Rachel Weinberger

Light Rail Proximity: Benefit or Detriment in the Case of Santa Clara County, California?

When the public sector sponsors projects to promote general welfare, disproportionate benefits or disproportionate burdens often fall on individuals. In Santa Clara County, California, private property owners sued the county for damages, claiming a burden due to the existence of light rail transit (LRT). By looking at rental rates for commercial property, the present research tests several hedonic specifications to determine what effect, if any, LRT has on proximate property values. It also compares transit accessibility with highway accessibility as determinants of rent. An understanding of this effect allows the county to make informed decisions in its defense against the suits brought and allows other government entities to make informed decisions with respect to the building of future LRT systems. The results indicate that, when controlling for other factors, properties that lie within 0.8 km (0.5 mi) of a light rail station command a higher lease rate than other properties in the county. When controlling for highway access, the rail proximity benefit was maintained, and it was shown that highway coverage in the county is so dense that there are no particular locational advantages associated with highway coverage.

Unpacking Preference: How Previous Experience Affects Auto Ownership in the United States

As environmental concerns mount alongside increasing auto dependence, research has been devoted to understanding the number of automobiles households own. The 2000 US census public use micro sample is used to demonstrate the importance of preference formation in auto ownership by studying auto ownership among recent movers. Using a multinomial probit model, the paper demonstrates that residents in the US transit cities who moved from major metropolitan areas are more likely to own fewer vehicles than counterparts who moved from smaller metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas. It is concluded that these results are due to learned preferences for levels of car ownership. Once the self-reinforcing ‘cultural knowledge’ of living without cars is lost, it could be difficult to regain. A focus on children and young adults, familiarising them with alternatives to the car may be an important approach to developing collective preferences for fewer cars.

Residential Off-Street Parking Impacts on Car Ownership, Vehicle Miles Traveled, and Related Carbon Emissions: New York City Case Study

Parking is a key element of the street and highway system. Parking supply affects driving demand by changing the underlying cost structure associated with mode choice decisions. It also affects levels of auto ownership by changing the cost of auto ownership. These two facts combine to make parking management an important and powerful tool for both traffic and air-quality management. A pilot analysis of demographics, highway and transit access, and off-street parking in two New York City neighborhoods strongly suggests that the provision of residential off-street parking affects commuting behavior. Moreover, the type of parking provision plays a strong role in determining mode share. Accessory parking that is adjacent to a home, in a garage or driveway, seems more likely to generate auto commutes than does parking in commercial centralized lots. This analysis, which was followed by testing plausible development scenarios, shows that the citys residential off-street parking regulations will undermine its own vision for a sustainable future.

Integrating Walkability into Planning Practice

This study used data from www.walkscore.com to assess walking behavior in four U.S. cities. Walk scores measuring the so-called walkability of neighborhoods are ubiquitous, and although the relationship between walk scores and real estate values has been established, the relationship between walk scores and walking has not. In this research three models were developed to understand the correlation between walk scores (as indicators of walkability; i.e., opportunity to walk) and walking. The models looked at walk scores and walk mode share for different trip types. What changes should be expected with changing walk scores along different parts of the walk score spectrum are illustrated. Results suggest that walk scores may be used as a reasonable heuristic to assist with assessing trip impacts for individual projects. With the universal availability of such data, planners can establish a consistent, cost-effective tool for assessing walking behavior with robust and transferable results.

Rising Gas Price and Transit Ridership: Case Study of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In July 2008, gas prices peaked at unprecedented levels in both nominal and real dollars. Americans also took more transit trips in 2008 than in any year since 1956. Past research has demonstrated a correlation between increases in gas price and increases in transit ridership. Using the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, metropolitan area as a case study, this research confirms and provides new insight into this relationship. Multivariate linear regressions were developed both to demonstrate and to measure the correlation while accounting for seasonal differences and to provide insight into what future gas price scenarios could mean for a transit system in a city like Philadelphia. One set of models was developed for the Regional Rail system and another was developed for the City Transit system. Both models demonstrated correlations of statistical significance. Comparison of the models showed that the price of gas had both a more significant correlation with and a higher impact on Regional Rail rider-ship than on City Transit ridership. The models were also used to explore the cross elasticity for transit demand. The results suggest various cross elasticities of between 0.15 and 0.23 for City Transit services and between 0.27 and 0.38 for Regional Rail services. The problems with attempting to isolate a value for cross elasticity are discussed. This analysis also explores the possibilities of a nonlinear relationship that explains past trends and discusses the difficulties in using these models to predict future transit demand.

Comment on Pierce and Shoup: Evaluating the Impacts of Performance-Based Parking

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Predicting Travel Impacts of New Development in America’s Major Cities: Testing Alternative Trip Generation Models

There is a widespread belief that the available tools for predicting travel impacts of urban development are not as strong as they could be. The implications are that cities (a) may be hindered in developing appropriate travel impact mitigations, (b) lack good information to communicate to existing residents about potential travel impacts of proposed development, and (c) with better tools would be able to make stronger policy on the basis of more reliable understanding of development impacts. The most frequently used tool for estimating travel impacts is the ITE informational report on vehicle trip generation. The ITE report contains information primarily on single-use suburban automobile-oriented environments. As travel characteristics are inherently different in urban areas, a wide body of research has sought to create additional data-driven tools to estimate multimodal trip impacts of developments on the basis of urban-context characteristics. This paper compares the estimated trip generation outputs of the ITE and other models to field counts and surveys conducted for the District Department of Transportation at 16 locations in Washington, D.C. The findings here support the widely held belief that existing tools are not well suited to trip generation estimation in urban contexts. The paper is part of a larger study effort that seeks to develop a robust data set of urban trip generation that will be a foundation in the creation of better models.

Parking in Mixed-Use U.S. Districts: Oversupplied No Matter How You Slice the Pie

Parking is among the most discussed topics in local politics, with citizens and business owners frequently concerned that supplies are too low. However, numerous research efforts have shown that parking is routinely oversupplied in single-use districts in the United States, and others have documented the same trend in mixed-use districts. This research considers parking supply and usage in 27 mixed-use districts around the country, the largest sample of districts examined in this type of study. Sufficient supply being defined as that which would leave 15% of spaces open, it was found that parking is oversupplied by 65% on average. Differences in oversupply were not systematically explained by commute mode share, region, type of place, or any other dimension that the authors were able to identify. Indeed, oversupply in places that have identified parking shortages averages 45%. That finding suggests that parking is often oversupplied to such an extent that it is nonbinding on travel decisions and has become unmoored from the typical relationship between supply and demand. Given the perception of shortage even where there is a documented oversupply suggests that better parking management rather than an increase in supply could be a more effective tool for mitigating perceived shortages.

Analysis of parking search behavior with video from naturalistic driving

The number of cars searching for parking, also known as “cruising,” is a risk factor linked to increased pollution and congestion and decreased road safety. Although the detrimental effects of cruising are known, the actual amount of cruising is unknown. A novel video data set of naturalistic driving is shown to provide reliable estimates of cruising behavior. The distribution of search start times, search distances, and search times is characterized. Cruising behavior variation between 109 different drivers is also reported on in the study, located in southeast Michigan. It was found that 30% of the drivers generated more than 70% of the meters cruised. This finding suggests that the search strategies of a few drivers disproportionately affect the many. These results facilitate the estimation of the number of vehicles searching for parking and the amount of pollution generated by cruising drivers. Researchers may also use these results to develop more realistic models of parking search and parking interventions. The results, based on video data, have implications for settings in which video data are not available. The results from this study can serve as input to a model that classifies GPS traces as cruising or not cruising.