Torres-Gil on Collective Responsibility to Support Elderly

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Professor of Social Welfare and Public Policy Fernando Torres-Gil was featured in a Covering Health article about developing policies to support aging populations. While advances in public health and medicine have increased the average life expectancy for humans, age- and health-related inequalities persist. Communities of color are especially vulnerable to social determinants of health and often have significantly lower life expectancies than other Americans. “If any good has come out of the pandemic, it may be that we are at a rare moment of opportunity for a paradigm shift moving away from individual to more collective responsibility,” Torres-Gil said. “One of the benefits of this great new era is that if we do all the right things, we have the real possibility to live a good long life, well into our 80s, 90s, and to be centenarians.”

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Umemoto on Coalitions Emerging From Firestorm of Racism

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Urban Planning Professor Karen Umemoto spoke to the Los Angeles Times and the podcast Then & Now about the dramatic rise in attacks on Asian Americans. Umemoto called the violence a “shadow epidemic,” stoked by former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. “Trump’s role in exacerbating and igniting this firestorm can’t be denied,” she told the L.A. Times. But she also pointed to a new era of coalition-building among communities of color long targeted by a culture steeped in white supremacy. “One of Trump’s legacies is sparking more activism and more acts of solidarity across many groups who became victim of many of his policies and rhetoric,” she told the podcast, produced by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy. To tackle structural racism at its roots, Umemoto called for educating schoolchildren about the history and contributions of Asian Americans so that they are no longer considered the “perpetual foreigner.”

Read the Los Angeles Times article
Listen to the Then & Now podcast

Shah Promotes Healthy Behavior Among Adolescents

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Public Policy Professor Manisha Shah authored an article in the Conversation about her work to improve adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Tanzania. Adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa experience high rates of HIV infection, unintended teenage pregnancy and intimate partner violence. While many reproductive health programs and services focus exclusively on females, Shah and her team developed a program to encourage adolescent boys and young men to make better choices around their sexual and reproductive health through sports programming. They also focused on empowering adolescent girls and young women to make healthy, informed decisions by using goal-setting exercises. The study found that both the men’s soccer league and the goal-setting activity for women reduced intimate partner violence and increased adolescents’ sense of personal agency to make better choices around sexual relationships. Shah concluded that “offering contraception alone, without focusing on behavior change for females and males, won’t necessarily improve sexual and reproductive health for adolescents.”

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Loukaitou-Sideris on Future of Biking in Los Angeles

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Urban Planning Professor Anastasia Loukatiou-Sideris was featured in a Los Angeles Downtown News article about her involvement in Civic Bicycle Commuting (CiBiC), a new initiative promoting the health and environmental benefits of commuting by bike. While Los Angeles has been dominated by automobiles for decades, a group of UCLA scholars has teamed up to create a digital media archive that will map safe routes, promote biking as an alternative to driving and foster community among bike commuters. Loukaitou-Sideris spoke to the Daily Bruin about CiBiC’s focus on reaching vulnerable groups, including women, people without housing and those from ethnic neighborhoods. In the long term, she hopes CiBiC will build a bicycle infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods through employer partnerships to improve the process of commuting. She added that creating a community of bikers will build safety and protection for vulnerable populations through social capital – the ties that hold together a community when individuals interact and help one another.

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Read the Daily Bruin article

Domínguez-Villegas on Latino Voter Trends

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Rodrigo Domínguez-Villegas, research director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, spoke to the Atlantic about Latino voter trends in the United States. In the 2020 election, incumbent President Donald Trump won a higher share of Latino votes than he did four years earlier. Domínguez-Villegas said he thinks Trump’s 2020 performance with Latinos was mostly a reversion to the mean after a low ebb in 2016. “It was going back to the historic numbers for the Republican Party,” he said. However, experts disagree about what to expect in the next election. “Latino voters still prefer the Democratic candidates by pretty large margins,” Domínguez-Villegas said. “In some places, [there were] smaller margins than 2016, but nothing out of the ordinary.” The 2020 election also challenged the common misconception that Latino voters are a monolith. “We slice white voters to tiny little slivers, and we don’t do the same with Latino voters,” he said.

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Pierce Recommends Investing in Clean Water Now

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Greg Pierce, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, was cited in a Radio Free article discussing a report he co-authored about access to clean drinking water in California. The Center for Innovation collaborated with the California State Water Resources Control Board and others on the report, which found that 620 public water systems and 80,000 domestic wells are at risk of failing to provide affordable and uncontaminated water — an issue that will cost billions to fix. The report was “the most comprehensive assessment that’s been done on the state level anywhere in the U.S.,” Pierce said. “Drought and access and water quality are all related.” He argued that temporary solutions, like providing bottled water to people whose water systems fail, are more expensive in the long run than fixing systems before they fail.

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Read the full report

Traffic on the 405 Can Be Awful, but Let’s Get Real ‘The idea that someone would take this seriously is, well, alarming,’ says UCLA Professor Brian Taylor

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By Les Dunseith

Anyone who has driven through the Sepulveda Pass during rush hour knows that traffic on Interstate 405 can be a nightmare. Still, it’s not as bad as it was made to seem in an altered photo that’s making the rounds on Facebook.

The image shows 19 (!) lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic snaking along the freeway just north of the Getty Center, about 3 miles from the UCLA campus. And when an Associated Press reporter decided to fact-check the photo, she turned to Professor Brian Taylor, director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. 

Not only did Taylor have the insight necessary to debunk the altered photo, but he even had a recent picture of the real 405 to prove it. 

Here’s the fake picture:

And here’s the photo by Taylor, taken in approximately the same location (although looking southbound, the opposite direction), which offers proof that there are not 19 lanes in that stretch of freeway, but 12 — including carpool lanes in each direction that were added in 2011 and 2012 during the infamous “Carmageddon” project.

A photo of the 405 taken in March by UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies Director Brian Taylor because, he says, “who wouldn’t go around taking pictures of freeways?”

In its story about the picture, the AP provides a link to the original photograph that had been doctored to produce the viral fake, saying it appears to have been captured in 1998. It shows five lanes of traffic in each direction, with far fewer cars.

Taylor, a professor of urban planning and public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, wrote to the AP reporter that the false image “has been bouncing around for years.” 

“It’s a bit of obvious hyperbole to (I assume) make a point about continually widening freeways to address growing traffic levels,” Taylor wrote. “The idea that someone would take this seriously is, well, alarming.”

Thanks to the AP and Taylor, Facebook has now added a notification that the photo has been altered.

Abrams on Harsh Effects of Entangling Children in the Justice System

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Social Welfare Chair Laura Abrams co-authored two commentaries aimed at galvanizing support for establishing a national minimum age of juvenile justice jurisdiction — an age below which a child cannot be prosecuted in juvenile court. Writing in JAMA Pediatrics and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Abrams argued that “entangling children in the justice system is harsh and developmentally incongruent with children’s needs.” With co-authors Destiny G. Tolliver of the Yale School of Medicine, Eraka Bath of UCLA Psychiatry and Elizabeth S. Barnert of the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, Abrams called for the establishment of a federal statute establishing a national minimum age of 12 years or higher for juvenile justice jurisdiction. “Child and adolescent psychiatrists should educate others on the psychosocial risks of early juvenile justice involvement, condemn its racist impact and drivers, and bolster family and community supports for youths with behavioral health and social needs,” the authors wrote.

Read the JAMA Pediatrics commentary
Read the JAACAP commentary

 

A Focus on Meeting the Demand for Clean Energy

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A National Geographic article highlighted the main points of a report by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation about accelerating the transition to clean energy. Many Americans support clean energy but can’t necessarily afford to install solar panels or change where their power is coming from. In California, community choice aggregators (CCAs), which buy energy on behalf of residents, have become increasingly popular. Unlike utilities, CCAs are nonprofits and are governed locally, which makes them familiar with a community’s needs and desires. The Center for Innovation report found that almost all California CCAs exceeded the interim goal of 33% carbon-free power by 2020 — and they also indirectly nudged traditional utilities into a more renewables-heavy energy mix. The report concluded that CCAs are accelerating the transition to green energy that many Americans are demanding. “Especially as the climate crisis gets worse, people are looking for ways to help move the transition forward,” said Center for Innovation project manager Kelly Trumbull.

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Taylor on Updating Obsolete Speed Limit Rules

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A Streetsblog California article on the “85th percentile rule” for setting speed limits cited Professor Brian Taylor, director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, who testified before a state Assembly committee considering legislation to change the policy. California cities currently set speed limits based on motorist behavior, under the assumption that about 85% of drivers on a given road will go at or below a reasonable speed, while about 15% will drive faster than is safe. In his testimony before the Assembly Transportation Committee, Taylor said the rule, created in the 1930s, was meant to be revisited when more evidence about science and safety was available but has instead persisted to this day. The bill, AB 43, would give local authorities more flexibility when it comes to setting speed limits and also require that pedestrian and bicycle safety be considered. The bill passed the committee on a 15-0 vote.

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