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Past research has shown that transit passengers’ fears and concerns about safety influence their travel decisions. While the relationship between women’s fear of crime and public space has been the focus of considerable research, transit environments—which are especially threatening to female passengers—have received much less attention. This study examines the issue of women’s safety on transit through a survey of U.S. transit operators. The findings show that most respondents believe women have distinct safety and security needs, but most do not think agencies should put specific programs into place to address these needs. In addition, only a handful of agencies currently have programs that target the safety and security needs of women. This survey suggests that there is a significant mismatch between the safety and security needs and desires of female passengers and the types and locations of strategies that transit agencies use.

Fear and anxiety about personal security are important detractors from using public transit. Empirical research in different cities of the Western world has confirmed that fear about crime affects transit ridership. Surveys of the perceptions of transit passengers have revealed a number of issues related to their anxiety about personal security. For one, fear of transit is more pronounced in certain social groups than others. Gender emerges as the most significant factor related to anxiety and fear about victimization in transit environments. Almost every fear of crime survey reports that women are much more fearful of victimization than men. This fear has some significant consequences for women and leads them to utilize precautionary measures and strategies that affect their travel patterns. These range from the adoption of certain behavioral mechanisms when in public, to choosing specific routes, modal choices, and transit environments over others, to completely avoiding particular transit environments, bus stops and railway platforms, or activities (e.g., walking, bicycling) deemed as unsafe.Women’s fear of crime in public spaces has been adequately documented. Research of transit passengers’ perceptions of transit safety has also intensified in response to the recognition that anxieties about crime are impeding travel choices and affect transit ridership and revenue, and guidelines for safer cities and transit environments have been drafted. Some studies incorporate an analysis of gender differences in perceptions of safety on transit; however, the focus is not specifically on women and safety. In contrast, a small subset of studies has focused on women’s concerns and fears about personal safety in transit environments. Criminologists complain, however, that our increased knowledge about the causes of fear has not necessarily translated into nuanced policy responses tailored to the particularities of different groups and physical settings. Additionally, there re

This research explores the spatial distribution of pedestrian-automobile collisions in Los Angeles and analyzes the social and physical factors that affect the risk of getting involved in such accidents. More specifically, this study investigates the influence of socio-demographic, land use, density, and traffic characteristics on pedestrian accident rates.We first provide an exploratory spatial and statistical analysis of pedestrian collision data in the city of Los Angeles to identify preliminary relationships between accident frequency and socio-demographic and land use characteristics at the census tract and block group levels. This aggregate level analysis also helps us identify major concentrations of pedestrian collision data which are used at a second stage of the research for more qualitative and detailed analysis of specific case studies of intersections with high frequency of pedestrian-automobile accidents. The study uses pedestrian accident data provided by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, traffic volume data provided by Caltrans, socio-demographic data from the U.S. Census 2000, land use data from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and pedestrian volume and built environment data from fieldwork research.

Los Angeles is a city shaped by its freeway system. Superimposed on the physical and social landscape of the city, the freeways have tended to split and destroy the fine grain of residential neighborhoods. The design and implementation of the freeway system exemplifies the dictum of top-down planning, envisioned by transportation engineers and city fathers with little or no input from the affected communities. Emblematic of this treatment of the urban landscape is the “first freeway of the west,” the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway in Los Angeles. Located within the Arroyo Corridor, the freeway includes in addition to the transportation artery, a sub-watershed of the Los Angeles River, which has also been channelized and built upon. The article discusses recent grassroots efforts that offer a ‘counter-strategy’ to the narrative of hegemonic, top-down planning, by allowing participation, input and action from the neighboring communities. The goal is nothing less but to make the freeway a connector rather than a separator of the diverse neighborhoods along its banks and to craft a core strategy for urban environmental renewal in a region long characterized as hostile to environmental goals.

A predecessor of the modern freeway and a celebrated transportation model of the early 20th century, the urban parkway has fallen on difficult times. Designed for uninterrupted and pleasurable driving through park-like surroundings and a visual connection to the communities the driver passed through, parkways were once hailed as marvels of transportation innovation and design, and as safe and efficient alternatives to non-limited access arterials and boulevards. By the 1950s, however, the goals of pleasurable driving and visual connection had progressively faded in favor of engineering efficiency and higher capacity use. In the meantime, existing parkways became tangled in a web of problems. Originally designed for fewer cars at lower speeds, parkways like the Arroyo Seco Parkway had to accommodate significant increases in vehicles at much higher speeds. This led to traffic congestion (the ten minute trip of 1941 along the Arroyo Seco might now take as long as 40 minutes), bottlenecks, and a major increase in traffic accidents.Today, the Arroyo Seco Parkway stands as a representative example of an urban parkway still in use but fraught with problems due to its disjuncture between its original conception and ultimate evolution. These changes also symbolize some of the problems and challenges in a freeway-centered transportation system. In what follows we will revisit the history and goals of early parkways, focusing in particular on the “first freeway of the West,” the celebrated Arroyo Seco Parkway. We will examine the forces that brought about its painful evolution and transformation from a visually appealing roadway to an accident-ridden freeway. Drawing from the specific example of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, our investigation will trace the change of the parkway model over time. At the core of our discussion lies the desire to examine if early parkways have indeed become “dinosaurs,” obsolete roadways incapable of accommodating contemporary traffic demands, or if t

The link between the social and physical environment and transit crime is an important one, but is not well understood or explored. This study explores the environment - transit crime connection by examining in-depth the relation between crime incidence at the stations and their neighborhoods. The study employs a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to analyze crime statistics, census and ridership data, and built environment data. It documents and evaluates the geography of crime along this light rail line, as well as the impact of socio-demographic and environmental attributes on crime incidence at the station.

This article focuses on the commercial strips of the American inner city, many of which are currently characterized by major decay and disinvestment. After a brief historic overview of the evolution and decay of inner-city commercial strips, the article turns to fieldwork research. The study uses case studies from Los Angeles for an assessment of the current economic environment of inner-city strips. Drawing information from surveys of inner-city residents and merchants along three corridors and focus group research with merchants along a fourth corridor, the article reports the perils and potential of business development along the strips and outlines suggestions for economic improvement and community development.

This study presents the results of a three-round Delphi survey that focused on issues and opportunities related to transit-oriented development (TOD) in US inner cities. The survey queried a panel of 25 experts about the various goals and objectives of the practice of TOD, as well as the preconditions and constraints surrounding such development in economically disadvantaged areas of the inner city. Starting form a wide range of responses, the panel was eventually able, through the Delphi process, to focus on specific issues and propose a concrete set of strategies for the implementation of TODs.

The paper examines the Blue Line corridor, a 22-mile rail transportation route that connects downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach. The line passes through some of the most neglected and poor communities in Los Angeles County. Despite initial rhetoric by rail advocates and local politicians the line has not succeeded in improving the economic environment of adjacent communities. In this paper we use the Blue Line as a case study in an effort to understand the real and perceived barriers to growth around inner city station areas. Based on information gathered through a series of interviews with politicians, planners, community leaders, and transportation experts, and site analysis data from extensive field work we identify the “missing antecedents” for neighborhood development around inner city station areas.

There has been considerable interest in recent decades for the identification of the physical correlates of crime in different urban settings. This study focuses on bus stop crime and seeks to understand how different environmental attributes in the vicinity of a bus stop can affect the incidence of crime. We first review evidence from the relevant literature to understand the impacts of built environment on crime. This is followed by the presentation of our empirical research. We have used a stratified random sample of 60 bus stops in downtown Los Angeles to examine the effects of environmental and land use attributes on crime per capita. Using descriptive statistics, correlations, regression and discriminant analyses, and matched pair analysis the study finds some relations between the existence or absence of certain environmental attributes and the incidence of crime.

The focus of this research is the commercial strip of the American inner city which, due to disinvestment, high crime rates, arbitrary and haphazard development, and poor connections to surrounding residential neighbourhoods, has become a problematic environment. Physical retrofit and economic policies are urgently needed in order to reclaim these decaying urban environments. This paper concentrates on the subject of physical retrofit, using three inner-city commercial strips in Los Angeles as case studies to document residents’ needs and utilisation of these strips, and proposes design and policy changes for their physical improvement.