Jacob Wasserman MURP ‘19, who currently works as a research project manager for UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, won the Neville A. Parker Award for his capstone project, “A Time and Place for Every Rider? Geographic and Temporal Changes in Bay Area Transit Ridership.” The award is given annually by the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) to two recipients for the best master’s project in either policy and planning, or science and technology. Since 2002, a UCLA student has won it nine times. The project explores how, where, and when ridership changed in the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission region over the past decade. Wasserman found three major trends in Bay Area ridership: gains at certain agencies masked declines in others, the largest operators suffered from peaking problems, and jobs and concentrated employment help explain the variation in ridership across agencies. “The current trend of transit ridership is the biggest crisis for transportation nationwide,” Wasserman said. “Having worked in transportation in the Bay Area myself, I was personally motivated to analyze and get to the bottom of the Bay Area’s unique transit ridership trajectory. I’m thrilled that CUTC, a critical decision-maker in transportation research funding, has also recognized the urgency [...]

Co-winner Martin Wachs receives the honor from the Transportation Research Board for a second time — four decades apart by Lena Rogow Evelyn Blumenberg and colleagues who include Professor Emeritus Martin Wachs have won the 2019 Pyke Johnson Award from the Transportation Research Board (TRB) for a recent paper about the mobility needs of aging adults, marking the third time someone from UCLA Luskin has won the prize since its inception. Wachs has been studying transportation and aging for decades and won the same award more than 40 years ago, in 1976. The award-winning paper, “Physical Accessibility and Employment Among Older Adults in California,” explores the relationship between car ownership, transit accessibility and older adults’ employment status. The paper found that adults age 60 and older are able to stay in the workforce longer when they have access to a car or to public transit — if they live in a dense urban area. Blumenberg MA UP ‘90, PhD ‘95, professor of urban planning and director of the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, said that she and Wachs decided to collaborate on the winning paper after realizing they had not previously worked together on a research paper. “This topic [...]

Have you ever wondered how to track bus locations in real-time? Do you know how transit agencies track where all shared scooters are at any given time? Or how to better analyze crash data in Los Angeles? These are all projects that UCLA Luskin graduate students are working on as a way to increase their data coding and analysis skills. The UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies hosted a four-day data camp for urban planning students this September. The goal of the workshop was to teach students how to use Python, a simple programming language, and related tools to process, analyze, and visualize data that would enhance their transportation planning and policy careers. Students with minimal prior knowledge gained valuable skills, including how to pull, analyze and visualize e-scooter data from LA Metro. The camp was taught by Tim Black MURP ‘14, a former data analyst at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and currently a data scientist at NBC Universal. As an extension of the camp, ITS has continued hosting monthly data hack nights for urban planning students interested in building their proficiency and to give students a space to work on their data projects on an ongoing basis. Juan [...]

UCLA Luskin urban planning students Maddy Ruvolo (left) and Cassie Halls received the prestigious Myra L. Frank Memorial Graduate Scholarship from WTS-LA. by Lena Rogow Seven UCLA women were honored this year in recognition of their achievements in transportation-related studies. The Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar, or WTS-LA, distributed $100,000 in scholarship funds to women in high school, community college, undergraduate and graduate programs in transportation-related fields. Seven of the 12 higher-education recipients were UCLA students. WTS is an international organization with more than 6,000 members dedicated to building the future of global transportation through the advancement of women. The prestigious Myra L. Frank Memorial Graduate Scholarship honors the legacy of a notable local leader in environmental planning and assessment. Through her firm, Myra L. Frank & Associates, Frank was involved in virtually every major transit project in Los Angeles, including the Downtown People Mover and the Pasadena Gold Line. She was also an active member of WTS-LA, and, following her death, the organization established a scholarship to honor her legacy. Over the years, UCLA students have often been honored with this scholarship, including in 2018, with two UCLA urban planning students receiving the award: Miriam Pinski [...]