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Archive for: Evelyn Blumenberg

Blumenberg on Rideshare Pilot Program in Ohio

May 16, 2019/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Evelyn Blumenberg /by Luskin Staff

Urban Planning Professor Evelyn Blumenberg spoke to the Columbus Dispatch about a proposed ride-share program in Grove City, Ohio. The Central Ohio Transit Authority and Grove City plan to implement a ride-share program to bridge the distance between public transit stops and people’s destinations. The pilot program would be offered in an area with many jobs. Blumenberg, director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA Luskin, noted that most jobs are not located in the central city. “That, no matter what, is going to pose a challenge for fixed-route public transit,” she said.

Read the article

 

First Conference on Regional Growth and Equity Tackles Transportation and Communities UCLA scholars, nonprofit representatives discuss how to use multibillion-dollar investment to address regional inequities

April 26, 2019/0 Comments/in Development and Housing, For Policymakers, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Social Welfare, The Lewis Center, Transportation, Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg, Madeline Brozen, Paul Ong /by Claudia Bustamante

By Claudia Bustamante

Los Angeles is populous and diverse, but that distinction also produces inequality. There are disparities in housing costs. Amenities vary across neighborhoods. Many low-income families struggle to make ends meet despite impressive gains in employment.

During an inaugural event focusing on regional growth and equity, the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies convened a group of experts to discuss how to leverage a sweeping, taxpayer-supported $120-billion investment in Los Angeles’ transportation system to address decades-old disparities.

Following the 2016 passage of Measure M, Metro committed $52 billion in sales tax revenue for capital investments throughout the county. The agency is looking to accelerate 28 projects by the time Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics. Senate Bill 1 approved in 2017 designated another $54 billion to fix roads, to relieve congestion, and to improve transit and trade corridors throughout California.

“The question is how can we improve the quality of communities by taking advantage of the ongoing and major regional investments in public transit,” said Evelyn Blumenberg MA UP ’90 Ph.D. ’95, director of the Lewis Center and professor of urban planning, at “InterActions LA: Inspiring Quality Transit Neighborhoods,” held April 18, 2019, at The California Endowment.

“It is precisely in these moments of rapid change when there is a window of opportunity to do something different,” Blumenberg said. “Hopefully, it’s to engage in more equitable outcomes that better connect residents to economic opportunities, that protect and expand affordable housing, and that improve the health and robustness of the L.A. region.”

Paul Ong, UCLA Luskin research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, has done extensive research on the role of urban structures on the reproduction of inequality. He said this topic is an important one for discussion.

“We, as a society, make neighborhoods,” Ong said, “and neighborhoods make us. The type of neighborhood we live in determines not only today’s quality of life but the trajectory over generations.”

Julia Stein of the UCLA Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment leads discussion. Photo by Amy Tierney
Paul Ong, UCLA Luskin research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Photo by Amy Tierney Presenters and participants network at InterActions LA. Photo by Amy Tierney Madeline Brozen, deputy director of the Lewis Center. Photo by Amy Tierney

Multiple approaches to improve neighborhoods were discussed. They include progressive housing and land use policies, stationary design, neighborhood amenities and community engagement.

Key among the discussion was the need to focus on people who use transit and their specific needs. For example, women, older adults and people with disabilities make up about 60 percent of Los Angeles’ transit ridership. Those transit users have specific concerns about safety and security while walking to stations, waiting and riding transit, said Madeline Brozen MA UP ’11, deputy director of the Lewis Center.

“If we’re not planning for specific groups in an intentional way, it’s not likely we’re going to see the shifts we want to see from these investments,” Brozen said.

Julia Stein, project director at the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA Law, said the city’s Transit Oriented Communities program, which provides incentives to developers to build near major transit stops and include affordable housing units, provides an opportunity to address some issues.

Since the program’s inception in 2017, about 2,400 affordable units have been proposed, of which 42 percent are reserved for extremely low-income households.

Attendees also heard about specific efforts being conducted in the city by nonprofit organizations, including improvements along Avenue 26 near Lincoln Heights and Cypress Park spearheaded by LA-Mas. The nonprofit agency engaged with community members to generate design improvements and creative wayfinding on a quarter-mile stretch near the Metro Gold Line station.

The end result was impressive, but Avital Aboody from LA-Mas said the permitting process was complex, expensive and time-consuming.

“We had the expertise and time to navigate this process, but that may not be the case for community members or grassroots organizations that may want to do this in their community,” she said.

Lessons Learned Outside L.A.

Outside California, the Twin Cities region in Minnesota has a reputation for being progressive. But the community deals with stark racial disparities, which date back to decades of systemic racism, like redlining, according to Owen Duckworth, director of organizing and policy at the Alliance, a Minnesota-based coalition of community-based organizations and advocacy groups.

Now that the region is investing in transit infrastructure such as an expansion of a rail line that connects downtown Minneapolis to St. Paul, there is an opportunity for communities to have greater impact.

“Government agencies want to deliver on equity. That’s the buzzword,” Duckworth said. “We can’t have equitable outcomes by continuing inequitable processes in planning.”

Another theme echoed by many panelists is community engagement — making sure residents’ input is not merely tokenized by developers and government organizations.

Community members provide valuable insights as experts in their own neighborhoods.

“Our partners want to be partners to government agencies in community development, but there’s no compensation for these organizations. They mostly volunteer their time,” said Thomas Yee of LA THRIVES.

“Everything from here on out needs to be collaborative. We need to get away from silos. We need to work together,” Yee added.

Multiple Objectives

Blumenberg ended the event by saying it is clear that multiple objectives must be met to ensure quality transit neighborhoods. To name a few, planners must consider housing, traffic, environmental concerns, access to opportunities, safety and security issues around mobility.

The solutions must be equally diverse — tailored to the different neighborhoods and communities throughout the region, she said.

 

Blumenberg on Cars, Jobs and Low-Income Communities

February 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Evelyn Blumenberg /by Luskin Staff

Professor of Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg spoke to Wired about how cars are the best way to connect low-income people to jobs. The article noted that the progressive agenda known as the Green New Deal focuses on public transit and clean vehicles but does not account for widespread inequities in mobility. Blumenberg’s work studied the effect cars have on a person’s ability to get and keep a job. The research showed that low-income people with cars were able to move into better neighborhoods, were less exposed to poverty, and were more likely to find and keep a job. She said this is particularly true for women and caregivers. “Trying to balance unpaid responsibilities and unpaid work is just really really hard while ‘trip chaining’ on public transit, or while the kids are on the back of your bike,” Blumenberg said.

Read the article

 

Blumenberg on the Persistence of Driving

January 24, 2019/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Evelyn Blumenberg /by Luskin Staff

Urban Planning Professor Evelyn Blumenberg commented on the decline in ridership on public transportation in a recent Philadelphia Inquirer article. “Even among population groups where transit ridership and transit use has been highest — low-income, immigrants, recent immigrants, in particular — we found a growth in driving,” Blumenberg said, referring to a Southern California study that reflects a nationwide trend. The article focused on the declining usage of public transportation in lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia due to the expense of automobiles, the hours lower-income jobs require, the demands of parenthood and concerns about safety. “We’ve created urban environments that privilege the automobile that make it difficult no matter what transit does,” said Blumenberg, who is also director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA. “If jobs are dispersing and things are spread out in metropolitan areas, transit is going to have an increasingly hard time meeting those travel needs.”

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Urban Planning Students Take Home Scholarship Awards

November 14, 2018/0 Comments/in Luskin's Latest Blog Evelyn Blumenberg /by Stan Paul

Four UCLA Luskin Urban Planning students were winners at the 2018 Women’s Transportation Seminar, Los Angeles Area Chapter, annual scholarship awards dinner held Nov. 8 in downtown Los Angeles. Two doctoral students, Hannah Rae King and Miriam Pinksi, each won Myra L. Frank Memorial Graduate Scholarships of $10,000 and $7,500, respectively. Urban planning master’s student Cassie Halls is the inaugural winner of the $5,000 Stantec scholarship. Halls was also among award winners – with urban planning master’s student Kidada Malloy – at the American Public Transportation Foundation’s annual conference in Nashville this past October. Joceline Suhaimi, a student in UCLA Luskin’s Urban and Regional Studies undergraduate minor, also received a WTS award. Suhaimi, who is majoring in civil engineering, won the Ava Doner Undergraduate Scholarship. “Transportation is a basic human need, and I want to make it accessible to all people, regardless of age, ability, income and car ownership,” said Suhaimi, who will receive $10,000. “This scholarship will allow me to continue education and pursue my career goals.” Allison Yoh, MA UP ’02 Ph.D. ’08, served as co-emcee for the awards. Yoh is now director of transportation planning for the Port of Long Beach. WTS-LA is a chapter of WTS International founded in 1977. The organization has more than 6,500 members (men and women) with 79 chapters in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. — Stan Paul


Blumenberg Says Trump’s Welfare Reform Plan Misses a Key Piece: Transportation 

July 3, 2018/0 Comments/in Luskin in the News Evelyn Blumenberg /by Les Dunseith

UCLA Luskin’s Evelyn Blumenberg is quoted in a Washington Post article about whether a Trump administration order to toughen work requirements for welfare recipients overlooks a well-documented link between transportation and employment.  “Since the 1990s, things have become much more difficult for welfare recipients,” said Blumenberg, a transportation expert and professor of urban planning. “And I have not seen an upswell in movement for supporting the transportation part of this.” Cars play a key role in access to jobs that are “suburbanizing.” Blumenberg said, “It’s a touchy subject in transportation circles, where funds are focused on increasing access to public transit, even though poor people more than anyone need the flexibility and instant mobility of having a car.”

Read the story

 

ITS Launches New Digital Magazine: Transfers

May 16, 2018/0 Comments/in Luskin's Latest Blog Donald Shoup, Evelyn Blumenberg, Gregory Pierce, Martin Wachs /by George Foulsham

Policymakers and professionals need important research to improve our transportation system, but it too often languishes behind the intimidating walls of academia. Transfers Magazine, a new biannual digital publication led by faculty and staff at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, aims to break down those walls by distilling the expert knowledge of scholars into tangible links to action. Donald Shoup and Martin Wachs, distinguished professors of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, serve as senior editors for Transfers. Each issue will feature shorter, more readable versions of peer-reviewed, previously published academic journal articles with the goal of making research accessible to students, policymakers, the press and the general public. Transfers is the flagship publication of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center (PSR), a research consortium of eight universities in Arizona, California and Hawaii. The inaugural issue was released on May 16 and features new studies from PSR scholars, including UCLA Luskin faculty members Evelyn Blumenberg, Brian D. Taylor, Gregory Pierce and Shoup, on key questions for transportation policy. The issue is now available online, and readers can receive future issues sent directly to their email by subscribing. Between issues, the Transfers staff will connect research updates, student projects, expert opinion and campus news to current events in the transportation world on the The Circulator blog and on Twitter.

Transfers is the flagship publication of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center.

Gil Penalosa – Creating Vibrant & Healthy Cities

March 20, 2018/0 Comments/in Alumni, Digital Technologies, Diversity, Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels, Environment, For Policymakers, For Students, News, Professional Events, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Transportation, Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg /by Whitney Willis

>> RSVP here <<

DESCRIPTION

Named by Planetizen as one of the 100 most influential urbanists, Gil Penalosa, founder and chair of 8 80 Cities, is known for his advocacy and passion for designing cities and public spaces for people of all ages and backgrounds. His talk will discuss how sustainable mobility, walking, riding bicycles, using public transit, contributes to a vibrant and welcome city for everyone to use and enjoy at every age.

This lecture is presented in partnership with the California Association for Coordinated Transportation.

Lunch will be provided

 

Who, Exactly, Is Our Transportation System Designed to Serve? Panelists decry transit shortcomings for women and families during second installment of an ongoing discussion series sponsored by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

March 12, 2018/0 Comments/in Alumni, Business and the Environment, Complete Streets, Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels, For Faculty, For Policymakers, For Students, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Transportation, Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg /by webteam

By Will Livesley-O’Neill, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

The gender imbalance of transportation planning — a field traditionally dominated by men who designed a system that too often falls short for women and families — was the subject of the second installment of the ongoing Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) discussion series Transportation is a Women’s Issue on March 7, 2018.

Policymakers, practitioners, scholars and students gathered at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in downtown Los Angeles for a panel featuring Seleta Reynolds, Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) general manager and ITS advisory board member; LA Metro Deputy CEO Stephanie Wiggins; and UCLA Luskin Urban Planning Professor and ITS faculty fellow Evelyn Blumenberg. Moderating was Investing in Place Deputy Director Naomi Iwasaki.

The transportation system is fundamentally designed to accommodate a 9-to-5 work schedule traditionally associated with higher-income men, panelists said. Even as women’s participation in the labor market has surged, that system continues to ignore the needs of travelers at off-peak hours and those with complex trip-making patterns, who are much likelier to be women, especially lower-income women, they said.

Women and men travel similarly in terms of mode, but Blumenberg said that the purposes are often different: Women make more trips that serve their household — a “trip-chaining” form of travel that can include multiple stops on the same tour — in addition to commuting.

“In most households, women work and have a disproportionate responsibility for the unpaid labor in the home,” Blumenberg said. “It’s really hard to carry out those multiple tasks with public transit, or using a bike, or walking.”

Watch the full panel discussion:

In Los Angeles and beyond, work and household trips usually require access to a car. Transit agencies attempt to reduce congestion by focusing on service during traditional peak commute hours, Reynolds argued, ignoring off-peak travel that could benefit women.

“If what you are solving for is the peak, the peak, the peak, then you’re never going to have a system that has reliable, frequent, comfortable service at the times of day when women need it the most,” she said.

Wiggins said that, too often, transit agencies such as LA Metro have adopted supposedly gender-neutral plans that fail to account for the different travel patterns of women.

“They say that what gets measured gets done, and we haven’t been measuring it at all,” she said. “We have to make sure that we don’t use the planning tools of the past to inform planning for the future.”

To that end, LA Metro’s CEO has approved a recommendation from the agency’s women and girls council to gather data about female passengers and hire a consultant to help develop a gender action plan. As LA Metro embarks on a next-generation study to revisit its bus network amid dramatic ridership decline, Wiggins said that women must be at the table for all levels of decision-making — not just in leadership roles but also in conducting the studies or scheduling service changes. Further research into female travel patterns is required to understand what women and families need and to persuade the federal and state agencies that fund transportation projects to emphasize those needs.

Improving transportation safety is critical for women’s travel. A survey of former riders cited safety as their primary reason for leaving the system, and Wiggins said that LA Metro now examines safety concerns through the lenses of sexual harassment and design. New campaigns with Peace Over Violence and local law enforcement agencies aim to crack down on harassment while applying a gender lens to design. Results could include better lighting at bus stops and transit stations, creation of accommodations for strollers, and changes to where passengers sit on buses and trains to minimize unwanted contact.

Blumenberg noted that better off-peak service requires safer conditions getting to and waiting for transit — lower-income workers are more likely to need to travel at night but often feel unsafe using the bus or train at those times.

Reynolds pointed out that too many futurist conversations about the potential benefits of automated buses and rideshare vehicles fail to recognize that many women will not feel comfortable without a driver, who acts as a chaperone.

“That is a really overlooked value and quality that a transit operator brings,” she said, adding that such discussions perpetuate a male way of thinking about mobility. “Most women, we feel like we move through the world always on guard about sexual harassment or assault.”

Reynolds said that her department’s new strategic plan includes a concerted effort to understand what women are looking for from their transportation system.  Then, implementation of pilot programs could lead to larger changes.

LADOT plans to start with after-school transportation, a burden that now largely falls on women to arrange as a result of long-term school budget cuts. A pilot electric car-sharing program in the MacArthur Park neighborhood incorporated local women’s requests for features such as carseats and the ability to add elderly caregivers to family service accounts.

Moving forward, a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to transportation planning is needed, panelists said. That approach should factor in the economic benefits of car access, better off-peak transit service and bike infrastructure catered not just to male preferences, and much more.

Right now, Reynolds said, “we’ve trapped women into finding the one choice that feels safe and comfortable and works for them, because of the design of the system.”

Policymakers, practitioners, scholars and students gathered at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in downtown Los Angeles for the panel discussion.

 

A Gendered Planning Mismatch

February 8, 2018/0 Comments/in Alumni, Digital Technologies, Diversity, Electric Vehicles and Alternative Fuels, Environment, For Policymakers, For Students, News, Professional Events, Public Policy, School of Public Affairs, Transportation, Urban Planning Evelyn Blumenberg /by Whitney Willis

>> RSVP here <<

How do discussions and plans for the future of transportation and new innovative mobility services account for women’s travel patterns? Women tend to commute shorter distances and conduct more household serving trips than their male counterparts. This gender gap exists even in dual-income households and widens further for child-serving trips, even among households with no children.

What potential do new mobility options, bikesharing, ridesourcing, microtransit hold for closing this gap? Or will they rather reinforce these divergent travel patterns? Join us for a conversation about women’s travel patterns, current and future transportation planning and policy. Our experts will share their previous research, and discuss future plans from the City and County of Los Angeles to better serve women’s travel needs and patterns.

Reception will follow after the event.

Speakers:

  • Evelyn Blumenberg MA UP ’90 PhD ’95, UCLA Luskin Department of Urban Planning
  • Seleta Reynolds, Los Angeles Department of Transportation
  • Stephanie Wiggins, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
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