Research shows that neighborhood social connectedness is important for wellbeing. However, these findings are mostly drawn from the Global North. We use the World Values Survey to examine the drivers of neighborhood social connectedness, and how connectedness shapes wellbeing, in a broader global context. Using multilevel modeling, we find that the drivers of trust in neighbors are consistent globally and that the links between trust in neighbors and wellbeing also hold across a variety of settings. This supports the generalizability of the socio-ecological model of wellbeing and suggests that interventions designed to foster neighborhood trust are broadly desirable.

The percentage of people who work from home (WFH) skyrocketed with the onset of Covid-19. Today, many workers continue to WFH, either completely or a few days a week. One reason for the popularity of WFH is a desire to minimize the commute and its associated costs in time, money, discomfort, and danger. In fact, workers with longer commutes should theoretically receive “compensating differentials” of benefits from their employers that offset their high commute costs. That said, working at a workplace may have advantages, such as stronger connections to coworkers and supervisors, better chances to learn on the job, and improved opportunities for career advancement. Using European Social Survey data, we examine whether commute durations are associated with workers’ perceptions of their job characteristics and desirability, as well as their happiness, or “subjective well-being.” We find that, among those who commute, commute duration is unrelated to wages, job satisfaction, and overall subjective well-being. Workers who WFH report more freedom in setting hours, but face greater stress at work, more work at night, and longer hours, the latter of which may exceed the time they save by not having to commute. Importantly, people who WFH tend to report being more satisfied with their jobs, as well as being well-connected to coworkers and supervisors and having a good chance for professional advancement. Employers and society should work to accommodate WFH with such steps as developing team-building strategies for WFH workers, addressing the “digital divide” where some workers may lack at-home information and communications technology, and adapting cities to WFH, for example by facilitating the conversion of office space to other uses and accommodating the need for more spacious homes.

"The Drive for Dollars: How Fiscal Politics Shaped Urban Freeways and Transformed American Cities." Journal of the American Planning Association, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–4 Additional informationNotes on contributorsPhilip PlotchPHILIP PLOTCH is the principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation and a fellow at New York University. His research into the politics and planning behind large transportation projects has explored the obstacles that lead to lengthy delays and the steps that can be taken to overcome them.

Problem, research strategy, and findingsCovid-19 significantly altered work, out-of-home activity participation, and travel, with much activity time being moved into the home. If these patterns hold, they could imply significant long-term changes for homes, businesses, cities, and transportation. We examined data for 34,000 respondents to the American Time Use Survey from 2019 (the pre-pandemic period), 2021 (the pandemic period), and 2022 and 2023 (the post-pandemic period). We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions to study participation in 12 out-of-home activities, travel (by auto, transit, and walking), and 16 in-home activities. We observed sharp declines in overall out-of-home activity, travel by all modes, and 10 of the 12 specific out-of-home activities in 2021 compared with 2019, whereas time spent on 13 of the 16 in-home activities rose during that period. By 2023, most of these changes persisted: Time spent out-of-home, traveling by all modes, and on six out-of-home activities remained notably lower in 2023 than in 2019, whereas time spent on nine in-home activities remained higher. The trend away from out-of-home activities and travel appears to be persisting.Takeaways for practiceFirst, given elevated remote work and shopping, planners should consider repurposing some office and retail land uses. Second, with fewer office workers, center cities may have to capitalize on other strengths such as recreational and residential desirability for some market segments, such as young people or others who prefer urban living. Third, more time at home may increase demand for more spacious and affordable housing, perhaps in lower-cost outlying suburbs of large metros and in smaller metropolitan areas. Finally, an end to ever-rising personal travel may lessen the need for costly interventions to increase the capacity of highway and transportation systems.

In 1968, John Kain hypothesized that Black residential suburbanization had not accompanied suburbanizing jobs, leading to poor employment outcomes for young Black men. This paper reinvestigates spatial mismatch in the 2000s and 2010s, focusing on differences between urban and suburban White, Black, and Hispanic residents of the U.S. We find some evidence for spatial mismatch when pooling data across all years, and stronger evidence for mismatch among Black people than among Hispanic people. First, both urban Black and Hispanic people earn lower wages than equivalent suburbanites, all else equal. Second, urban Black people have a higher probability of un- and under-employment relative to their suburban counterparts. Third, Black and Hispanic people have longer commutes than equivalent Whites do, but suburban residence mitigates this effect. Yet we also find evidence that in recent years, spatial mismatch may not be as serious a problem as many people believe. For example, the wage premium for suburban people-White, Black, and Hispanic-has fallen. Further, urban Hispanic people are not more likely to be unemployed than equivalent suburbanites. Finally, urban and suburban Black and Hispanic people do not work in different types of occupations, so location is not associated with suburbanites of color holding more or less "desirable" jobs.

The inexorable rise in personal travel in the 20th century has given way to stagnation in the 21st, a phenomenon some call "peak travel." We use 2003–2019 data from the American Time Use Survey to explore whether and why personal travel per capita has stopped growing. We show that time spent on personal travel has been dropping consistently over these years, and suggest that one important cause is likely a dramatic and ongoing decline in the time Americans spend on out-of-home activities. We find significant changes in time spent on many of the 34 activities conducted inside and outside of the home that we examine. Many of these changes appear related to advances in information and communications technology (ICT), as this period saw the quality of in-home ICT continually rising and its real cost falling, resulting in ever-improving gaming, surfing, watching, and streaming options. For example, our data suggest that out-of-home work and shopping time fell significantly during our study period, while in-home time spent on work and education rose. Game playing (presumably mostly computer games) and TV watching in the home both increased dramatically, while attendance at live entertainment, arts, and sports activities fell. Reading and writing fell substantially both inside and outside the home, perhaps replaced by electronic communication. Our findings suggest that increased in-home ICT use may have been associated with 25–30% of the reduction of out-of-home time. We also find a significant increase in sleeping, and a decrease in time spent eating and drinking both inside and outside of the home. Although we deliberately chose to examine time use and travel prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we suspect that, even as the pandemic fades, the trend toward more time at home and less time spent traveling may well increase further.

Abstract In rural areas, state and federal highway engineers responded to pressure for better roads from bicyclists and later motorists. They began with piecemeal road improvements and then gradually turned to the development of interconnected rural and intercity highway systems. By the end of the 1920s a federally supported, but state administered, national system of rural and intercity highways emerged as the focus of rural highway builders. This system was built by ostensibly apolitical engineers to uniform standards and prioritized economical traffic service over the social objectives that had motivated some earlier rural highway advocates. Yet by the end of the 1920s, the finance system used to support these programs ran into difficulties due to the high costs involved. A solution was found with the move to user-based highway finance, centered on motor fuel taxes, which would become the focus of state and federal decision-makers in the years that followed.

"Age of Auto Electric: Environment, Energy, and the Quest for the Sustainable Car." Journal of the American Planning Association, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2 Additional informationNotes on contributorsEric MorrisERIC MORRIS is a professor of city and regional planning at Clemson University. He focuses on transportation’s and urbanization’s links with wellbeing, beliefs, and activity patterns, as well as on transportation history.

Abstract Vast networks of freeways began to transform cities as well as travel in them. As freeway construction and use began to negatively impact urban communities, freeways generated increasing controversy. As a result, the bipartisan political consensus that had originally emerged around freeway development proved both short-lived and an exception to the century-old rule of ad hoc transportation planning and finance. But even more importantly for the eventual demise of the freeway-building era, the smoothly running highway finance machine that was in high gear in the early 1960s began to sputter just a few years later. Conventional wisdom holds that rising political opposition to urban freeways cut their development short; that’s true, but only part of the story. Ultimately, more urban freeways were stopped by the fiscal well running dry than by public backlash against them.

Abstract American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways, and travel on them, dominate the urban landscape. While they have fallen out of favor among many transportation planners and policymakers, especially those who seek more sustainable, less car-dependent modes of travel, today the share of urban travel carried by (increasingly congested) freeways is greater than ever. This book tells the largely misunderstood story of how the United States came to make freeways the centerpiece of its urban transportation systems, and the crucial, and often overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing this about. We aim to help readers understand the still-relevant possibilities of roads not taken in U.S. urban transportation planning over the past century, as well as the central role that fiscal politics plays in transportation right up to the present day.

Abstract Between 1908 and 1929, the automobile became the primary means of transportation in the United States. But it also brought with it a set of new urban traffic-congestion problems. Concerned local officials engaged the services of planners and engineers who responded with increasingly sophisticated traffic regulations, as well as major street improvements. Their plans not only reflected a desire for civic grandeur, but also included practical solutions for congestion, though the two aspirations were sometimes at odds. As their interventions grew more elaborate, and costlier, elected officials had to devise new means of paying for urban roads.

Abstract With the advent of the post-Interstate era in the 1990s, the U.S. transportation-planning process came full circle—from local, to national, to local again; from multimodalism, to a myopic focus on the auto, and then back to multimodalism; and from relative penury, to wealth, and back to penury. This is nowhere more evident than in the federal surface-transportation program and its partnerships with state departments of transportation, which have eroded considerably amidst a return to a more decentralized transportation policy. The shift back to more local control has raised public transit investment in metropolitan areas, increased attention paid to the environmental costs of travel, and resulted in little consensus over whether to build new roads or rebuild the nation’s now-aging freeways systems. This lack of policy consensus helps to explain the persistent lack of fiscal consensus over how to pay for street, highway, and transit systems. Into this vacuum, states and metropolitan areas have experimented with many ways to increase revenues to pay for aging road infrastructure and invest in public transit. These range from increased general fund expenditures, to increased borrowing (and, at the federal level, deficits), to increased state fuel taxes, to earmarking sales tax increases for transportation, to new forms of electronic tolling. While this fiscal innovation has increased transportation spending substantially in some places, the results have varied across the U.S. and no obvious fiscal successor to fuel taxes has yet to emerge.

Abstract America’s response to the onset of the Great Depression dramatically reoriented politics and policy in many spheres: highway policy would prove no exception. Although plummeting property tax revenues hamstrung cities in their efforts to undertake dramatic new initiatives, particularly those involving urban freeways, New Deal policies extended federal financial support to some urban road building projects. In terms of roads between cities, the new spirit of government activism set off by the New Deal would, with the personal sanction of President Franklin Roosevelt, ultimately lead to dramatic advances in the quest to create a national highway system. Beginning with the report Toll Roads and Free Roads in 1939 and continuing through Interregional Highways proposal in 1944, the form of a future Interstate Highway System gradually emerged.

Abstract Urban planners have alternately viewed the automobile and suburbanization as the saviors of urban civilization and as its banes. Both remedied long-standing urban problems associated with crowded cities that depended on horse-drawn transportation. But autos and suburbs also led to new problems associated with pollution and auto-oriented sprawling development. The urban freeway has played a central role as a contributor to both the benefits and the costs of automobile-oriented cities. Particularly in the United States, urban freeways have exercised a significant influence on cities and the lives of the residents who live within them and near them. Yet, the freeways that exist in most cities today bear only scant resemblance to the facilities planned by early planners and engineers. The legacy of freeways has attracted enthusiastic support from some authors and condemnation by many others, but, in all, prior work has failed to take a holistic view of both freeways’ benign and malign impacts and has also failed to focus on the financial calculus that has made the freeway system what it is today.

Governments, civic society, businesses, and citizens all strive to make cities more livable. However, evidence about what aspects of cities actually contribute to the subjective well-being of their residents is incomplete. This paper examines the links between life satisfaction and indicators of the "quality" of U.S. metropolitan areas such as leisure/cultural opportunities, crime, climate, transportation, racial/ethnic diversity, incomes, cost of living, income inequality, the environment, healthcare, population growth, and political affiliation and polarization. Using mixed-effects regression and controlling for individual demographics, data on 9,498 respondents in 161 U. S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) suggest that MSA characteristics have little relationship with life satisfaction. The only consistently significant characteristics are the natural log of median MSA per capita income, which is negatively associated with life satisfaction, and climate quality, which is positively associated with it. The association between the percentage of the population voting Republican and life satisfaction is negative but only borderline significant. Further, principal components analysis shows that MSAs with characteristics similar to California's Central Valley or the Texas/Mexico border are actually associated with higher life satisfaction. The finding that subjective well-being tends to be higher in places with better climates is well-supported by prior literature; past research also helps explain why poorer places may be happier, since people tend to be happier when their income compares favorably to their peer group's.

The traditional build-and-expand approach is not a viable solution to keep roadway traffic rolling safely, so technological solutions, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), are favored. AVs have considerable potential to increase the carrying capacity of roads, ameliorate the chore of driving, improve safety, provide mobility for those who cannot drive, and help the environment. However, they also raise concerns over whether they are socially responsible, accounting for issues such as fairness, equity, and transparency. Regulatory bodies have focused on AV safety, cybersecurity, privacy, and legal liability issues, but have failed to adequately address social responsibility. Thus, existing AV developers do not have to embed social responsibility factors in their proprietary technology. Adverse bias may therefore occur in the development and deployment of AV technology. For instance, an artificial intelligence-based pedestrian detection application used in an AV may, in limited lighting conditions, be biased to detect pedestrians who belong to a particular racial demographic more efficiently compared to pedestrians from other racial demographics. Also, AV technologies tend to be costly, with a unique hardware and software setup which may be beyond the reach of lower-income people. In addition, data generated by AVs about their users may be misused by third parties such as corporations, criminals, or even foreign governments. AVs promise to dramatically impact labor markets, as many jobs that involve driving will be made redundant. We argue that the academic institutions, industry, and government agencies overseeing AV development and deployment must act proactively to ensure that AVs serve all and do not increase the digital divide in our society.

Abstract Immediately after World War II, political debates and bargaining over how to fund ambitions plans for freeways took place, first in Sacramento, California and later in Washington, DC. California took a series of steps that would presage later highway finance developments at the national level. While California’s iconic image as the global capital of automobile culture is in some ways misplaced, it was indeed a pioneer in building a statewide freeway system. The California fiscal-administrative model would become the prototype for the rest of the country—most importantly, for the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Many interests that would later comprise the “Highway Lobby” began as determined opponents of increasing taxes and fees to build freeways but were won over during the process. Urban interests were brought into the highway finance coalition with promises to build the new superhighways, not just between cities, but within them as well. This urbanization of state and federal highway finance, culminating at the federal level in 1956, would transform American cities and travel within them for generations to come.

Abstract With the passage of the landmark Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government had followed the lead of California in establishing a trust fund to serve as a repository for motor fuel tax and related highway-user revenues. Money was disbursed from both federal and state trust funds to state highway departments for road design, construction, operations, and maintenance. With this political decision, the conflicts between urban and rural highway planning principles, and between financial imperatives and planning ones, came to a head. Finance now trumped planning, as authority over highways within cities as well as between them was now jointly vested in Washington and the state capitals. With money in hand and the mandate to build, the mass production of freeways, including in cities, commenced in the late 1950s and proceeded at a furious pace into the early 1970s. City officials’ willingness to surrender control of planning decisions in exchange for the state and federal dollars needed to build the freeways resulted in a triumph of rural planning ideals and principles over urban ones, with a cascading set of consequences for cities.

Abstract Long before the advent of the freeway, local, state, and in a few instances the federal government were involved with building and paying for city streets and major roads between cities. For most of American history, though, relatively little planning for streets and highways took place. During the more than two centuries that preceded the automobile’s arrival, urban and rural road planning in colonial and then post-Revolutionary America was a haphazard affair, with roads built and maintained using an irregular and rudimentary finance system. But when planning for roads did occur, there were important differences between planning and paying for roads within cities and for roads between them.