American Women Less Likely to Bike Than Dutch Women, Here’s Why Domestic roles influence the cycling habits of women across the world.

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huffralph

By Alejandra Reyes-Velarde
UCLA Luskin student writer

The UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies’ Herbie Huff and transportation policy and planning doctoral student Kelcie Ralph say that American women are less likely to bike than Dutch women, largely to differences in domestic roles rather than infrastructure.

In an op-ed that ran in The Guardian’s bike blog on Oct. 3, the researchers said that “Despite years of progress, American women’s lives are still disproportionately filled with driving children around, getting groceries and doing other household chores…that doesn’t lend itself easily to two wheeled transportation.”

Their claims that infrastructure does not account for the differences in male and female bikers are supported by Ralph’s research, which reveals disparities between Dutch culture and labor policies as well as the gender gap of bikers in the U.S.

To learn more about their solutions to these disparities, you can read the full article here.

 

Shoup Receives his Second Rapkin Award for Best Article in JPER The Chester Rapkin Award for the Best Paper in JPER is intended to encourage the submission of high quality papers.

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The Chester Rapkin Award for the best article to appear in this year’s Journal of Planning Education and Research goes to Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup for “Graduated Density Zoning.” A shorter version of the article has also been published in Zoning Practice.

According to the awards committee the article “presents a potentially very important innovation in zoning, which could have significant application in practice. It also constitutes a theoretical advance in the idea of zoning, which remains a key part of land use planning. In form, the paper is a model for how to write an academic paper within a professional domain. It is persuasive, elegant, and economical. The author uses examples and ingenious figures to make its message clear, and it is beautifully written. In sum, this paper provides lessons for all of us, both in our search for ways to improve planning, and in how to present our work.”

The award will be presented at the annual ACSP awards luncheon which will take place in Arlington, VA, October 3, 2009.

Shoup and co-authors Jeffrey Brown and Daniel Baldwin Hess, received this award in 2004 for their article on “Fare-Free Public Transit at Universities“.

The Chester Rapkin Award for the Best Paper in JPER was established in 1987 to honor Professor Rapkin at his retirement. It is intended to encourage the submission of high quality papers. Award-winning articles reflect the scope of Rapkin’s work and have ranged from multi-attribute evaluation to the challenges of participatory planning.

Institute of Transportation Studies Contributes to New Sustainable Transport Program The Program for Sustainable Transport brings researchers together from more than 30 disciplines on six campuses to seed multi-disciplinary initiatives.

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The University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) Multi-campus Research Unit received a major grant to create a new Program for Sustainable Transport. The new program, supported by an initial 5-year award of $6.25 million from the UC Office of the President, was selected under the auspices of the Multi-campus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI.) Leveraging the substantial capabilities of ITS, The Program for Sustainable Transport designs tools, policies, and programs to reduce congestion, oil use, local air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, in ways that contribute to economic growth and social well being. The program focuses on three specific integrated activities: vehicles and fuels, infrastructure investment and system management, and land use and mobility planning.

The new Program for Sustainable Transport supports research, education, and outreach activities on six UC campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Riverside, Santa Barbara, and UCLA. UCLA ITS director, Brian Taylor, and associate director, Allison Yoh, contributed to the creation of this program; Taylor will serve on the program’s executive committee.

The Program for Sustainable Transport brings researchers together from more than 30 disciplines on six campuses to seed multi-disciplinary initiatives, including collaborations between economists, geographers, ecologists, city and regional planners, public policy analysts, engineers from civil, environmental, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer scientists and experts in energy. In addition to cutting-edge research targeted at key societal needs and key state initiatives that are unfolding over the next few years, this new program supports the training of the next generation of experts and leaders. UCLA researchers in the Institute of Transportation Studies, which is housed in the School of Public Affairs, are slated to focus on infrastructure investment, system management, land use, and mobility planning in their work with the center.