Visions of an autonomous car future may come with a few bumps. UCLA Luskin’s Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, commented in a Wired story on how a so-called robotaxi revolution could play out as self-driving vehicles are hitting the road. Promoters of a driverless future like Tesla’s Elon Musk see a promising outlook for autonomous taxis, including car sharing systems that allow self-driving-car owners to rent out their vehicles while not in use by the owner, potentially alleviating parking problems. Not exactly, say some experts like Millard-Ball, citing studies of Uber and Lyft’s effects on U.S. cities that show the introduction of these services have actually created more urban traffic. “That’s going backward for the environment and for other urban goals — whether it’s being physically active or socially inclusive,” Millard-Ball said.
After 23 years at the helm, Brian D. Taylor has stepped down as director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, effective July 1. His successor is Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin.
Taylor has led UCLA ITS since 2001, playing a critical role in its expansion. Under his tenure, the institute has transformed from a small operation with limited staff and resources into a nationally influential research center with more than 75 scholars and staff conducting cutting-edge research in eight program areas. It has also established partnerships in several consortia, most recently being named the lead in a five-year, $7.5 million federally funded Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles.
“I am honored to have collaborated with so many talented and motivated students, staff and faculty in building the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies into the productive and influential transportation research center it is today,” Taylor said. “And I am confident that the institute will continue to effectively tackle our most pressing environmental, equity and technological transportation challenges in the years ahead.”
Significantly expanded its California-focused transportation policy research in 2017 due to substantially increased annual state funding through the Road Repair and Accountability Act (SB 1);
Supported five graduate transportation degree programs in three UCLA Luskin academic departments that have recently climbed in their most widely recognized national rankings — Civil & Environmental Engineering (#12), Public Policy (#14) and Urban Planning (#1);
Supported the recruitment of three transportation engineering faculty since 2020 and the creation of master’s and doctoral degrees in transportation engineering.
Directed more than $3 million in funding to support graduate students;
Supported more than 20 former transportation students who have moved on to tenured or tenure-track faculty positions at leading universities around the world, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and University of Virginia;
Broadened research focus areas to include access to opportunities, the environment, new mobility, parking, public transit, traffic, transportation & communities, and transportation finance.
Taylor’s Leadership Roles
Taylor worked professionally as a transportation planner/analyst for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission before pursuing a PhD in urban planning under the mentorship of Martin Wachs at UCLA. Taylor’s academic focus on transportation finance and governance made him a natural fit for policy engagement.
He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1994, Taylor joined the UCLA faculty, one year after Wachs re-established the institute on campus. When Professor Wachs moved to UC Berkeley in 1996, Taylor became the only faculty member on campus dedicated primarily to transportation teaching and research. That same year, he became associate director under Donald Shoup, who had replaced Wachs as UCLA ITS director.
In addition to serving as UCLA ITS director since 2001, Taylor is a professor of urban planning and public policy. He also chaired the Urban Planning department for three years and was the director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies for seven years. In recent years he has been an associate director of the Pacific Southwest Region 9 University Transportation Center and this year was chair of the council of directors for the four-campus UC ITS.
Building on Two Decades of Momentum
New director Adam Millard-Ball brings a wealth of experience in data science and climate change policy.
Incoming director Millard-Ball brings a wealth of experience in data science and climate change policy. He joined UCLA Luskin in 2021, and served as acting director of UCLA ITS during the 2022-23 academic year. In that time, Millard-Ball oversaw TRACtion: Transformative Research and Collaboration, an initiative that brought together academic researchers and community advocates to identify barriers to a just and sustainable future for Los Angeles.”I’m thrilled to lead UCLA ITS, which Professor Taylor has led and built up with his colleagues for more than two decades,” Millard-Ball said. “I hope to maintain our contributions to research and policy for our local community in Los Angeles, for California and across the U.S., and increasingly internationally as we confront the global challenges of climate change.”
The future for UCLA ITS holds more collaboration with engineering scholars at UCLA, exploration of climate issues in relation to transportation, work on equity and community engagement, and integration of innovative methods in data science.
As for Taylor’s future, he’s not going very far.
“I plan to remain active in transportation scholarship and policy, and look forward to devoting more time to research, teaching and mentoring in the years ahead,” he said.
Urban Planning Professor Adam Millard-Ball spoke to Florida public media outlet WUFT about the growing number of people who live in RVs by choice or necessity. Housing research into the estimated 1 million Americans who live full-time in RVs has focused more on people pursuing a highly mobile and leisurely “Van Life” than on stationary, low-income residents, the article noted. “Some people like the nomadic existence, but for many people it’s the lesser of two evils,” Millard-Ball said. “It’s better than couch surfing or being in a tent.” Large urban centers can support this option by converting excess space on public roads and in parking lots into areas with access to basic utilities such as water hookups and garbage collection, where residents of campers and RVs can live legally. The average residential street is more than twice as wide as the functional minimum of 16 feet, Millard-Ball’s research shows, and some of that extra space could be used to accommodate housing.
Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, has received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments by scientists and scholars from around the world. Trained as an economist, geographer and urban planner, Millard-Ball conducts research on transportation, the environment and urban data science. Award recipients are invited to collaborate with scholars based in Germany, and Millard-Ball is currently on sabbatical at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin. Each year, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, named after the noted German astronomer and mathematician, is given to 10 to 20 internationally renowned academics. The awards are funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research and administered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which promotes scientific advances, academic exchanges and cultural dialogue across borders. Award recipients were honored at a symposium in Bamberg, Germany, in March.
UCLA Luskin’s Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and acting director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, commented in an MIT Technology Review article about a California-based car manufacturer seeking to earn carbon credits for its electric vehicle chargers. Rivian, producer of high-end trucks and SUVs, has applied to one of the world’s largest certifiers of carbon credits to retain “all environmental attributes” from the use of its chargers, the article revealed. Residential chargers are included along with the company’s own charging stations and third-party site hosts under the company’s plan, which Millard-Ball doubts would be noticed by purchasers or likely pointed out by sellers. “If someone is buying a charger and the company is selling away the good so someone else can pollute more, I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the marketing or the branding or the motivations of many people who buy electric vehicles,” he said.
“But it dawned on me that a really important foundational piece of work that was published one-half century ago, 50 years ago, was Marty Wach’s paper on accessibility,” said Cervero during a Feb. 28 presentation in honor of his former urban planning mentor and colleague. “And why don’t I wrap my talk … around the theme of that paper and try to show how it really shaped my own research in this field and, I would suggest, generations of other people as well.”
Titled “Physical Accessibility as a Social Indicator,” the article by Wachs and T. Gordon Kumagai continues to influence planning policy, said Cervero, who earned his doctorate in urban planning at UCLA in 1980 and joined UC Berkeley’s city and regional planning faculty, where he remained until 2016.
“The article really highlights a number of different contexts of which accessibility should really be an overarching principle that guides what we do in this field of urban planning and transportation,” Cervero said.
During introductory remarks, UCLA Luskin Professor Brian Taylor mentioned that the lecture was the first in the series to be presented without Wachs himself in attendance. The longtime urban planning scholar taught at both UCLA and UC Berkeley before his death in 2021. Members of the Wachs family, including his wife, Helen, were in attendance.
Presented in conjunction with the Luskin Lecture Series, Cervero’s talk was titled, “Accessibility, Social Equity, and Contemporary Policy Debates,” and he spoke about how the concepts put forth 50 years before still have relevance today, especially in regard to how access to transportation contributes to the well-being of people living in cities.
“Marty made the point with his co-author that this sensibility happens at multiple scales. It’s regional access to jobs or medical facilities, but it’s also at the micro-scale of ‘Do you have access to, say, a bus?’” said Cervero, who said he built on this notion in his own research about socioeconomic matching in terms of the realities of transportation access. A person might live in a transit-rich area, for example, “but if you’re in a wheelchair, and the buses don’t have wheelchair ramps, then you don’t have great transit access.”
In the 1970s, few scholars prior to Wachs had written about these types of human components to transportation access. “To me, it was truly revolutionary,” Cervero said.
For example, Cervero found that people living in central city neighborhoods often bear disproportionately higher costs for transportation services. Because they make frequent off-peak trips for necessities like groceries, they end up paying a lot more than affluent suburbanites taking fewer trips over longer distances.
The disparity also was apparent when he and other researchers looked at why people who seemed to have public transit options readily available to them choose to rely primarily on their vehicles instead.
“A lot of these individuals were people like working moms who had very complex travel patterns,” Cervero said. “They have a child to drop off at the child care center and then go to their job. They were taking vocational courses at night and had to get there at a time when public transit service was bad. They had split-shift weekend jobs when transit services are notoriously lousy. So, they need a car.”
In looking at the concepts articulated by Wachs so many years before, Cervero also found lessons that can be applied to some of today’s planning and policy debates. One example is the idea of a “15-minute city,” a place designed by planners to ensure that most people have ready access not just to work but to the other necessities of daily life within 15 minutes of their homes.
The idea is laudable, but it has its critics.
“If you really insist on this, you potentially stifle economic competition. Companies don’t want to thinly distribute activities everywhere,” said Cervero, as some in the audience of UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni nodded their heads in agreement. “So, this idea of a 15-minute city really runs in the face of what economists have long argued are important economic drivers towards the economic growth and performance of a city.”
In his career, Cervero has consulted on transportation and urban planning projects worldwide, including recently in Singapore. “They’ve come up with this idea of the 20-minute town and the 45-minute city. You can reach a lot of things within 20 minutes. But when it comes to employment, when it comes to going to see a sporting event or buying a car or going to a regional hospital with specialized medical care, that’s a 45-minute city. So, I think we’re getting a lot better articulation and sensible policy.”
During a Q&A session after his formal presentation, Cervero spoke with UCLA Professor Adam Millard-Ball and took questions from the audience. When asked to talk more about his global experience, he explained that much of the scholarly work to date has focused on urban life in the United States and Europe.
Some of today’s researchers focus on climate change impacts and how to find “a little more efficiency out of electric mobility or ridesharing or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, over the next 20 or 30 years, 80% to 90% of urbanization is not going to happen in the Global North. It’s going to be in south Asia and Africa, and whatever happens there is going to swamp any and everything we do here, particularly in the rates of carbon emissions and so forth.”
In the developed world, the focus is often on how to get people from the central cores to jobs in suburbia. That’s less true in places like Mexico, South America, Indonesia and other parts of Asia.
“It’s a totally different landscape. Most of the poor are not in cities but in far-flung suburbs or towns. When you’re talking about lack of access, it’s a two- to three-hour, one-way daily commute,” Cervero said. “The amount of time and resources you have to invest is enormous just getting to and from where you need to be in order to have the earnings to cover basic needs.”
He was also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting rise in remote work.
“Historically, we think of physical proximity,” said Cervero, noting that when workers have highly specialized skill sets they depend on interactions in teams of people with other specialized skills to thrive.
“The whole idea of access being tied to location is being somewhat thrown around by all these rapidly evolving, powerful kinds of technological advances,” he said. “Technology is transforming. The notion of physical proximity as we all know it has long driven the idea of cooperation. But maybe it happens less.”
Established by students, the Wachs Lecture Series features prominent and innovative scholars and policymakers in the field of transportation. The UCLA Luskin Lecture series brings together scholars with local and national leaders to discuss solutions to society’s most pressing problems. This event was organized by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and Institute of Transportation Studies, for which Taylor has served as the director and Millard-Ball the interim director. Cervero was the director of UC Berkeley’s counterpart to ITS for many years.
The UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge has launched an initiative called TRACtion — for Transformative Research and Collaboration — that will bring UCLA scholars together with community stakeholders to address key topics related to sustainability: transportation, energy, water and ecosystems. The program will begin with a two-year series of activities and funding opportunities that will tackle the region’s seemingly intractable transportation challenges. Called Transforming Transportation in Los Angeles, this track will tap the expertise of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), which will work with community-based organizations and advocacy groups to identify barriers to a more equitable transportation system, then fund research to fill some of these gaps. TRACtion organizers held a Jan. 26 kickoff meeting that included California Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin, UCLA faculty from several disciplines, and community organizations engaged with transportation and environmental justice. “These are voices that will disagree and push each other,” said Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and acting director of ITS. “If we don’t make some people uncomfortable, I don’t think we’ve pushed people far enough.” He said it is critical that the effort encompass expertise from across numerous disciplines. Involving political scientists, for example, might illuminate how elected officials determine transportation policy; historians could help explain how the car has come to dominate transportation discourse; artists and designers could help ensure that solutions are shared with the public in engaging and culturally relevant ways. “Transportation equity and sustainability are too important to be left to transportation scholars alone, and we need these sophisticated, multidisciplinary perspectives,” he said.
In late December, a ride-hailing service using driverless vehicles was expanded in San Francisco, and a reporter for Al Jazeera was among those taking a first ride. Assisted by two staffers from Waymo, the writer completes a 15-minute trip from the Castro District to the NoPa neighborhood in a driverless car without incident. The article mentions that autonomous vehicle proponents envision that parking spaces will become less necessary because driverless vehicles will simply drop off passengers and continue on their way. But there’s a downside to such a scenario, notes UCLA Luskin’s Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and acting director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Without the need to park, autonomous vehicles might actually increase congestion, cruising without passengers while awaiting riders. “There’s just not the physical space in most cities for unlimited free car use,” Millard-Ball says. “That basically destroys much of what makes cities livable and attractive.”
LAist spoke with Urban Planning Professor Adam Millard-Ball for a report on the history and future of the electric car. California’s plan to end the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 is expected to spur electric vehicle sales across the nation. “We’re not going to be able to resolve the climate crisis without electric vehicles,” Millard-Ball said. “And that’s mainly because transportation is such a big part of the climate problem.” The move toward emission-free cars is part of progression of automotive technology dating to the Clean Air Act of 1970, but it’s only part of the solution, Millard-Ball said. In addition to making individual vehicles more climate friendly, he called for “getting more people walking and biking and better buses, … a transit system that is a real competitor to the private car.”
Associate Professor of Urban Planning Adam Millard-Ball was featured in a CapRadio article about Sacramento County’s in-progress climate action plan, one of many plans adopted by California cities to combat climate change at a local level. Several of the plans have been criticized for sticking to safe solutions and failing to address equity. “Cities aren’t really getting outside of their comfort zone,” Millard-Ball said. “They don’t force the city to do something it wasn’t already going to do.” Radical change will be required for these plans to be effective in the future, he said. “In order to make change, there’s not going to be 100% agreement on these difficult decisions if cities are serious about reducing emissions,” he said. “We’ve already done most of the kind of easy, cheap, quick fixes that everyone can agree on.” The article cited research co-authored by Millard-Ball on equity in urban climate planning.
