Martin Wachs
This is the tenth issue of ACCESS, and the University of California Transportation Center will soon reach its tenth anniversary. Such milestones call for celebration, congratulations, and contemplation of the future.
Donald Shoup
Ask anyone to define a livable city. Some will say clean air and safe streets. Others will mention good restaurants, affordable housing, pleasant parks, or less traffic congestion. But, chances are, they'll all agree on one thing - plenty of free parking.
Evelyn Blumenberg and
Paul Ong
In 1995, 13.6 million people nationwide received welfare benefits totaling $22 billion. Critics have considered this sum unnecessary and the welfare program inefficient. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, welfare reformers established time limits for receiving benefits, hoping to speed the transition from public assistance to employment.
Charles Lave
Despite opposition from many nation safety groups, in November 1995 Congress gave the states permission to raise speed limits. Opponents had testified that raising speed limits would cause and additional 4,400 to 6,000 deaths per year. Fortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and
Tridib Banerjee
In 1990 Los Angeles inaugurated the Blue Line amidst much fanfare as the first increment of a long-awaited light-rail system. The rail line connects downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach, traversing twenty-two miles of the poorest and most neglected neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles. After six years, ridership has risen significantly, but areas around stations remain unchanged - disinvested, forsaken, and decaying – denying planners' dreams of transit villages and depriving surrounding communities of their hopes for a better economic future.
Joseph F. DiMento,
Drusilla Van Hengel, and
Sherry Ryan
When the Century Freeway opened in October 1993 after three decades in the making – the product of intensive civic conflict, and advertised as the world’s most costly road at over $100 million per mile – it was indeed an achievement of the century. Ultimately it was far more than a mere road. It also became a community development enterprise, an environmental improvement program, a housing project, and a legal precedent that may well shape all future freeway construction. To assess its significance we’ve been examining the record and interviewing the participants, and we will now summarize our findings.
Robert Gottlieb and
Andrew Fisher
A prevailing myth holds that America, land of plenty, provides everyone with vast opportunities for education, mobility, and food. Yet, not everyone shares this bounty. Significant sections of the population lack a neighborhood supermarket and thus end up paying high prices for inadequate or poor-quality food. Many of them do not have cars and thus depend on a transit system that fails to provide convenient access to groceries.
Robert L. Bertini
Everyone knows that major sources of freeway congestion are the “incidents,” including accidents, that block free traffic flow. Other troubling incidents include stalled engines, cars that have just run out of gas, debris fallen from trucks, flat tires, strayed animals, and other random events. According to one estimate, half of all congestion is relate to incidents. With vehicles stopped on the roadway, one incident can cause others, something leading to chain reactions involving many cars. So motorists and traffic officials alike consider incident-mitigation a critical objective.
Daniel B. Klein,
Adrian T. Moore, and
Binyam Reja
Public buses can't compete with private automobiles because bus rides usually involve long waits, slower commutes, limited route and destination choices, and less privacy. To improve transit, it may be necessary to overhaul our current government-owned bus system by legalizing private transit services. Consider one promising alternative, "jitneys" - small private vehicles that carry passengers over regular routes but allow flexible schedules.
Martin Wachs
and
Nabil Kamel
Many people seem to behave differently during emergencies than they do under ordinary circumstances. Feuding families unite to help each other when a tornado strikes their town, and neighbors who haven't spoken for years share a candlelight dinner after a hurricane knocks out their power. When faced with a disaster, people become more cooperative and humane, rising above their conflicts and aloofness.