Amy Lee

@amyelee.com

5758 Followers 446 Following

Postdoc at the University of California, Davis. Studying policy & politics around transportation, land use, and travel behavior. She/her. amyelee.com 🏳️‍🌈

Screenshot of a quote from the article: "Global climate modelers have a hard time incorporating policies like street design and bike lanes [into their estimates] because they're implemented by thousands of individual local governments, rather than the nation-state, which is a normally the unit of analysis," Millard-Ball added. "So as a result, a lot of the global climate policy discourse focuses more on technology in the transportation sector, like electrification and fuel efficiency. And certainly that's really important — but it doesn't capture the public transit, [or] the walking and biking policies."
blooming jacaranda trees in the UCLA sculpture garden
a photo from an airplane with a corridor of jacaranda street trees blooming purple
6 Distributional Effects Proposals to implement congestion pricing often face concerns over potential adverse impacts on specific groups, such as lower-income drivers (Ecola and Light, 2009; Taylor, 2010). In this section, we estimate the effects of congestion pricing on regions of different income levels, distance to the CBD, and for specific areas of interest such as New Jersey and the Bronx. Table 1 documents the policy's treatment effects on four outcomes for each geographic breakdown, following the same generalized synthetic control methodology as in previous sections. The first two columns show the effects on segments within the specified region. The latter two show the effects on speeds for trips originating from the region to destinations either inside or outside the CBD. Median household income. We first compare the effects of the policy on areas with higher or lower income. We divide Census tracts based on where they fall in the within-CBSA distribution of median household income in the 2018-2023 American Community Survey (ACS). Median household incomes in the NYC metro area range from approximately $44,500 for the average tract in the bottom qui tile of the distribution to $182,000 for the average tract in the top quintile. We find that congestion pricing has had broadly similar effects on areas across the income distri-bution. Our estimates suggest that the positive effects on speeds have been greatest in the bottom quintile of income and decreased monotonically as we move up the income distribution, although the differences are small and not statistically significant. The corresponding effect on emissions follows a similar pattern, with the largest decreases for segments in the lowest income tracts. Trips traveling to the CBD from any income quintile have experienced an 8-9% increase in speeds, with no significant differences in effects across quintiles.
Press release with text: U.S. Transportation Secretary Duffy Announces Review of California High-Speed Rail Project WASHINGTON – Today, at the direction of Secretary of Transportation Sean P. Duffy, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) initiated a review of the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA). This review will help determine whether roughly $4 billion in taxpayer money should remain committed to the proposed project to build high-speed rail in the California Central Valley between Merced and Bakersfield. The entire San Francisco to Los Angeles project was initially supposed to be completed by 2020 and cost $33 billion. Today, the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment alone would cost more than the original total. The latest estimate for San Francisco to Los Angeles is $106 billion — more than three times the original cost estimate. “For too long, taxpayers have subsidized the massively over-budget and delayed California High-Speed Rail project,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy. “President Trump is right that this project is in dire need of an investigation. That is why I am directing my staff to review and determine whether the CHSRA has followed through on the commitments it made to receive billions of dollars in federal funding. If not, I will have to consider whether that money could be given to deserving infrastructure projects elsewhere in the United States.” As recently noted by the California High-Speed Rail Office of the Inspector General, just the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment has a funding gap of at least $6.5 billion. That gap remains despite California being due to receive over $4 billion from the Biden Administration. The CHSRA Inspector General also found that even this limited project, with barely 2 million in annual projected ridership because it fails to connect California’s larger cities, is unlikely to be completed by 2033.
Photo of urban core and edge of the LA basin at night from an airplane
Prosecco with descritption that says "what to expect" mineral
A pink sealed envelope saying “official vote by mail ballot”
My cute spotty dog sitting in an empty meadow