(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 539: Testing Universal Basic Mobility

This week we’re joined by Madeline Brozen of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. We talk about universal basic mobility and research her team has done on the LA Mobility Wallet Pilot Program.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood: Madeline Brozen, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast.

Madeline Brozen: Hey, longtime appreciator of Overhead Wire. So really glad to be here.

Jeff Wood: Thank you. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, so I am the deputy director at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. We study housing affordability and transportation equity for the greater LA region. And what we try to do as a research center is make sure that high quality research that is being done. By a whole variety of folks is actually just kind of making its way into policy, into decision makers.

You know, arming people with truth and evidence is what our kind of MO is trying to do. So that’s our center where my work is situated, and then I’m a long time [00:03:00] transportation researcher focusing mostly on the equity side of things.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. And what got you interested in cities and transportation?

Was it something that happened when you were a little kid or was it something that you grew into later in life?

Madeline Brozen: The best I can kind of figure out is that I just got a lot of independence as a young kid because of transportation. I grew up in Minneapolis where it’s very safe to. Bike a lot, and so it was like, oh, okay.

My kind of radius of where I was able to travel by myself got wider and wider as I was getting older. I would also just like, before I had a driver’s license, I would just take myself on bus adventures. And then I also had a lot of experience in New York City. That’s where my dad grew up, and I visit family a lot, so I just could kind of navigate cities well and just, it was really fun to feel like I had a lot of autonomy.

Just like recognize that, oh, if you can figure out how to kind of get yourself places by yourself, you can do a lot of fun [00:04:00] things. So I then in college, started in architecture because I think, I thought that architecture was planning. I. And that didn’t last very long. And so once I found out that urban planning existed, I was like, oh, this is fantastic.

And then kind of in the realm of like, well, what do you wanna specialize in the transportation side of things, which is something I just kind of naturally gravitated towards. So I feel very happy and pleased that I was able to kind of find a professional career that just felt very natural to me. And I’ve been, in the transportation world now, in academia and professionally for like.

20 years, which is kind of wild.

Jeff Wood: Which one’s better professional or academia?

Madeline Brozen: I don’t know. I mean, that’s the nice thing. You don’t need to disparage

Jeff Wood: anybody, of course.

Madeline Brozen: No, no. It’s, I have a very weird job in that I do academic research and I am not a professor, so I get all of the. In depth, getting to [00:05:00] deeply think about stuff, working with really talented research assistants, and at the end of the day, my job’s not measured by peer reviewed publications that are difficult to come by and take a long time to come out.

So I kind of exist in a weird space where I’m a professional academic, which. If you can get the gig to work for you, I think it’s really fun.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I did that kind of at a quote unquote think tank for about eight years and it was a blast and I highly recommend it, but it’s uh, definitely a rare job. And when it disappeared, I was very sad.

I’m still sad. I’m still not over that. Well, I wanted to have you on to chat about the LA Mobility Wallet pilot, and you all did some research on that recently. But first I wanted to hear your thoughts on the importance of mobility and specifically this idea of universal basic mobility.

Madeline Brozen: I mean, I am really enthusiastic about this concept.

I think that. We’ve been trying to figure out ways to make transportation work for people who are too [00:06:00] poor or unable to drive or are just not interested in that. And if you kinda look back in the history of what we’ve done, especially at the federal level in the last 50 years, I don’t think things have worked very well.

Like we’ve. Put a lot of money and time into transit, which I think is the backbone of this universal basic mobility concept. But we’ve kind of thought about it like one mode at a time. And then the other part is that we’ve just never, as a country, provided enough money for transit operations to make it work really well.

So like. If you were reliant on transit, it was a mode that, you know, works pretty well in cities. I mean, for people that live in like suburban or rural communities, like you know, they are at a much worse disadvantage, but it just wasn’t really kind of getting you all the way there. And I. So kind of as universal basic mobility has come up, it’s just kind of [00:07:00] a new paradigm and it just like recognizes that if you can’t actually get to where you need to go, opportunities in your life just kind of cease to exist, right?

Like you just make your world smaller. You look for jobs that are closer by, even though there might be a better job further away from you, but you’re just like, I just can’t get there. That doesn’t really exist. This kind of pattern just shows up in a lot of different aspects of your life. And so one thing that’s exciting about UBM is just like, okay, this is a barrier to people having a good quality of life, and maybe there’s something we can do about it.

And what we can do about it is actually recognize that people are kind of the best arbiters of how they make decisions. And if we can figure out a way to actually give them more options than just transit alone, although those options need to be good like you, you know, they need to actually exist, but like maybe some of those opportunities in life they can actually unlock.

So there’s kind of two streams of places where I [00:08:00] think that this concept has its origins. One is just in the rise of guaranteed and basic income pilots of the United States, where it’s like, rather than saying, here’s your food money and here’s your housing money, and you know, hopefully you signed up for all of them to actually get it.

Here’s just money and you can figure out how to decide, right. So that’s been really kind of up and coming. And then the idea of like mobility as a service. That if we want people to be able to get around without having to rely on private automobiles, we have to make the experience of using a bunch of different modes easier and more seamless.

Right? I don’t think that like mobility as a service and kind of a integrated platform has come as far in the United States as we’ve seen it like in European context. But the kind of cool thing is that like, for a low income people, it’s not necessarily like the modal friction, it’s just the affordability.

So that’s like where these kind of two things have come together is like, okay, let’s take. Guaranteed income and giving people money and autonomy and a [00:09:00] seamless experience and rather than kind of one app to rule them all, maybe it’s just a debit card, right? We’ll give you the money to afford. So it’s really exciting.

In the few short years we’ve been doing this work, there have been more places that are trying this. And it’s really, it’s fun. I think that you look at guaranteed income and you’re like, yeah, we know that works. So the fact that transportation is trying this out is just a really fun place to be.

Jeff Wood: I just find it really interesting from the mobility as a service angle where I. It might not even work in those European contexts as well as maybe they wish it would, and maybe it’s because of who controls the system and who’s putting it out there. You, you mentioned, you know, one app to rule them all the, the, the reference floor of the rings.

But I’m also hearing a lot from folks like, um, David, he at the University of Sydney, who talks about mobility as a feature rather to mobility as a service, which is like. Maybe it shouldn’t be the transportation agencies that are behind this. Maybe it’s like a higher power of sorts, like an insurance company or somebody who [00:10:00] has like an incentive to promote like active transportation versus the risk that’s created by people driving.

And so I find that angle interesting too, is that maybe it is just the debit card versus something that we’re concocting to try to fix a problem that’s way harder than they can actually fix.

Madeline Brozen: Certainly, I mean, I think that that idea is also just connected to this larger movement towards open loop payments, right?

That like we don’t want to have every single transit agency have their own bespoke way that they take money and you have to lock up money in the silly car that you can’t use when you go to another city or state. Right? It’s like we have a universal payment system, it’s called credit, or it might be debit for some people, whatever.

Let’s just use what people are already using. Right? And so I like that idea a lot because it’s like, no, like whose incentive is it to actually integrate? Because I know a lot of transit agencies are I. Understandably to a point, like concerned, oh, if you [00:11:00] have access to other modes like that’s competing with transit, like do they actually have a good enough incentive as transit agencies to actually like give the suite of options?

I mean, obviously LA Metro I think is kind of an exception given they’re one of the big partners in this. Program in Los Angeles. But I think it’s a good point to think about like who benefits, right? Like a lot of the times the investments that we make in transportation are actually being seen in other places, right?

If you have the ability to get to your doctor, that investment in transportation, whether it’s transit or another mode that’s actually showing up in like the healthcare system, right? And so, yeah, I like this idea of like. Maybe there’s just like a larger social service kind of provider that thinks about mobility rather than having kind of these smaller agencies that all have their own individual interests thinking about it,

Jeff Wood: it also gets this idea of poverty reduction too.

In my mind, I. I had talked to Scott Bernstein, who is a, a long time friend on the [00:12:00] show like many, many years ago. And we were talking about poverty reduction and, and he was talking about basically this idea of like a dollar saved as a dollar earned, where you can give people all of these different plans and programs and stuff like that.

And what happens is people will use that instead and transfer the money that they would’ve used for transportation or for healthcare or for whatever else you’re giving them, and use that for something else. And then they don’t have to pay taxes on that money. And so they actually earn more money over time because of that.

And I find that interesting thinking about this program, and we’ll talk about the program in a second, but I thinking about poverty reduction more generally of how each of these programs can help people kind of along the way towards making sure those low income folks you mentioned before can get a leg up.

Madeline Brozen: We’ve really thought about. Transportation as a poverty reduction solution. Not in a super direct way, but if you can actually get to a job. Right. Well, you think about job access a lot of times in different ways. Do you have the skills to work at this job? Do you have the education? And sometimes I think the [00:13:00] workforce sector, you know, depends on who you talk to, but they may or may not be thinking, can you actually get there?

And especially. Over the past, 20, 30 years we’ve had the suburbanization of jobs, right? Jobs are getting further and further away from where people live. And so if you can close this gap on the actual transportation side that unlocks those jobs, and just the ability to participate in the labor market.

Define jobs where you actually have. Job advancement opportunities, like that’s super critical. You don’t have that baseline. Everything else in your life is just gonna be really hard and a lot of times I think it does just start, you know, do you have transportation? I mean, this is why on a lot of job applications, I think actually for a bad screening reason, it’s kind of discriminatory.

They ask you, do you have a car or do you have reliable transportation? Because employers kind of have a sense that like if you can’t get here, you may not be as good of an employee as someone else.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, I thought you were gonna say if you [00:14:00] have a driver’s license And

Madeline Brozen: that’s also, yeah, that’s another screen.

That’s another thing, which is like super wild because I’ve had graduate students at UCLA and they’re applying for some summer internship and like a government where they’re just gonna go and like have a desk job and there’s a driver’s license application screening and they’re like, I’ve lived in New York City my whole life.

I don’t have a driver’s license. Like why do I need this? To be an intern at this agency. So, yeah, I mean, I think that we shouldn’t be screening for having a driver’s license or a car or reliable transportation. Like those things are just discriminating against people in many different ways. But it demonstrates that actually employers do know that transportation’s important, but we just haven’t really figured out how to make sure that it’s actually part of the conversation and getting people jobs.

Jeff Wood: So that’s where this pilot comes in to a certain extent. L-A-D-O-T and element piloted a mobility wallet pilot program. Where did that emerge from and, uh, what were the parameters?

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, so this is something that the Los Angeles [00:15:00] Department of Transportation has been pitching as an idea since pre pandemic.

The former general manager of L-A-D-O-T, who’s actually now, she’s the head of the Office of Strategic Innovation at LA Metro now. So leader on like she really was kind of, yeah, Selena Reynolds. Maybe has been on this pod she has. If not, you should have her. She’s fantastic. She has been on this, um, yeah, so she was kind of, you know, pitching this idea like for universal basic mobility.

And so then L-A-D-O-T was able to secure a state grant from the California Air Resources Board. They’re the people that give out different grants that are, are cap and trade revenues from the state through one of their equity programs to actually like pilot this idea in part of South Los Angeles. And that grant had kind of different components.

It had the mobility wallet, which we’ll talk about, which is where our research really focused on. It also was looking at different transportation improvements more generally, like tactical bike [00:16:00] lanes, other service improvements, things of that nature. So then over the progression of this program and kind of designing it and rolling it out, L-A-D-O-T ended up partnering with LA Metro to actually figure out kind of the, the wallet side of things.

Originally there were thoughts about, well, maybe like kind of the tap card, which is like our transit pass. Maybe that could be the medium for that. And I’m really glad that like a lot of the technical learnings, which also kind of rely on partners at the state level thought about, let’s just, let’s go back to this kind of.

Universal payment, let’s just try this with a de, a prepaid debit card. So in 2023 is when we had the first rollout of the mobility wallet and about a thousand people in South Los Angeles got $1,800. Across one year, um, on this prepaid debit card they had to be low income. It was aligned as the same thresholds as the transit [00:17:00] discount program life.

So it’s like roughly $50,000 for a household of one for the annual income. And it goes up in size a little bit more. It goes, the income thresholds go up as the household gets larger. So you had to live in the, in the study area and kind of have these income meet the income qualifications. Uh, most people applied online.

They also did a distribution through community workshops, and then you got this debit card. And on the backend, that debit card is programmed to only be accepted at particular transportation providers, essentially. The real technical part is called merchant category codes. Every business place that you buy something from is assigned one of these, and so it just goes through and it’s like, okay, these are the merchant category codes that cover public transit ride hailing.

Scooters, car sharing and bike shops. So they could pretty much spend it on anything besides [00:18:00] cost related to a private automobile. So no gas, no parking, car repairs, things of that nature. A bunch of different modal options. And they could actually spend it like at a local bike shop.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, that’s really cool.

’cause uh, there’s a lot of folks that would use it. And I actually read an article yesterday where they were trying to get the second phase going and somebody was waiting to get their bike fixed because, uh, the money hadn’t come through or something was going wrong with the payment systems. And they were like, well, I don’t wanna go to the bike shop yet because I need to use my card to do that, so if it comes in the next week, I’ll be out of that money for fixing my bike.

And so it was frustrating, but I think that the whole, you know, not being able to use it for gasoline is interesting too. And I’ll, I’ll. Talk about that in a little bit as well, but I, I am interested in this point that it, and we talked about this before a little bit, but I wanna hammer on it, is that like, it wasn’t just a transit only program.

It wasn’t only for the transit agency, which I think is something that kind of sets this apart from a lot of other discussions about low-income fairs, about the, you know, free transit and the other policies that are happening right now. But it was actually [00:19:00] like kind of a, a more robust discussion about mobility or a more robust program that encompassed a lot more mobility.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, I mean, part of what I think this program is trying to demonstrate and you know, we’re digging into a lot of data that looks at this, but like. How do modes beyond just transit alone make it so that transit works better? Like if you have occasional car access, whether that’s calling a Lyft or Uber or like we had unfortunately no longer exists, hopefully it’ll come back.

Um, like a car sharing program that was run by the city. Like I’ve done some work on that program. Blue LA and like. People could use a car for just very particular points when they needed it. It actually made it so that like your backbone was still transit. But this isn’t really something I think that we’re embracing as much.

I hope that through these demonstrations, there’s a, a increased awareness that other modes of transportation are kind of [00:20:00] complimentary. To public transit, like transit is the backbone. It has to work well. Um, it has to go places where people need to. It has to feel safe and reliable, but like, you shouldn’t be punished on a day where you wake up late or your bus doesn’t show up and then you can’t afford.

Just to call an Uber or Lyft like that shouldn’t have serious life consequences for you. And right now, like sometimes it does, right? Like you have to make, or you have to make really bad decisions of like, oh, okay, I woke up late, my bus didn’t come. I have to call an Uber. So like that’s gonna be my grocery money later, right?

Like these are real financial choices that people are making. And so it kind of is trying to acknowledge that like. You have to have a multimodal system that has options, but people need to be able to pay for those options. Like, we have talked more generally as a transportation agency, transportation community, about like multimodal, but like.

We also need to kind of have a [00:21:00] bit of a conversation about affordability. Like, a lot of these things beyond transit are not cheap, but they’re very valuable to people. Right? It’s a very valuable tool that, you know, if you don’t have a mobility wallet, like you probably will just pay for, because getting to wherever you need to go.

You put a really high value in that in your life, whether that’s your job or you know, your mom’s birthday or like whatever it is, you’re like, this is actually worth the financial trade off I’m making. And so yeah, having good options more than transit and ability to pay is good. I mean, LA Metro is kind of in a somewhat minority, we have a good amount of low income discounts in California.

But I think it might actually be surprising to a lot of people, income-based discounts are not mandated by the federal government. You know, we have senior discounts, we have discount transit discounts for people with disabilities, but like, that’s kind of, those are the [00:22:00] only things that are required.

And so, having low income, fair discounts is important. Like people are making real decisions about whether it’s a. Pay or take the bus and like buy some groceries, but also they just need other tools, I think, to make everything work well.

Jeff Wood: I was also interested in some of the trade-offs that people were making in the interviews that you all did about what this money would be useful for.

So somebody said, that Uber Lyft trip was nice, but that 50 bucks to get wherever, $80 to get downtown, would’ve been nice if I could have just filled up my gas tank, because I already have this sunk cost of an automobile, right? And so that may have given me, you know, 10 trips or something like that versus one trip.

And so I find that interesting too, is the discussion about how much transportation costs from that perspective.

Madeline Brozen: I mean, this is the one limitation I think in terms of the Los Angeles pilot is like, you can get into a kind of esoteric but also practical debate of like how universal is universal basic mobility.

When [00:23:00] you say this one mode. Isn’t gonna count, right? And you know, we interviewed about 31 people throughout this whole year that they were getting the wallet. A number of those people didn’t have cars, but some people did, where they were sharing one car with like a lot of people in their household.

I do think it’s like also always important to recognize that like poor people have cars, like more poor people don’t have cars than everyone else, but like they also do, and that is expensive. Like they’ve probably made some trade-offs in their life. To actually just afford that and because it’s valuable, right?

They’re like, listen, if I can get to where I need to go faster, like I only have so many hours in the day to work, to pick up my kids from school, to be with family, it is worth it to like have the sun cost in an automobile. I think the difficulty is less technical or theoretical and it’s kind of, it’s a political choice.

It would not make a lot of sense. I think to say as a state, we are allowing money that’s from a cap and trade kind of greenhouse [00:24:00] gas reduction approach program to allow people to drive their cars more. It’s a challenge and I can totally understand that. The nice thing is that, like you said.

Having just more money means it can free stuff up for people. So yes, one ride hail trip is. Pretty expensive. And that money and gas money gets you to go more miles, right? But you know, maybe the $50 a month you’re spending on your transit card for some of those trips now that’s your gas money. So until like hopefully there’s a future where there’s non-grant sources of money to actually pay for these types of things, like maybe they’ll be kind of constructed differently.

I do think it’s going to be. A challenge no matter what, to kind of sell these programs politically if they’re helping people with gas. Given that we do need the majority of people to drive less. Now, there’s a whole caveat that like actually [00:25:00] low income people just don’t drive as much, and because they don’t drive as much, they actually need more access.

But we’re really starting to be like, well, how far can you get? In the disparity of not having a car or not being able to use your car all the time just by accessing it sometimes. So like trying to do these experiments and be like, we know that cars are really important and car ownership is indicative of people having more opportunities, but can you close that gap?

By just like car sharing or Lyft, Uber, occasionally. Right? And we’re having some positive evidence of that, but that is in a really dense place like Los Angeles that just has more transit service than a lot of other places right now.

Jeff Wood: Well, the findings from the reports that you put out are super interesting, and I wanted to go through them one by one.

’cause I think they really do tell this larger story. And the first one was, the quality of life improved because people were using their money that they would’ve used for transportation for other things. But also it’s just like the quality of life. People [00:26:00] feel better. That’s just from a public health perspective, that’s really good too.

Right?

Madeline Brozen: Yeah. We asked people, we talked to them before they got their money during, and then about three months, three to four months after. And one of the big things that we just tried to document in this approach was like, how hard is it to kind of make ends meet in your household? Right? And being poor is very difficult.

In the United States, being poor in Los Angeles is especially difficult with our kind of high cost of living as one indicator. One of the zip codes that this program people were eligible to participate has the most overcrowding of any zip code in the United States. Right. So like just the housing side of things crunches, people’s budgets really hard and so yeah, they were really kind of struggling to make ends meet.

And $1,800 over a year is like a really. Good infusion. And so that was kind of the biggest thing is you know, we’d ask people at the end like, what’d you miss most? And they’re like, I just had extra money. It [00:27:00] was just really helpful. I just. Have one less thing to worry about because like someone’s like, transportation’s covered this thing that I, think about on a pretty, either trip by trip, day by day, week by week, whatever.

I just didn’t have to worry about it. And so, yeah, that’s why we’re really working on some more specific findings around like the stress outcomes. There’s a good body of work that just talks about how stressful it is to be a low income person, but also just how bad stress is for your health. It can cause ulcers, it’s gonna negatively affect your relationships.

It’s gonna have really bad physical and mental health effects on your life. And so for a relatively small amount of money, on the aggregate, people were able to actually say like, yeah, I. It was easier for me to get through things and it would show up in a lot of ways. Like one of our interviewees works with kids and he would just say that like, because he just didn’t have [00:28:00] as much stress and like knowing how he’d get to work, he would just show up at his job feeling more ready to like interact with his kids and he felt like they could see it, you know?

And like that was just something that was really heartwarming, um, to be like, oh, okay, if we can make transportation easier for you, you’re just better. At your job, then you feel better about being better for your job. And so it just kind of, you know, is a real positive cycle that these people were able to experience during the program.

Jeff Wood: What else did you learn about stress reduction?

Madeline Brozen: I mean, I think we just discount that transportation is kind of an inherently stressful thing. I mean, maybe if you’re like a cyclist in a city, like you know this on a very personal basis, like there is some hairy part of your commute. Like I’ve been a pretty regular bike commuter to UCLA for a while and there’s this one part.

Of the commute in West Hollywood that just like, it has a bike lane, but there’s on street parking and sometimes you look at another person biking next to you and you get to the light and you’re just like, oh, okay. Like that was a bit of a [00:29:00] gauntlet, right? Yeah. Driving is really stressful.

People like that, like they, sometimes they would just take an Uber or Lyft and they weren’t worried about sitting in traffic, especially in Los Angeles. Sucks. And it’s just like it makes your heart rate go up. They like being on the train or on the bus ’cause they could just use their time differently.

They just didn’t have to think about it. And then the other part was being worried about whether you’re gonna make it to somewhere on time. That was just like a really stressful situation. So, you know, one person, she was a barista, she worked super early in the morning. At like four or five o’clock in the morning, like transit’s not running very frequently.

And so that would be the way she would get to work. But if again, like she woke up late, or if that one bus every 20 minutes just didn’t come, it wasn’t like, oh my God, what am I gonna do? It’s like, okay, I actually, I just have an option. I can just, you know, take a ride, hail to my job. I know I will get there on time.

Right. And that’s just like a real relief for people because. I think [00:30:00] we kind of discount, you know, if you’re a person who. Doesn’t have to worry about paying for transportation. Like you’re just like, oh, my bus didn’t show up either. Like, oh, okay. I can just like tell my boss I’m working remotely today.

Which is like a privilege that a lot of people, but not all people have. Or you can just call a ride because the option for most of these people, if they couldn’t afford ride hailing was like relying on other people. And no one wants to do that. No one actually wants to be a burden to people in this work and other work I’ve done for people that don’t drive, it’d be like, oh, does anyone in your household have a car?

Could they get you? And they’re like, yeah, they do, but I don’t wanna ask. Like I just don’t want to be that additional worry for someone else. So that’s kind of the other part, is that they didn’t feel like they have to burden other people and they just kind of can know that they could do things on their own.

There was another one of our interviewees who has a disability that like she has good days and bad days, but by and large, like [00:31:00] she would really rely on her family to take her to where she needed to go. She’s a substitute teacher and this like blew my mind. Substitute teachers learn where they’re going to be teaching at sometimes the night.

Before they need to go there, which is just a transportation nightmare for me if you don’t have a car, right? It’s like, okay, cool. So I have to decide tonight how I’m getting to this other place. And she kind of, you know, never really knew how she would feel when she’d wake up. And the family she lived with, they’d also have to get people to school.

We don’t really have a lot of school busing in Los Angeles, so like she just didn’t wanna be this other trip that someone in our house had to make. And it was just so. Freeing for her to like just get places on her own. That autonomy also just really gives people a lot of positive mental health benefits.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. People really do wanna feel like they’re independent, right? That they have their own. You know, life in order and, and can do things themselves. We also, we talked to Alex Murphy and Alex Gold Worth about their [00:32:00] transportation insecurity index a number of years ago. And, and the one thing that stuck out to me when I was talking with them, it was like that whole asking people for help thing is really hard.

It’s really hard to have to like almost get your courage up to ask somebody like, can you take me to here when you can’t do it yourself? And so that just really hits, I think for a lot of folks.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, I am a huge. Alex and Alex, uh, fan, I think this idea that they have proposed and is really getting, you know, increasingly used, the transportation security index is just a real bonus to the transportation field.

Like we’ve been doing this work at UCLA in collaboration with colleagues at uc, Davis. Who have kind of the similar cadence. They did surveys in this phase that work I think will come out later this summer. But like they were able to demonstrate how the mobility wallet improved people’s transportation security, which is like the symptom of not having this.

Right. And so not only do I think we have a language now about so what does not [00:33:00] having transportation do in your life and how can we measure that? But as more people are actually using that in evaluations and research, we’re starting to see what interventions might actually kind of move the needle on the transportation security for people.

I.

Jeff Wood: The one bummer about the work that you all did was that the pilot ended right, and that people kind of told you that they went back to feeling stressed or feeling insecure or feeling the feelings that they were before, and that’s obviously frustrating. It’s good that they got that opportunity to feel differently, but then it went back to the way it was before.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah. We have a lot of thoughts on our research team around. What we describe as the ethics of pilots, right? Like how. How fair is it that we give people a chance to have something better for a short period of time? That year in the program was really helpful for people at the bottom line.

Even people that [00:34:00] said like, ’cause there’s some people that like their transportation might not have changed whatsoever. But they just had more money. And that was good. You know, like they, they were kind of, you know, like, ah, nothing really changed. I just kinda went about my life. But yeah, no, it was nice.

So we just have a lot of thoughts and feelings kind of as people that watched this, as people that had these conversations with this group of people for a year. It was emotional for us as researchers to like have these end of program interviews because you could just tell that. People had this thing, it did good in their life and now it was gone.

That was hard to hear, much less like experience for them. There was so much empathy and appreciation, though I think from these people, people are saying like, well, this was my turn. You know, I know there’s another phase. Someone else can get it. Right. There was so much altruism about like understanding the struggle of other people in Los Angeles and like wanting other people to benefit, [00:35:00] but like these people shouldn’t be forced with that kind of burden to carry.

There were some things that, you know, they. Were able to actually maintain, so like the number one thing was that financial part of it. So there were people that caught up on bills, there were people that actually had savings and they were so proud they actually had savings because it was maybe, you know, the first time in a while that they felt like they actually had a little bit of financial cushion in their life.

Going back to the bike shop thing, like. I think we only had one person that was really a big bike user in the interview pool. But yeah, he fixed up his bike and now he has like a better bike, more reliable bike than when he started. And the other thing is like people were also helping other people in their household.

They were. Sharing their money, which they were totally allowed to do by like putting that on their, siblings tap cards. They were ordering cards for their parents and so they felt really good about like the ability to help [00:36:00] other people in their lives. But yeah, they just kind of went back to like, oh, okay, before, our interview with disabilities, now she has to just go back and, kind of rely on her family again.

And so. It’s really important to start to think about like for cities that are doing pilots, like what is the future if this works. How are you gonna actually make sure that you can find a pathway to pay for this? I think we’ve probably had a number of different pilots that happened, like during the pandemic or just like it is a way to demonstrate a new approach to something, but sometimes I’m just not sure that it’s really thought out all the way of like, so if it works, whatcha gonna do?

Like, how do you actually make this a permanent thing? And so yeah, there, there were some really sad moments after those conversations. It’s

Jeff Wood: really big social experiments. I feel like I’ve heard a lot from folks who got CARES Act money or you know, cities that were able to do things that maybe they wouldn’t have done otherwise because they had some extra money that they had access to.

And [00:37:00] so whether it be a TOD program in the Twin Cities or something along those lines, and it shows that having extra money to do these things is beneficial. But then we get into this larger discussion about, we should not be spending so much money, you know, social benefits, discussions that are spilling out into the world at this very moment.

And I think it’s frustrating ’cause you, I mean from you all’s perspective, when you’re talking to these interviewees and they’re being so altruistic and they’re being so connected to, the system as it is, as a whole, it feels like we’re having this larger discussion about the haves and have-nots or, or you should get it or you don’t deserve it, or those types of things.

And it’s like, why, why are we having that larger discussion if all these people are benefiting, they’re thriving there, there’s value to it. I just, it just makes me sad ultimately.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, you mentioned that there’s a second phase. You know, LA Metro does have money for phases, so this was phase one that we evaluated.

We’re involved in the next ones. Phase two is rolling out very shortly. There’s a phase three behind it, [00:38:00] so that’s good. I like really appreciate that this is not a one time thing, and then kind of wait and figure it out that they’re really stacking as much grant money as they can. In phase two.

36,000 people applied for 2000 slots. There is a real demand for having support for transportation. And a lot of our other programs, you know, you see on the e-bike subsidy programs, you see these just crashing websites left and right when places roll them out, you know? And it definitely is connected to like a larger, like how are we thinking about giving?

People transportation support, that really kind of goes to people, right? I think that the way that we do kind of federal transportation budgeting of the standard, like 80% to highways, 20% to everything else, has really hamstrung what cities and agencies and regions and states can do for a long time because they just don’t have enough flexibility.[00:39:00]

But we know the need is there. Kind of going back to the, you know, insurance or Medi-Cal, like other sectors. You look so many places and you’re like, oh wow. People without transportation aren’t showing up to court. They’re, not showing up to their jobs, to medical appointments. I mean, so there’s something to say like, oh, okay, could these other sectors like step up to actually do that?

But it’s like, well, how about the transportation sector? Just kind of. Tries to figure out a little bit new roadmap so that we’re not having to say, great, thank you for your participation in this program. Hopefully there’ll be a future where you get it again.

Jeff Wood: There’s two things that are so tied to everything else, and you know, people talk about the housing theory of everything, but maybe there’s also a transportation theory of everything, right?

There’s probably some way to juice those two sectors that we can help more people, and it’s connected to all the other sectors. You, um, wrote on Blue Sky above our previous podcast with Ross Peterson about non-emergency medical transportation and the amount of money that Medicare spends on [00:40:00] transportation or housing now that they’re trying to do in California.

Like, why don’t we try to. Figure out how to get housing right or how to get transportation right so that we can spend medical money on medical stuff. And I understand all the interconnectedness, but you know, there’s these two sectors that seem like we can, we can work with those and make improvements and they will bleed over into other sectors as well.

Madeline Brozen: It’s not just true in the healthcare side. It’s also true in like education. Most school districts or states don’t really have a dedicated line of money to pay for school busing. That’s why in California we just don’t really have school busing because local school districts have to decide with a. Fixed amount of money.

Do you wanna pay for busing? Do you wanna pay for education? But yet we see that when people have transportation, whether it’s busing or like as they’re older options for transit, it allows you to go to maybe schools that match better. It allows you to show up on [00:41:00] time just to get to places. I mean, yeah, I like those transportation theory of everything.

I feel like I have. It’s like planner brain. We’re like, everything is connected.

Jeff Wood: Same.

Madeline Brozen: But definitely on the transportation side. Like so in New York City, if there’s one kind of thing in transportation that really has kind of done it all, it’s congestion pricing, right? Like, oh my gosh, it’s making it so like kids are showing up to school.

Earlier, which means they’re getting their free breakfast, which means they are more prepared to learn, right? Like, you know, if you, I think, would’ve tried to sell congestion pricing on like, oh, it actually means that like kids are gonna be smarter. You’d be like, what are you talking about? You’re like, no, no, no, like gimme three kind of points of evidence and I will show you, like this will actually work.

So we just see that like investing in transportation works, we just gotta get more money to do it.

Jeff Wood: You all had another research paper last fall that got brought up into the news a couple of days ago, or maybe last week, about gentrification and housing costs. Uh, I think it was Ben [00:42:00] Christopher at, uh, Cal Matters wrote something about this and, you know, I was talking, uh, with Leisha Schweitzer a number of years ago.

We had this discussion too, about like, what does it mean when people are pushed outta their neighborhoods and what does that mean for the transportation from the regional standpoint too, that kind of is coming to be understood as a negative for the transit ridership. Housing prices causing gentrification.

Gentrification push people out. People have need to have access to things and so they end up buying cars because they’re outside of the area where good transit might have worked for them. I’m curious about that connection too. You all have had stuff on this, you know, research about this specific topic.

I.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah. So yeah, my colleague who works at the Lewis Center on our housing side of things and at our sister center institute, transportation studies on the transportation side of things. So he was kind of the perfect person to think right and research on this, but he had a paper that we talked about on our typically housing podcast, housing voice that is doing a short stint on the transportation side.

They found [00:43:00] that in places that had increased housing cost burden, where essentially like the housing costs for people had gone up, those are the places where the majority of transit ridership decline was happening. In that study, they didn’t get to like, really, okay, where these people go, are they buying more cars?

Like he has other work he’s participated in with colleagues at UCLA. They did find that, like previously, a lot of the determinants of our declines in transit ridership was because people were buying cars, right? Like we had this huge kind of boom in car ownership. Especially pre pandemic when, interest rates are really low, people could get cars pretty cheap.

I think that era has kind of left us a little bit, but you know, what we’re seeing in this new work is that yeah, if we don’t, if, if you’re a city that’s kind of in the situation that Los Angeles is, which is. A longer and longer kind of growing list of people that don’t wanna be in this club, right?

You do not wanna be in the club of having [00:44:00] housing cost burden, not having enough housing for people. But if you’re there, like it is going to really negatively affect the transportation side of things, right? Because yes, people are gonna. Get pushed out, and you’re gonna see this probably in a bunch of different places.

You know, you might see that as now like, emissions that weren’t being made at the city of Los Angeles. So people are moving out into like the Inland Empire, Riverside Places where they just have to drive everywhere. They had an option where they could get around without a car in Los Angeles, but they couldn’t also afford it.

So, yeah, it’s tricky on that one because I. By and large, do think that transit agencies and transportation folks should just figure out how to do the transportation? Well, like LA Metro does have a joint development program as part of this capital build out. Like they have land, hopefully more of which will be developed for multi-family housing, but it’s still a minority of land in a city as large as Los Angeles, we have to just unlock housing.[00:45:00]

On the city planning side and on our zoning rules. And you know, I think maybe somewhere that transit agencies can kind of step up is just like kind of on the housing advocacy. It’s just like telling, you know, their partners in cities like help us out. You know, like figure out how to unlock more housing production because like we’re getting hammered over here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Was there anything that surprised you about your findings?

Madeline Brozen: I think one thing that was really surprising was how only a small number of people that were getting a mobility wallet were actually enrolled in the transit discount program. Everyone was eligible, and not just in our interviews, but also in the survey respondents.

I mean in our interviewees was about half the people that. Had both Mobility Wallet, they were enrolled in the transit discount program in the surveys. And I think also what we’re seeing in people that have applied for this next phase, it’s maybe a quarter of people. And so it was just really surprising and shocking.

And I think kind [00:46:00] of something that just needs more attention is like, so how are people finding out about this mobility wallet about something that helps you with transportation? They’re people that ride transit a lot. How do they not know about this discount program? We kinda ask you about it in the interviews, like some people had kinda a misunderstanding.

They were like, oh, I didn’t, I thought I was eligible, but now I’m not. We would always, after the interviews, we had this conversation, we just like made sure that everyone got information where we would tell them they’s exact same eligibility. You know? Especially now, your mobility wallet has. Gone away.

This is something that can help you. You should just sign up for this program. We did also make sure that if they had public insurance, they also knew about the medical transportation side of things. ’cause like that was even worse. But that one I kind of knew already that like. People are not really offered transportation support for the medical appointments, even if they do qualify for it.

But on both of those things, there are other things that extensively are on paper are benefits these people should [00:47:00] receive, right? They are eligible for them and neither they didn’t know about them or they did and they weren’t. Signed up. The mobility wallet was really fantastic, but you know, it’s not something that’s permanent.

There are these programs that like exist that people just like weren’t really signed up for. And so that was the thing that was really surprising and I was just having a conversation yesterday. ’cause I hang out with too many other nerdy people. Um, that’s a good thing. Felt like, um. Whether it’s honestly at like the DMV or if you go to, you know, department of Social Services, like when you’re going through the huge hoops that you jump through to sign up for like food benefits, someone should just be like, Hey, you could also get X, Y, and Z, and you just, we need to help people get signed up for as many things that they can benefit from as they can.

So it’s gonna make a difference. To that point about like if you’re getting a benefit, now you have money for other things, you can use that and it really helps. So that was the thing that was most surprising was there are just a lot of people that are riding transit that are very low income that would really benefit from any [00:48:00] discount they can get and they’re just.

It’s just kind of sitting out there not being taken advantage of for a variety of different reasons. But yeah, trying to figure out how to just auto-enroll or kind of figure out ways to make it easier so that people know and are aware of discounts that would help ’em in their lives. I

Jeff Wood: feel like we’d need like a knowledge crew or something like that goes out.

One of the things that I’ve been kind of hitting on over the last decade or so is that we know that when people move into a new house, it’s the opportunity to change their behaviors, right? And so what if you had somebody that went to somebody’s house and gave them a pamphlet of, of things that they can access or the way to get to work on the bus, or you know, here’s your bike route that works for you to get to where you need to go.

Maybe we just need like an educational like system for each county or something like that where there’s like people that go to your house where they can. Send you pamphlets or whatever it may be. I don’t know. And maybe that doesn’t get to those folks the way that the census doesn’t get to some of those folks as well.

You gotta try, right?

Madeline Brozen: Yeah. And I think [00:49:00] it’s difficult because, I mean, yes, like a transit discount is something that like, oh, a transit agency could figure out, and they have to elementary’s credit, they have increased enrollment. But like what we saw in this program is like there’s a lot of people that just aren’t benefiting from this.

But it’s really, this is some of the work I was doing with a healthcare clinic. It’s like it’s no one entity’s job to make sure that you have information on discounts for a bunch of different things. Whether it’s even just on transportation oh, okay. The scooter program has a discount, the car share program has a discount.

You probably have this healthcare benefit, right? Like it’s no one entity’s job, so then it makes it no one’s job, right? And so that’s why like, you know, maybe if you, if you are connected to a caseworker and that person’s really savvy, like they’re helpful to you, but you know, we are thinking about just for.

Like healthcare clinics, like could it make like a transportation guide? So it’s [00:50:00] like, okay, you are a trusted source and you are better educated. And then there’s like kind of a pocket guide for like what you can just give to people. But yeah, it’s, it, it, it feels like something that would just really help people that is no one’s responsibility at this moment.

Jeff Wood: My last question for you, is there anything you would do differently in designing the program?

Madeline Brozen: So there were a couple of things and I think that Metro, since they do have this phased approach now, they are learning and doing more and they’re such a great partner. We’re embedded with them. So like the things that we learned in phase one, they are implementing.

So I’m probably just gonna say things that are already changing that are not like things that I may maybe were my ideas, but like honestly they’ve been a great partner. So one thing was just making sure that there’s a clear awareness. Of all the modes that people can actually, all the uses of the card, right?

Like they made this little in phase two is called a how to Hack guide. And it just like went through everything because we asked people both [00:51:00] in interviews and the surveys, what can you spend it on? And there wasn’t really a widespread awareness, like most people didn’t know about that bike shop thing, that they could do it on that.

And so that’s kind of one thing. The other thing was like, and I kind of go back and forth on this one, in phase one, people got the $150 once a month for 12 months. That was kind of nice because people would say that like, it helped me understand how much I spend on transportation. So I would just kind of think about, so now afterwards, I’m just putting $150 aside and like that’s my monthly budget.

But if you want to do a big purchase like a bike or like an electric scooter of your own, you’d have to save up for a long time. So in the next phase, the plan is to do two installments of $900 at a time. And so, I don’t know, it will be helpful in some ways. We’re gonna see if, if people like think about their spending in the same way.

The other thing is just to make it clear like this is your money. Like you can. Help your [00:52:00] cousin. You can buy a car ride for your friend when you’re out. Like, people were doing this. But we were always like, when we asked them about it, we were very clear like, this is for you. But there wasn’t a lot of clarity on that.

So I think those are kind of the main things that we saw that are largely being addressed. But yeah, I think for other cities, going back to a question you asked earlier is just really understanding that if you want to provide universal basic mobility and improve that for people, you have to be as universal as possible on what people can spend their money on.

Right? And just be okay with that. Like if the idea is to give people autonomy, give them as much as they can. You know, we’ve seen other programs that are more restrictive or people that are planning, they’re like, oh, we, we just only think we can do it on this. And so it’s kind of like a call to places that are thinking about this is try to push the envelope as much as possible about what people can spend [00:53:00] this money on, because it’s more likely that they’re gonna get more out of it if it’s less restrictive.

In general, I.

Jeff Wood: Well, where can folks find out more about the research you all have done and maybe download the paper?

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, so we have two briefs. One we talked about is like, you know, how to help people’s lives and we have other that’s like very specific to how this compares to transit discount programs.

And those are on our Lewis Center website, www dot. lewis.ucla.edu. You can find me on Blue Sky at m bron at Blue Sky or whatever comes after it. Um, and feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, you know, with kind of the death of Twitter, you know, finding places where there is a professional community of people that are interested.

LinkedIn has kind of been one of those places, so yeah. Um, I’m also just very easily googleable, so Yeah. Really, uh, if people like this work, if you have questions happy to talk, so just feel free to reach out via email.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, [00:54:00] Madeline, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Madeline Brozen: Yeah, thank you so much.