Mar 12, 2021
Reveal Equitable Change in your City
Understand who’s affected by your project and make change that serves everyone in your community.
Let’s take the example of a potential congestion pricing scheme in Los Angeles. It’s undeniable that reducing traffic congestion in the city with the busiest urban highway network in the United States would yield a broad range of benefits. But it’s important to define the geographic contours of any pilot area in a way that avoids disproportionate adverse impacts.
Census Bureau data products give us a good feel for the demographic characteristics of an area’s resident population. It’s much tougher to obtain information about the people who work in that area. And it can be impossible to identify the people who might need to travel through an area to reach other destinations. Replica streamlines this analysis and adds context not obtainable elsewhere.
In this example, we focus first on individuals who start or end non-discretionary trips in a proposed cordon area. We apply some quick filters to identify the areas that generate high volumes of vehicle trips by these individuals: here, we’ve selected car trips made by nonwhite Angelenos with household income of less than $50,000 who are traveling to their homes or workplaces.
The resulting map reveals some predictable results: downtown LA is a major source of trips meeting these criteria, as are neighborhoods like Koreatown and Wilshire Park. But we also see dense trip clusters in more affluent areas of west Los Angeles, especially around Century City and Westwood. In subsequent analysis phases, we could compare this map to the existing transit network to understand where vehicle trips might most easily be converted to transit trips. And we can leverage Replica’s network volumes data to gain additional understanding of the trips that are being made through any proposed cordon area.
Over the past two years, we’ve worked with Caltrans, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) to provide mobility data and transportation insights for the Sacramento region and we’re excited to bring the same value to everyone in California.
From today through March 31st, Replica is making both its Places and Trends products available at no cost to all state and local public sector employees in California. Sign up today for immediate access.
Your trial will include access to two Replica Places Megaregions — Northern California and Southern California — covering the entirety of the state of California, as well as Nevada. Together, these two models cover 42 million people.
