From the Director:

Looking Forward for California
This Winter 2008 e-News of the Ralph and Goldy Lewis Center is the first under our new banner: Looking Forward for California. The Lewis Center exists to promote the study of and solutions to Southern California policy problems. Our areas of faculty expertise include the environment, urban design, housing, transportation, and economic development. Located in the UCLA School of Public Affairs which houses the departments of Public Policy, Social Welfare, and Urban Planning, we enlist and support faculty from a wide range of disciplines across the University to apply their research to regional public issues.

The need for quality research and timely recommendations on regional policy problems has never been greater. In this e-News, you will see that the Lewis Center, in addition to its longstanding role in understanding California’s demographics, is playing special attention to problems of transportation and traffic, in conjunction with the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. We are examining innovations such as Smart Cards and Transit Taxis, and looking at ways to make all transportation alternatives more dependable and safe.

UNDERSTANDING CALIFORNIA’S VIEWS ABOUT IMMIGRATION
As immigration issues have become a hot item in the Presidential campaign, the 2007 Southern California Survey conducted by the Lewis Center sheds light on California’s real views on immigration and neighborhoods. Former center director, Professor Paul Ong and post-doctoral researcher Dr. Kim Haselhoff (Ph.D., Political Science ‘03, UC Irvine) report that among their initial findings: Southern Californians are slightly more pro-immigration than Americans in general, and more cautious on policy recommendations. Those who tend to be pro-immigration are younger, Latinos, foreign-born, liberals, and lower income residents. More restrictive attitudes are held by those who tend to be older, white, conservative, and native born. [FACT SHEET]

MAKING L.A. SAFER FOR PEDESTRIANS
More than 3,000 pedestrians get hit by cars every year in Los Angeles, with over 125 fatalities and hundreds more are left with life-long disabilities. Urban Planning professors Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, who chairs the department, and Robin Liggett, and Hyun-Gun Sung (Ph.D., Urban Planning ‘05, UCLA) looked closely at 12 high-accident intersections in the city. In addition to expected factors such as traffic volumes, density of businesses and residences, width of sidewalks, and location of driveways, they also found unexpected factors, e.g., neighborhoods with high concentrations of Latino populations have disproportionately higher numbers of pedestrian collisions. Their policy recommendations include conducting safety audits of high risk neighborhoods, customizing traffic controls for specific needs such as longer signals in elderly neighborhoods, building “refuge islands” in medians, avoiding building schools on major arteries, decreasing driveway entrances on busy streets, and vigorous education of pedestrians and children. [FINAL REPORT]

ENABLING INNOVATION: SMART CARDS AND TRANSIT TAXIS
Swiping smart cards through fare boxes and having smaller vans, called transit taxis, drive after-hours bus routes are two popular transportation innovations that many believe are taking too long to implement and replicate across the state. Professor Brian Taylor is engaged in research projects that might help speed things up. He and one of his Ph.D. students, Allison Yoh, are developing policy recommendations to cut through the barriers so that riders can use the same cards on different public transportation systems in California. They are finding that when local transit managers have clear understandings of the true costs and benefits of smart cards, which riders like, the route to interagency cooperation is faster. And working with Mark Miller at UC Berkeley, Taylor is also identifying the community characteristics that contribute to successful transit taxi programs. A proven innovation in many university communities, a pilot project is being designed to test transit taxis in areas of San Diego. [FINAL REPORT]

MAKING RIDERS AND MANAGERS HAPPY WITH STATIONS
Professor Brian Taylor and Mark Miller, Visiting Scholar, UCLA ITS, have completed a comprehensive survey of what riders and transit managers want at public transit stops and stations. The primary objective was to determine the best ways to reduce the out-of-vehicle travel burden and improve transit users’ experiences at stops, stations, and transfer facilities. From their analysis one principal finding stands out clearly: The most important determinant of user satisfaction with a transit stop or station is frequent, reliable service in an environment of personal safety, and only indirectly the physical characteristics of that stop or station.

In other words, most transit users would prefer short, predictable waits for buses and trains in a safe, if simple or even dreary, environment, over long waits for late-running vehicles. This finding presents a contrast to much of the descriptive and design-focused research in the past which tended to capture most attention from transit managers because acquiring, maintaining, and operating vehicles is the core mission of any transit system. [FINAL REPORT] [REPORT SYNTHESIS]

FRONTLINE INNOVATIONS IN THE BATTLE FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING
The scarcity of land, coupled with the disparity of prevailing wages to the cost of living, has caused a widespread affordable housing epidemic, which is especially pronounced in Los Angeles. Research by Helen Campbell (M.A. Urban Planning ’07, UCLA) and partially funded by the Lewis Center, examines the wider historical, political and socioeconomic contexts of community land trusts (CLT) in order to analyze their effectiveness for use as a regional and local urban economic development tool. Los Angeles Council District 1 was studied as a model to determine if the findings could be applied Citywide in Los Angeles. Council District 1, near downtown Los Angeles, includes parts of Chinatown, Highland Park, Westlake and Pico Union.

The report contains a comparative case study analyzing commensurable CLTs in Vermont, Illinois, and Irvine, California and an overview of inclusionary zoning and SB 1818. It recommends that the City of Los Angeles, with the assistance of the City Planning Department and others, revise current affordable-housing strategies and available funding streams to facilitate the creation of local CLTs and to support CLT organizations that provide units of affordable housing that protect investments made for our collective future. [REPORT]

NEW STUDENT RESEARCH
The Lewis Center continues to sponsor two student research programs. The Master Student Thesis Program is supporting second year master's students with five awards of $1,000 to $2,500 each. A GIS Initiative to encourage graduate students to work on GIS mapping projects and to promote the use of spatial analysis and geographic techniques will be announced later this year.

2007-08 Thesis Grant Recipients
LaMonica Andreoff, Elisabeth Furbush, and Brian Hackney (Public Policy): Asylum in America: Remedies for Inconsistent Decision Making in the Asylum Process.

Peter Capone-Newton (Urban Planning): Regional Travel Behaviors and Self-Reported Health Outcomes: Results from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS) with Special Consideration of Non- residential Destinations and Grocery Store Location and Quality on Obesity and Self-reported Health Outcomes.

Chris Chandler, Jonathan Tang, and Yoshimasa Nakajima (Public Policy): Organizational Analysis for the Design of the L.A. River Revitalization Corporation.

N. D. Doberneck (Urban Planning): Informal Settlements: The Potential and Peril of America's Free Land Niches.

Laura Zahn (Urban Planning): Summary for Policymakers: Airports and Climate Change.