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The recent spread of COVID-19 across the U.S. led to concerted efforts by states to ``flatten the curve" through the adoption of stay-at-home mandates that encourage individuals to reduce travel and maintain social distance. Combining data on changes in travel activity with COVID-19 health outcomes and state policy adoption timing, we characterize nationwide changes in mobility patterns and isolate the portion attributable to statewide mandates. We find evidence of dramatic nationwide declines in mobility prior to adoption of any statewide mandates. Once states adopt a mandate, we estimate further mandate-induced declines between 2.1 and 7.0 percentage points across methods that account for states' differences in travel behavior prior to policy adoption. In addition, we investigate the effects of stay-at-home mandates on changes in COVID-19 health outcomes while controlling for pre-trends and observed pre-treatment mobility patterns. We estimate mandate-induced declines between 0.13 and 0.17 in deaths (5.6 to 6.0 in hospitalizations) per 100 thousand across methods. Across 43 adopting states, this represents 23,366-30,144 fewer deaths (and roughly one million averted hospitalizations) for the months of March and April - which indicates that death rates could have been 42-54% higher had states not adopted statewide policies. We further find evidence that changes in mobility patterns prior to adoption of statewide policies also played a role in reducing COVID-19 mortality and morbidity. Adding in averted deaths due to pre-mandate social distancing behavior, we estimate a total of 48-71,000 averted deaths from COVID-19 for the two-month period. Given that the actual COVID-19 death toll for March and April was 55,922, our estimates suggest that deaths would have been 1.86-2.27 times what they were absent any stay-at-home mandates during this period. These estimates represent a lower bound on the health impacts of stay-at-home policies, as they do not account for spillovers or undercounting of COVID-19 mortality. Our findings indicate that early behavior changes and later statewide policies reduced death rates and helped attenuate the negative consequences of COVID-19. Further, our findings of substantial reductions in mobility prior to state-level policies convey important policy implications for re-opening.Take Away Link https://are.berkeley.edu/sites/are.berkeley.edu/files/PolicyTakeAway_Web.pdf

Daily transportation mode choice is largely habitual, but transitions between life events may disrupt travel habits and can shift choices between alternative transportation modes. Although much is known about general mode switches following life event transitions, less is understood about differences that may exist between subpopulations, especially from a long-term perspective. Understanding these differences will help planners and policymakers introduce more targeted policy interventions to promote sustainable transportation modes and inform longer-term predictions. Extending beyond existing literature, we use data collected from a retrospective survey to investigate the effects of life course events on mode use situated within different long-term life trajectory contexts. We apply a machine-learning method called joint social sequence clustering to define five distinct and interpretable cohorts based on trajectory patterns in family and career domains over their life courses. We use these patterns as an innovative contextual system to investigate (1) the heterogeneous effects of life events on travel mode use and (2) further differentiation between gender and generation groups in these life event effects. We find that events occurring relatively early in life are more strongly associated with changes in mode-use behavior, and that mode use can also be affected by the relative order of events. This timing and order effect can have lasting impacts on mode use aggregated over entire life cycles: members of our ‘‘Have-it-alls’’ cohort—who finish their education, start working, partner up, and have children early in life—ramp up car use at each event, resulting in the highest rate of car use occurring the earliest among all the cohorts. Women drive more when having children primarily when their family formation and career formation are intertwined early in life, and younger generations rely relatively more on car use during familial events when their careers have a later start.

Emerging technologies and services stand poised to transform the transportation system, with large implications for energy use and mobility. The degree and speed of these impacts depend largely on who adopts these innovations and how quickly. Leveraging data from a novel survey of San Francisco Bay Area residents, we analyze adoption patterns for shared mobility, electrified vehicle technologies, and vehicle automation. We find that ride-hailing and adaptive cruise control have penetrated the market more extensively than have electrified vehicles or car-sharing services. Over half of respondents have adopted or expressed interest in adopting all levels of vehicle automation. Overall, there is substantial potential for market growth for the technologies and services we analyzed. Using county fixed effects regressions, we investigate which individual and location-level factors correlate to adoption and interest. We find that, although higher-income people are disproportionately represented among current adopters of most new technologies and services, low- to middle-income people are just as likely to have adopted pooled ride-hailing. Younger generations have high interest in automated and electrified vehicles relative to their current adoption of these technologies, suggesting that young people could contribute substantially to future market growth—as they are doing for ride-hailing. We find no evidence that longer commutes present a barrier to plug-in electric vehicle adoption. Finally, women are less likely than men to adopt and/or be interested in adopting most new transportation technologies, with the exception of ride-hailing; designing or marketing technologies with women's preferences in mind could contribute to future market expansion.

This paper provides an overview of the contributions to this special issue in the context of a wider argument about the notion of queering elementary education. When "Queering Elementary Education" was published 10 years ago there was very little writing or research on matters related to primary education, and just finding experienced educators to contribute and allaying the concerns of our publisher proved to be challenges. The book was met with considerable opposition, and angry reactions to challenging established norms in terms of family, marriage and sexuality have continued to follow work addressing sexuality in primary settings to the current day. Nevertheless, under the guise of protecting children we actually put them at risk for becoming bullies, being bullied and failing to realize their full humanness as gendered and sexual beings. In this book we proposed a critical sexual pedagogy, an interrogative approach I continue to advocate for the exploration of gender and sexual assumptions. Queering elementary education means interrogating our institutions as well as our own complicity in regimes of truth that ill-serve young people. (Contains 1 note.)