Abstract

Communities are traditionally built with one transportation mode and user in mind—the adult automobile driver. Recently, however, there has been an international focus on the trip to school as an opportunity to enhance children’s independent active travel. Several factors must be considered when designing programs to promote walking and bicycling. This paper examined the influence of child sex on caregivers’ decisions about travel mode choice to school.

Caregivers of children in grades three to five from ten California Safe Routes to School communities were surveyed on their child’s normal travel mode to school and factors that determined travel decisions. Results indicate that the odds of walking and bicycling to school are 40 percent lower in girls than boys; however, this relationship is significantly moderated by the caregiver’s own walking behavior. The findings suggest that programs that focus on increasing children’s active travel to school should consider multiple influences on health behavior, including the neighborhood physical activity of parents.

Abstract

While transit-oriented development (TOD) has become an increasingly popular planning idea, very few studies have examined how localities plan for and implement transit oriented projects. This paper helps fill that gap by studying the TOD implementation process near stations on the oldest of the current generation of light rail lines – the San Diego Trolley. Interviews with planning directors in the region, supplemented by zoning data, archival research, and inspection of station-area land use, all suggest that TOD is a niche market in the region. There are several barriers which have constrained TOD implementation in San Diego County. TOD projects have been pursued most aggressively in cases where those barriers are less severe or do not apply. Overall, we argue that each city, while being sympathetic to regional rail goals, works within a framework of local goals and constraints. The net result is regional TOD implementation which resembles the incremental model of policy-making first popularized by Lindblom (1959). One implication of this is that a comprehensive reshaping of station-area land use will, at best, take years to be realized.

Abstract

An increasingly influential planning strategy for leveraging rail transit is high-density residential development near rail stations, or ‘Transit-Based Housing’. Proponents argue such projects will get more people onto trains, reduce developers’ expenses, and lower commuting costs, housing prices, and air pollution in the bargain. While most of the literature has addressed the merit of such projects, this paper considers a separate question: Whatever virtues transit-based housing may have, what are its prospects?

We find that transit-based housing faces a much steeper uphill battle than the conventional wisdom suggests. Cities’ parochial fiscal and economic interests appear to conflict with transit-based housing in several fundamental respects, a view strongly supported by a behavioral analysis of zoning data for all 232 existing and proposed Southern California rail transit stations. Municipalities behave as if they prefer to use rail transit stations for economic rather than residential development, suggesting that transit oriented planning strategies would profit form more attention to their local fiscal and economic benefits.