Research by UCLA Luskin’s Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, is cited in Next City and Bloomberg articles on traffic gridlock that occurred amid the devastating fires in Los Angeles. During the fire, motorists evacuating their neighborhoods were forced to abandon their cars, which had to be pushed aside by bulldozers. Millard-Ball’s paper on street-network sprawl, released on Jan. 13, notes that neighborhoods where residents struggled to flee have some of the county’s least connected streets with limited access in or out. Millard-Ball and his colleagues mapped street connectivity, not just in L.A. but worldwide. “We found that the U.S. actually has some of the least connected streets in the world,” they noted. While L.A. does have a generally well-connected grid system, the researchers found exceptions including Pacific Palisades. They added that building the streets back exactly as before would be a lost opportunity to improve disaster preparedness.