Internal Affairs: Untold Case Studies of World War I German Internment

Internment of German-Americans and Germans in the United States as the country entered World War I marked a turn in the relationship between America’s governing institutions, its citizens, and its non-citizen aliens. The power and reach of the American state inflected upwards during World War I. Internment was the most drastic facet of a new state involvement in the makeup and dynamics of communities and the liberties and perceptions of minorities. Aside from whether such an effort was justified, internment lies at a crucial point in a sustained American history of powerful state (and state-like) actors interacting with newcomers and outsiders. Indeed, despite its lack of scholarship and popular knowledge, German internment left a lasting legacy. Just one world war later, it provided the logistics, personnel, and messaging for expanded successor programs, which in turn created similar types of backlash. To understand German internment is to understand a long trend of state expansion into the lives of disempowered and non-citizen residents—and an equally long history of resistance to i

Smart Funding for Smart Infrastructure: Examining and Evaluating Funding Methods for Infrastructure to Support Autonomous Vehicles

"Self-driving cars won’t work until we change our roads," wrote Andrew Ng, chief of research at Chinese tech giant Baidu. Though Ng may exaggerate, autonomous vehicles (AVs) do benefit greatly from "smart infrastructure." Witnessing AVs’ rise, American governments have eagerly begun smart infrastructure projects, but few have developed stable methods of funding them. In this paper, I explore the funding mechanisms that exist today—the national gas tax, pooled and local financing, and AV mileage taxes—and evaluate their track record, future feasibility, and ability to make the largest beneficiaries pay a proportionate share. While the federal government has dedicated decreasing amounts of gas tax revenue to smart infrastructure, it also distributed gas tax dollars in the Smart City Challenge, an innovative contest that successfully if unsustainably drew in private contributions. Meanwhile, the Connected Vehicle Pooled Fund Study and Atlanta’s North Avenue Smart Corridor show how states and localities have self-funded intelligent transportation systems through general revenues. However, none of these methods impose costs on smart infrastructure’s largest users to the same degree as AV mileage fees, seriously considered in Tennessee and other states. No funding stream has simultaneously levied costs proportionately and dedicated its revenue back to smart infrastructure. The Smart City Challenge and especially AV taxes have come closer, but both involve political tradeoffs. In coming decades, autonomous vehicles and their supporting infrastructure offer a chance to rethink the fairness of transportation finance and the role of the public and private sectors in the city of tomorrow

Big Trouble in the Big Easy: The Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Power

Big Trouble in the Big Easy: The Battle of Canal Street and the Independence of Black Political Powe

A Time and a Place for Every Rider?: Geographic and Temporal Changes in Bay Area Transit Ridership

Transit ridership is on the wrong track across America. Yet until 2016, the San Francisco Bay Area appeared immune to the ridership declines plaguing most other cities. However, in 2017, Bay Area ridership began to fall, both regionwide and on almost all major transit operators. But this decline has not occurred uniformly. Thus, to help explain why transit ridership has changed, this report elucidates how, where, and when it has changed across the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission region in the past decade. To answer these questions, I analyze ridership data for the region as a whole and for three of its largest operators in depth. Following this, I conduct a multivariate statistical analysis that simultaneously considers the various factors that have influenced ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).While the landscape of transit use in Northern California is varied and shifting, I find and detail three significant trends. First, while the Bay Area had appeared to have stronger ridership than much of the rest of the country until recently, gains at major Bay Area transit agencies masked longer-term declines in the rest of the region. Second, the region’s largest operators are suffering from severe and deepening peaking problems: ridership during off-peak periods and in off-peak directions has cratered, while ridership at peak periods and in peak directions remains steady. Finally, I find that jobs, and particularly concentrated employment, explain far more of variation in ridership than any other determinant analyzed, including factors like service provided. Policymakers must therefore make the difficult decision of whether to channel resources towards the most crowded trip types, to alleviate crowding and double down on their strongest market, or towards slumping trips types, to shore up the weakest parts of the transit network despite their limited control over them

What’s Behind Recent Transit Ridership Trends in the Bay Area? Volume I: Overview and Analysis of Underlying Factors

Public transit ridership has been falling nationally and in California since 2014. The San Francisco Bay Area, with the state’s highest rates of transit use, had until recently resisted those trends, especially compared to Greater Los Angeles. However, in 2017 and 2018 the region lost over five percent (>27 million) of its annual riders, despite a booming economy and service increases. This report examines Bay Area transit ridership to understand the dimensions of changing transit use, its possible causes, and potential solutions. We find that: 1) the steepest ridership losses have come on buses, at off-peak times, on weekends, in non-commute directions, on outlying lines, and on operators that do not serve the region’s core employment clusters; 2) transit trips in the region are increasingly commute-focused, particularly into and out of downtown San Francisco; 3) transit commuters are increasingly non-traditional transit users, such as those with higher incomes and automobile access; 4) the growing job-housing imbalance in the Bay Area is related to rising housing costs and likely depressing transit ridership as more residents live less transit-friendly parts of the region; and 5) ridehail is substituting for some transit trips, particularly in the off-peak. Arresting falling transit use will likely require action both by transit operators (to address peak capacity constraints; improve off-peak service; ease fare payments; adopt fare structures that attract off-peak riders; and better integrate transit with new mobility options) and public policymakers in other realms (to better meter and manage private vehicle use and to increase the supply and affordability of housing near job centers)

Driving A-loan: Automobile debt, neighborhood race, and the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 altered travel patterns in the U.S. Studies have analyzed the effect of the pandemic on travel mode, including working from home, but few have focused on automobile ownership—a relationship with potentially long-term consequences for accessibility, household budgets and debt, and policy efforts to meet climate goals.To understand the association between the pandemic and automobile ownership, we rely on a unique credit panel dataset from Experian and examine three different automobile loan-related outcome measures: annualized growth rate of new automobile loan balances, average new loan size, and the number of new loans. We focus specifically on changes across loans in neighborhoods by race/ethnicity, hypothesizing larger increases in automobile debt in Black and Latino/a neighborhoods, where workers are less likely to be able to telework. The annualized growth rate of new automobile loans increased during the pandemic across all neighborhoods by race/ethnicity, increasing most rapidly in Latino/a neighborhoods. Controlling for other factors, loan size increased similarly across neighborhoods by race/ethnicity. The increase in automobile lending in Latino/a neighborhoods, therefore, likely was explained by a significant uptick in the number of new loans.The growth in automobile lending during the pandemic was potentially prompted by pandemic-induced changes in the need for automobiles and facilitated by an expanded social safety net. As the pandemic and its various forms of public financial assistance recede, the findings underscore the importance of ongoing assistance in enabling automobile ownership or shared access among households with limited means whose livelihoods depend on the access that vehicles provide