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Slowing Down Saves Money and Lives, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in an Atlantic article about the benefits of driving slower. Fast speeds use more energy to cover the same distance, making driving fast more dangerous, more harmful to the environment and more expensive, especially with the recent increase in gas prices. According to Manville, the first step to altering the culture of fast driving is simply to enforce existing speed limits more consistently. “If a camera catches everyone who speeds on a road segment, every time they speed, then you can actually get meaningful deterrence,” he said. Furthermore, speeding fines would be less expensive if they caught every instance of speeding. “The logic behind the high fines for speeding right now is that you don’t catch most people who speed,” Manville explained. However, if drivers knew they would be consistently penalized for speeding, they may slow down, a decision that could save money and lives.

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Gas Hike a Litmus Test for Mass Transit, Matute Says

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Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the impact of soaring gas prices on transit ridership in Los Angeles. The article said many Angelenos are concerned about the number of homeless people and the increase in violent crime on the Metro, which slashed its bus and rail service this year amid a COVID-fueled driver shortage. Many transit planners have argued that the cheap cost of driving vehicles keeps commuters from jumping on a bus or train. Matute noted that the spike in gas prices will now serve as a litmus test for mass transit. “If driving gets 50% more expensive because of the increase in gas prices and you’re not seeing a corresponding increase in ridership, maybe there’s something you have to look at about their service, improving it, whether it be reliability, safety or passenger experience,” Matute said.

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Gas Bill Debt Disproportionately Burdens Low-Income Neighborhoods As California’s utility shutoff ban ends, UCLA research shows where unpaid gas utility bills proliferated amid the pandemic

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By Lauren Dunlap

Unpaid bills for heating and cooking gas are unevenly distributed among Californians, according to a new report from the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin in partnership with the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (LPPI) and the Luskin Center for Innovation.

Since Oct. 1, customers who are behind on utility bills are no longer protected from shutoffs by a statewide order enacted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study reveals clear patterns of inequity: Neighborhoods with high gas bill debt rates also have higher poverty rates, lower incomes, more renters than homeowners and higher proportions of Black and Latinx residents than the average neighborhood served by Southern California Gas.

The research team analyzed data from the utility, which provides gas service to about 50% of California residents. The team found that, as of February 28, 2021, 1 in 5 customers were at least 30 days behind on their gas bill payments, and almost 1 in 10 were at least 90 days behind. 

The report provides several lessons for policymakers to equitably relieve the burden of utility debt on customers. The authors recommend improving the data available on utility debt and shutoffs to lead to better-informed decisions. They also note the importance of targeting relief aid at the most affected, lowest-income households. 

The co-authors also emphasize a connection between their findings and the growing movement toward building electrification. Transitioning residential buildings to run on electricity alone is significant to avoid greenhouse gas emissions — especially since natural gas is composed primarily of methane, a major contributor to climate change. But this transition may impose high costs on people who already face utility debt. 

“When higher-income households stop using gas, lower-income households may be saddled with higher and higher gas costs,” said Silvia González ’09, MURP ’13, UP PhD ’20, director of research at LPPI. “It is essential to make electrification equitable, which means households don’t get left behind or stuck with increasingly unmanageable energy costs.” 

Because lower-income households could be negatively impacted by the fixed costs of gas service — the costs that don’t go down when there are fewer customers — the researchers advise that more research is needed to understand and mitigate this impact. 

This study is the third and final in a series examining utility debt inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous policy briefs focused on unpaid utility bills among Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Pacific Gas and Electric Company customers. 

 

Tilly Examines Impact of Inflation

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly was featured in a Sacramento Bee article discussing the impact of inflation on the 2022 midterm elections. Prices have increased 5.4% in the last year, one of the steepest rises since 2008, and California now has the highest per-gallon gas price in the country. According to Tilly, higher prices at the pump hurt agriculture-heavy regions like the San Joaquin Valley more than any other areas of the state. “A lot of the agricultural valley workforces are relatively low-income, which means that they’re ill-equipped to deal with higher prices,” Tilly explained. Businesses struggling to handle the costs of inflation are more likely to raise the costs of their goods and less likely to increase the wages of their workers. “If I’m an agricultural worker, and possibly even an agricultural worker who’s dealing with supply chain problems in their own industry, then I’ve got a problem,” he said.

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Taylor Highlights Benefits of Increased Gas Tax

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Brian Taylor, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, was featured in a Los Angeles Times column about rising gas prices in California. On July 1, the state’s gas tax will rise by 3.2 cents to 50.5 cents per gallon. While many are opposed to raising gas prices, the tax is projected to bring in $7 billion this fiscal year to pay for much-needed repairs. Furthermore, road work and infrastructure projects can be done while fewer people are driving due to stay-at-home orders. Taylor, a professor of urban planning and public policy, explained that the gas tax also discourages use of fossil fuels at a time when the planet needs to be much more serious about addressing climate change. “It encourages people to move around by means other than burning fuel,” he said. “In a sense, a gas tax should put itself out of business by ultimately eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels.”

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Gas Tax Is ‘Absolutely Necessary,’ Wachs Says

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Martin Wachs, distinguished professor emeritus of urban planning, spoke to the San Diego news site inewsource about Senate Bill 1, a gas tax  passed in 2017 to improve the condition of California roads. Some communities are unsatisfied with the pace of road repairs, the article noted. But Wachs called the law “a short-term fix that was absolutely necessary.” In the future, he added, different solutions will be needed as fuel mileage rates increase and more people drive electric cars that don’t use gas — two trends that will cut into gas-tax revenue. “We’ll be selling less gasoline in relation to the driving that we do as years go by,” Wachs said.

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Tackling the Resource Curse UCLA researchers launch the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance to design policies in countries where corruption, conflict undercut natural abundance

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By George Foulsham

From left, Michael Ross, professor of political science; Graeme Blair, assistant professor of political science; and Darin Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at UCLA Luskin, are the co-founders of PRDG. Photo by George Foulsham

For three UCLA scholars, it just didn’t add up. Why do so many people who live in developing countries with an abundance of natural resources struggle in poverty every day?

“You would think that it’s a simple thing to take wealth that’s underneath the ground and turn it into wealth on top of the ground for everybody to share,” said Michael Ross, a professor of political science at UCLA. “But we know from studying countries around the world that that very rarely happens.”

Social scientists call it the resource curse, and it’s one of the reasons why Ross and two UCLA colleagues, UCLA Luskin’s Darin Christensen and political science faculty member Graeme Blair, have created the Project on Resources, Development, and Governance (PRDG), a network of social scientists, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations and industry representatives dedicated to finding policies that promote welfare, peace and accountability in resource-rich countries.

“For the past 15 years or so, I have been living in two worlds,” Ross said. “One is an academic world where I do research and I speak to some of the smartest young social scientists in the world who are studying the problems of developing countries. In the other world, I’m sitting around the table with policymakers who are worried about how to fix a problem called the resource curse.”

About three dozen countries in the low- and middle-income world are economically dependent on oil, gas and mining, but they all seem to struggle despite the riches provided by the resources. Those countries include Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Indonesia, East Timor and Kazakhstan.

“They tend to be conflict-ridden,” Ross said. “There are protests, there’s pollution, there are civil wars around these projects.” There’s also plenty of corruption, with many of the countries in economic turmoil because of bribery and other issues in regions of exceptional resource wealth, such as mining areas.

“There are so many opportunities for corruption, and politicians are a whole lot less responsive to the people and a whole lot more concerned with siphoning off money for their own bank accounts overseas,” Ross said.

Finding solutions to these challenging issues won’t be easy.

“We have a generation of super-smart young political scientists and economists who are interested in this problem,” Ross said. “Our project is designed to bring together the smartest sort of leading-edge people in political science and economics with the policymakers who are dealing with these problems on a day-to-day level.”

That mission officially begins Sept. 21-22, 2017, with the first PRDG summit at the Luskin Conference Center on the UCLA campus. Researchers and policymakers from UCLA, the World Bank, Barnard College, the University of Pittsburgh, the Natural Resource Governance Institute and many other organizations and universities will make presentations and discuss issues that range from creating successful research-policy partnerships to the research priorities of funders.

The September conference at UCLA was generously funded by the Luskin Center for Innovation, Natural Resource Governance Institute, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Burkle Center and UCLA’s Political Science Department. The initiative also recently received a one-year, $600,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support additional workshops in Washington, D.C., and Accra, Ghana, and the research partnerships that emerge from these meetings.

“One of the important parts of PRDG is the effort to bring in local researchers,” said Blair, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. “We want to provide training in modern social science research methods, and to provide learning-while-doing at matchmaking workshops where we bring together academics, policymakers and practitioners.”

Providing guidance on policy issues is Christensen, assistant professor of public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “I think policy plays an essential role in this PRDG initiative,” Christensen said. “What PRDG is trying to do is bring policymakers and academics around the same table and allow policymakers to propose solutions and team up with researchers who can go to the field and determine whether these new initiatives are actually helping root out the corruption or address the grievances that often accompany these big mining, oil and gas projects.”

PRDG’s short-term goals include generating a series of new research projects on solutions to problems faced in resource-rich countries, bringing together researchers, policymakers and practitioners. “Another goal is to start joint learning exercises where we go out into the field and try to help build research into their existing program,” Blair said.

In the long term, the UCLA researchers are hoping that the conversation about these issues becomes circular — the research feeds back into the policymaking conversation, which generates new questions the researchers can tackle.

“We want to figure out ways to make a difference, and find ways to fix this problem,” Ross said.