Vehicle access and falling transit ridership: evidence from Southern California.

We examine pre-COVID declines in transit ridership, using Southern California as a case study. We first illustrate Southern California's unique position in the transit landscape: it is a large transit market that demographically resembles a small one. We then draw on administrative data, travel diaries, rider surveys, accessibility indices, and Census microdata for Southern California, and demonstrate a strong association between rising private vehicle access, particularly among the populations most likely to ride transit, and falling transit use. Because we cannot control quantitatively for the endogeneity between vehicle acquisition and transit use, our results are not causal. Nevertheless, the results strongly suggest that increasing private vehicle access helped depress transit ridership. Given Southern California's similarity to most US transit markets, we conclude that vehicle access may have played a role in transit losses across the US since 2000.

Regional differences in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food sufficiency in California, April-July 2020: implications for food programmes and policies.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate regional differences in factors associated with food insufficiency during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic among three major metropolitan regions in California, a state with historically low participation rates in the Supplementation Nutrition Assistance Program, the nation's largest food assistance programme. DESIGN: Analysis of cross-sectional data from phase 1 (23 April-21 July 2020) of the US Census Household Pulse Survey, a weekly national online survey. SETTING: California, and three Californian metropolitan statistical areas (MSA), including San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA. PARTICIPANTS: Adults aged 18 years and older living in households. RESULTS: Among the three metropolitan areas, food insufficiency rates were lowest in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley MSA. Measures of disadvantage (e.g., having low-income, being unemployed, recent loss of employment income and pre-pandemic food insufficiency) were widely associated with household food insufficiency. However, disadvantaged households in the San Francisco Bay Area, the area with the lowest poverty and unemployment rates, were more likely to be food insufficient compared with those in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA. CONCLUSIONS: Food insufficiency risk among disadvantaged households differed by region. To be effective, governmental response to food insufficiency must address the varied local circumstances that contribute to these disparities.

Rating the composition: Deconstructing the demand-side effects on transit use changes in California

Transit use in the U.S. has been sliding since 2014, well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The largest state, California, was also losing transit riders despite substantial public investment and increased service in the pre-pandemic period. This downturn prompted concern among transit managers and planners interested in service-side interventions to reverse the decline. However, relatively little is known about changes in the demand for public transit and how shifts in demand-side factors have affected patronage. Drawing on California data from the 2009 and 2017 National Household Travel Surveys, we quantify demand-side changes as a function of two factors—changes in ridership rates of various classes of transit riders (“rate effects”) and changes in the composition of those rider classes (“composition effects”). Statewide, we find that while shifts in the population composition were in some cases associated with lower levels of ridership, the largest declines in transit patronage were associated with falling ridership rates. Specifically, those with limited automobile access and Hispanic travelers rode transit far less frequently in 2017 compared to 2009. Transit ridership rates and rider composition in the San Francisco Bay Area were relatively stable during the study period, while both rate and compositional changes in the Los Angeles area were associated with much lower levels of total ridership. Overall, our findings demonstrate the important role of demand-side factors in understanding aggregate transit use, and suggest that planners and managers may have limited policy tools at their disposal when seeking to bolster ridership levels.