Asha Weinstein Agrawal

How Far, by Which Route and Why? A Spatial Analysis of Pedestrian Preference

This paper reports on a survey of pedestrian trips to transit that examined the trip lengths and route choices made by people walking to five rail transit stations in California and Oregon. In highly motorized countries such as the US, policy-makers are beginning to recognize that shifting some travel from auto trips to walking trips can help the country achieve important policy objectives such as combating obesity and reducing the air pollution and oil dependency that result from auto use. However, researchers know very little about pedestrian behaviour and the role of the built and aesthetic environment in influencing pedestrian trips to transit. As communities wrestle with the interconnected issues of obesity, sprawl, and quality of life, planners need to understand how far Americans will walk to transit and the environmental factors that influence them. This survey of 328 pedestrians walking to rail stations, primarily on weekday mornings, found that they were willing to walk an average of half a mile to the rail station and that minimizing the distance walked was the most important factor influencing their choice of route. The people surveyed also frequently mentioned safety factors as important in route choice. Aesthetic elements of the built environment, on the other hand, were rarely mentioned as important route choice factors. The paper concludes by using these survey findings to recommend strategies that planners, designers, and policy-makers can use to design successful transit and pedestrian-oriented developments.

TTSAT: A New Approach to Mapping Transit Accessibility

Transit agencies have never had an accurate indicator of the extent of their service area based on riders’ door-to-door travel time. This is an important gap in knowledge, because travel time is one of the most important factors determining whether or not people will use public transit. This paper presents a powerful new travel timebased method to visualize and analyze transit service coverage—a computer application called the Time-Based Transit Service Area Tool (TTSAT). Unlike other service area metrics, TTSAT incorporates total trip travel time into the transit service area maps it generates. To make these travel-time estimates realistic, TTSAT integrates all segments of a complete, door-to-door transit trip into the trip time calculations. TTSAT’s mapping and analysis capabilities offer numerous potential applications for planners, developers, and members of the public working to create transit-accessible communities.

To Be a Transportation Engineer or Not? How Civil Engineering Students Choose a Specialization

The transportation industry faces a growing shortage of professional engineers. A key strategy in solving this problem will be to encourage more civil engineering students to specialize in transportation while completing their undergraduate degree so that employers have a larger pool of likely recruits. This paper examines the factors that lead civil engineering undergraduates to specialize in transportation, as opposed to other civil engineering subdisciplines. The primary method used was a web-based survey of 1,852 civil engineering undergraduates. The study results suggest steps the transportation community can take to increase the number of civil engineering undergraduates who choose to specialize in transportation. Educators need to introduce material into required freshman and sophomore courses that shows the range of dynamic career possibilities available in the transportation field, and employers need to increase and better publicize transportation internships.

Are Land Use Planning and Congestion Pricing Mutually Supportive

Problem: Congestion pricing and land use planning have been proposed as two promising strategies to reduce the externalities associated with driving, including traffic congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. However, they are often viewed by their proponents as substitutive instead of complementary to each other. Purpose: Using data from a pilot mileage fee program run in Portland, OR, we explored whether congestion pricing and land use planning were mutually supportive in terms of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reduction. We examined whether effective land use planning could reinforce the benefit of congestion pricing, and whether congestion pricing could strengthen the role of land use planning in encouraging travelers to reduce driving. Methods: VMT data were collected over 10 months from 130 households, which were divided into two groups: those who paid a mileage charge with rates that varied by congestion level (i.e., congestion pricing) and those who paid a mileage charge with a flat structure. Using regression models to compare the two groups, we tested the effect of congestion pricing on VMT reduction across different land use patterns, and the effect of land use on VMT reduction with and without congestion pricing. Results and conclusions: With congestion pricing, the VMT reduction is greater in traditional (dense and mixed-use) neighborhoods than in suburban (single-use, low-density) neighborhoods, probably because of the availability of travel alternatives in the former. Under the same land use pattern, land use attributes explain more variance of household VMT when congestion pricing is implemented, suggesting that this form of mileage fee could make land use planning a more effective mechanism to reduce VMT. In summary, land use planning and congestion pricing appear to be mutually supportive. Takeaway for practice: For policymakers considering mileage pricing, land use planning affects not only the economic viability but also the political feasibility of a pricing scheme. For urban planners, congestion pricing provides both opportunities and challenges to crafting land use policies that will reduce VMT. For example, a pricing zone that overlaps with dense, mixed-use and transit-accessible development, can reinforce the benefits of these development patterns and encourage greater behavioral changes. Research support: This project was supported by the Mineta Transportation Institute, where the authors are research associates.

Getting Around When You’re Just Getting By: Transportation Survival Strategies of the Poor

Researchers argue that transportation expenditures impose a heavy burden on low-income households, many of whom experience difficulty managing their travel costs. However, relatively little research explores how low-income households manage their mobility needs. To address this issue, this study uses qualitative data from interviews with 73 low-income people living in and around San Jose, California. The interviews reveal the resiliency of low-income families in creatively managing their transportation costs. However, the transportation survival strategies of the poor can come at a high price—fewer miles traveled and, therefore, reduced access to opportunities that may lift them out of poverty.

Shared-Use Bus Priority Lanes on City Streets: Approaches to Access and Enforcement

This paper examines policies and strategies governing the operations of bus lanes in major congested urban centers where the bus lanes do not completely exclude other uses. The two key questions addressed are: 1. What is the scope of the priority use granted to buses? When is bus priority in effect, and what other users may share the lanes during these times? 2. How are the lanes enforced? To answer these questions, the study developed detailed cases on management strategies in seven cities that currently have shared-use bus priority lanes: Los Angeles, London, New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, and Sydney. Through the case studies, the paper examines the range of practices in use and highlights innovative ones that may contribute to bus lane success.

Simple, Inexpensive Approach to Sampling for Pedestrian and Bicycle Surveys

Many transportation planners undertake local surveys for a better understanding of the levels of walking and cycling of residents in their city or town. This paper explores the challenges of designing a robust sampling strategy for such surveys. A review of existing surveys on nonmotorized transportation demonstrated that many existing surveys used less than ideal sampling approaches for communities that were aiming to collect populationwide data on cycling and walking and thereby jeopardized the strength of their conclusions. Either surveys used approaches that were too expensive and complex for most communities to implement or surveys generated data that were not applicable to all residents in a community (i.e., data that were not generalizable to the full population). In response to that sampling problem, this paper presents a new method for collecting generalizable data: the sampling method developed in the Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) project. PABS offers a rigorous, yet inexpensive, simple, and well-documented method to conduct surveys. The PABS mail-out–mail-back survey and probabilistic (generalizable) sampling approach can be performed in-house within municipal agencies. With the use of PABS, transportation professionals can obtain higher-quality data about their community as a whole than they would obtain with many of the other existing approaches. PABS is thus a useful complement to other sampling approaches such as intercept surveys (an important way to collect data on the use of specific facilities) or surveys distributed to e-mail lists (a cheap and useful way to collect qualitative data).

Immigration, Income, and Public Transit Perceptions: Findings from an Intercept Survey

Although a significant fraction of public transit riders in the United States are immigrants, relatively little research explores whether immigrants have unique transit experiences. This paper analyzes intercept survey data from 1,247 transit riders in the San Francisco Bay Area to explore how mode choices and travel experiences differ for low-income immigrants compared to higher-income immigrants and US-born residents. We find that some public transit experiences are similar across all immigrant status and income groups, while in other ways low-income immigrants differ from their higher-income counterparts or from US-born respondents. In particular, low-income immigrants were less likely to have a bus pass or bicycle access. They were far more likely to substitute driving for taking public transit than all other immigrant and income groups. The results underscore the importance of collecting data on country of origin together with travel behavior data, because many experiences are more burdensome for low-income immigrants.