increasingly commute-focused, particularly into and out of downtown San Francisco; 3) transit commuters are increasingly non-traditional transit users, such as those with higher incomes and automobile access; 4) the growing job-housing imbalance in the Bay Area is related to rising housing costs and likely depressing transit ridership as more residents live less transit-friendly parts of the region; and 5) ridehail is substituting for some transit trips, particularly in the off-peak. Arresting falling transit use will likely require action both by transit operators (to address peak capacity constraints; improve off-peak service; ease fare payments; adopt fare structures that attract off-peak riders; and better integrate transit with new mobility options) and public policymakers in other realms (to better meter and manage private vehicle use and to increase the supply and affordability of housing near job centers).
Policy Briefs
2020
Why is Public Transit Falling in the San Francisco Bay Area, and What Might Be Done About It?
Brian D. Taylor, Jacob L. Wasserman, Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett