Rethinking L.A. Traffic: Manville Highlights Congestion as a Sign of Prosperity

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A recent op-ed for Town & Country by journalist Annie Goldsmith reexamines Los Angeles’s reputation for notoriously bad traffic. Opening with the iconic freeway scene from “La La Land” she frames traffic not merely as a nuisance but as a defining characteristic of the city.  She argues that unlike older cities with dense, rigid street grids, Los Angeles offers multiple routes and relatively predictable congestion, allowing drivers to plan their travel more effectively.

Goldsmith reframes traffic as a byproduct of economic vitality and personal mobility rather than dysfunction.

Luskin urban planning professor Michael Manville reinforces this perspective, stating: “Congestion is oftentimes a sign of economic prosperity.”

Ultimately, the piece portrays Los Angeles traffic as culturally embedded and even somewhat romantic—encouraging readers to reconsider it as an inevitable and even perhaps meaningful aspect of urban life.

Manville Weighs In as New York Considers Paid Parking to Help Close Major Budget Gap

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As New York City confronts a $7 billion budget gap under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, policymakers are increasingly considering long-overlooked revenue sources, including charging for curbside parking. With roughly 97% of the city’s 3 million parking spaces unmetered, experts estimate the city may be foregoing up to $2 billion annually. While proposals such as residential permits and expanded metering face political resistance, particularly concerns about regressive impacts, urban policy experts argue that pricing parking is both economically rational and widely adopted in other major cities.

Urban planning professor at UCLA Michael Manville emphasized the fiscal and policy potential of such reforms to CNBC in a recent article. “Can you finance the whole city off it? No, of course not, but you could make a sizable amount of money,” he said. Framing the issue as a basic matter of supply and demand, Manville added, “If you offer New York City land at the price of zero, then you’re going to have a shortage of it because the price is well below its value.”

Manville on Implementing Congestion Pricing at LAX’s Horseshoe

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The notorious “horseshoe” at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is a source of great aggravation for many airport-goers. The U-shaped road’s five lanes are almost always congested, and conditions have only worsened over time despite numerous efforts to address the issue. 

A novel approach, however, could almost guarantee a traffic reduction. Congestion pricing, or charging drivers to enter traffic-heavy areas, has been previously proven to ease traffic, and if implemented at LAX, could encourage drivers to stay away from the horseshoe. UCLA professor of urban planning Michael Manville shared with Golden State that LAX is a “natural place” to showcase the effectiveness of this strategy, and that although commuters may question why they now have to pay for something that was originally free, “congestion is its own deterrent to using the road, because it charges a big cost in time.” While a formal proposal has yet to be submitted, successfully implementing this strategy could bring traffic innovation to not only LAX, but southern California as a whole.

Rethinking Rent Control in California

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Luskin’s Michael Manville discussed rent conrol on the California Insider Show, examining its effects on tenants and landlords across California. While rent control can help limit year-to-year increases, housing costs have continued to outpace inflation, underscoring the need for alternative solutions to affordability in Los Angeles.

“The more you turn the clamps with the rent control law, the more you give people incentives to be the worst version of themselves,” Manville says. While rent control laws can provide temporary aid for certain renters, housing costs have not kept up with inflation in California.

“Rent control can be a reliable way to prevent big rent increases from happening year to year, but it isn’t necessarily a good path to actually make housing affordable,” Manville explains.

Manville also argues that population growth is not effective to infer need for more housing. He suggests approaching housing the same way businesses look at prices to assess demand.

Michael Manville on Why L.A. Traffic Isn’t Improving Much

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UCLA Luskin’s Michael Manville was quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times article analyzing why traffic congestion in Los Angeles remains persistently high despite modest year-over-year changes.

Manville, a professor and chair of urban planning at UCLA, said flat or slightly declining congestion levels are not surprising given the continued prevalence of remote and hybrid work. He also emphasized that traffic conditions in Los Angeles have long been severe, making dramatic improvement unlikely. “Things have always been pretty bad traffic-wise in L.A.,” Manville said.

Pointing to the region’s distinctive development patterns, Manville explained that Southern California’s moderate but widespread density creates a challenging transportation environment. While other metropolitan areas have dense downtowns that can support robust transit systems, Los Angeles is “not really dense enough in any area to really support public transportation, but dense enough to make traffic bad.” As Manville noted, this structural reality makes small improvements difficult for commuters to perceive.

Scrutiny Grows Over Measure ULA Claims, Mike Manville Weighs In

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Measure ULA, the voter-approved  “mansion tax” that was meant to address Los Angeles’ housing affordability crisis and boost construction jobs, is drawing new scrutiny. An April news release from the tax’s oversight committee claimed that, within its first two years, Measure ULA helped create 800 new affordable homes and 10,000 union construction jobs. Those figures are now facing serious questions about their accuracy.

LAist cited Professor and Chair of Urban Planning Michael Manville’s input on these controversial numbers. According to Manville, these statistics are highly implausible as there hadn’t been a lot of construction resulting from Measure ULA happening at the time the claim was made. 

“What it suggests to you is the possibility that the people at work sort of promoting and, in theory, even regulating this measure aren’t that interested in the details, aren’t that interested in the rigor and are more interested in just promoting a particular storyline,” he said.

Further investigation revealed that the method in which the estimate was obtained was fundamentally flawed and the post has since been altered to reflect these insights.

Manville on the End of an Era for Carpool-Lane Access

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Michael Manville, chair and professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about new rules that are kicking solo drivers of clean-air vehicles out of California’s carpool lanes, raising questions about how commute times and traffic will be affected.

The carpool lane perk was used to promote the adoption of clean and zero-emission vehicles. As of Aug. 14, more than half a million motorists statewide had an active decal on their vehicle to access the lanes.

That privilege ended Oct. 1, and experts say it will take time to see how clean-air vehicle drivers might adapt.

“Will they just throw up their hands and get in traffic with the rest of us in the three [other] lanes, or will they actually do something else, because they really do value not being in traffic?” Manville asked.

He added that, on an already gridlocked freeway during peak drive times, commuters might not even notice one more car that merges in.

Manville: Ventura’s Main Street Debate Oversimplifies Downtown Challenges The UCLA planning scholar warns that business depend on many factors beyond the street closure.

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As Ventura’s City Council prepares for a final vote on whether to keep Main Street closed to cars or reopen it, business owners and residents remain deeply divided. Some credit the pandemic-era “Main Street Moves” closure with creating a lively, family-friendly downtown, while others say it’s driven customers away and hurt businesses.

Michael Manville, professor and chair of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, commented in an article published by the Ventura County Star against drawing direct conclusions about the closure’s impact. He notes that downtown retail across the country has faced long-term challenges, from e-commerce to competition with big box stores, making it hard to isolate the effect of Ventura’s street closure.

Manville frames the debate as less about hard data and more about perception.

“Downtowns and businesses in downtowns have good and bad periods for all sorts of reasons,” Manville said. “Isolating the amount of good or bad luck that you can attribute to the street closure is difficult. If someone owns a business and the business is flagging a little bit and there happens to be a street closure, it makes sense to blame the street closure and see if changing it up can change your fortunes.”

Michael Manville Critiques L.A.’s Vision Zero: Progress ‘Incredibly Disappointing” Urban planning expert Michael Manville says Los Angeles’ Vision Zero traffic safety initiative has failed to deliver

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The Los Angeles Times article examines the harsh reality of implementation challenges for ambitious urban goals like phasing out gas-powered vehicles or becoming a fully interconnected Smart City. Most notably, the Vision Zero initiative—the city’s pledge to end traffic deaths by 2025—has stumbled amid funding shortfalls, political inertia, fragmented coordination, and a lack of accountability.

On Vision Zero’s failure, UCLA professor and chair of urban planning Michael Manville didn’t mince words: “Incredibly disappointing,” he said. “The city remains incredibly dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians.”

Despite these setbacks, Los Angeles has committed significant resources to Vision Zero. In the 2025-2026 fiscal year, the city approved a budget of $100 million for Vision Zero initiatives, including road redesigns, improved signage, and enhanced lighting in high-risk areas.

Underpaying and Overusing Our Roads: The True Cost of Driving UCLA Luskin’s Mike Manville is challenging how we think about traffic, housing, and fairness.

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by Peaches Chung

If you’ve ever been stuck in gridlock traffic on the 405 or circled the block looking for parking in L.A., you’ve experienced the kinds of problems Michael Manville has spent years researching and trying to solve. As professor and chair of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Manville is reshaping how we think about transportation and housing in a sprawling city like Los Angeles and turning his research into real-world impact.

At the center of Manville’s transportation research is a deceptively simple idea: the way we price things matters and how we price things shapes how we use them.

” Driving costs less than it should, because the full social costs of driving, like congestion, pollution, infrastructure wear, aren’t reflected in what we pay to use our roads.”

“Driving is too cheap, and housing is too expensive,” he says. “Driving isn’t cheap in the absolute sense of the word ‘cheap’ because cars aren’t cheap and gas isn’t free, but in the sense that it costs less than it should, because the full social costs of driving, like congestion, pollution, infrastructure wear, aren’t reflected in what we pay to use our roads.” The price of housing, meanwhile, is driven up by restrictive land-use policies that limit supply.

Manville’s first introduction into urban planning began in a newsroom while covering transportation and housing topics as a local reporter. When the newspaper he worked for went bankrupt, he joined the local planning commission. Eager to turn his newfound passion into a career, he enrolled in the urban planning master’s degree program at UCLA and after a summer as a research assistant, decided to pursue a Ph.D. Today, he leads the department that jumpstarted his second career.

Building on the groundbreaking work of his mentor Donald Shoup, former UCLA urban planning professor and pioneer in parking reform who famously argued that free or underpriced parking distorts urban development, Manville and many other experts in the field have expanded this logic more broadly, emphasizing that it’s not just parking that’s mispriced, it’s also the roads themselves.

One proven strategy to address this is congestion pricing, a transportation policy that charges drivers a fee to use certain roads during peak traffic times. A controversial idea that has gained some traction in recent years, the goal primarily is to improve traffic flow and lower pollution, although it can also generate revenue for public transit and infrastructure.

It’s the idea that using roads during peak times should come with a price, just like electricity or water. “We meter every other government-owned utility,” Manville explains, “but not roads.” “It’s the only system that we don’t charge prices for, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the only system that colossally breaks down about two times a day.” Manville argues that the same basic principle we apply to everything else in our economy, pricing goods and services based on demand, should also apply to road usage.

“We meter every other government-owned utility, but not our roads. It’s the only system that we don’t charge prices for, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the only system that colossally breaks down about two times a day.”

Cities like Singapore prove it can work. In Singapore, dynamic tolling keeps traffic flowing at 45–55 mph even in a city as densely populated as San Francisco. Manville argues that Los Angeles could reap similar benefits if it embraced the idea. “We’ve normalized the dysfunction of our transportation system,” he says. “But there’s nothing inherently fair about free roads, or unfair about charging for their use.”

For Manville, reimagining cities isn’t just about policy; it’s about turning research into practical, real-world implementation. At UCLA Luskin, he says, that happens through teaching the next generation of planners, working directly with policymakers, and ensuring research is more accessible to community members. “The biggest impact we can have,” he explains, “is making sure our students leave with the ability to weigh tradeoffs—not chase perfect solutions.”

When asked what he hopes for the next generation of urban planners who will be tasked to solve some of the most complicated issues our cities face today, Manville had some wisdom from his own experience as a young planner.

“I came to UCLA convinced there were a bunch of right answers,” he reflects. “But the biggest lesson I’ve learned, and hope to pass on, is that progress comes from understanding the nuance and complexity of the issues we hope to solve. In a city as vast and diverse as L.A., differing perspectives are inevitable and real change begins with listening, especially to those you may not agree with.”