By Meiduo Ji, MPL 2018

On Friday, October 21st, 2016 METRANS held its fifth transportation research seminar featuring the research of three Ph.D. students in urban planning from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Southern California Association of Governments was the joint sponsor of this seminar. Marlon Boarnet professor chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, critiqued each presentation. Attendees were students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, and alumni from the fields of transportation engineering and planning.

The first speaker was Quan Yuan, a fourth-year Ph.D. student. His research interests mainly lie in freight planning, parking, urban transportation, and land use. He gave a presentation on longitudinal analysis of environmental justice in a warehousing location. To begin with, he put forward two scientific questions: 1. Pre-siting warehousing location choice process and post-siting demographic changes process, which one came first? 2. What are the factors of these two processes? Then, he introduced his research approach and data. Through his research he concluded that environmental injustice in warehousing location solely results from the pre-siting location choices process, instead of post-siting demographic changes process, and warehouses follow minority population.

The second speaker, Eun Jin Shin, is a Ph.D. candidate focusing on urban spatial structure and transportation. Her research interests lie at the intersection of transportation planning, demographic analysis, and social inequality issues. She presented her research on polycentric urban structure and disparities in access to opportunities across neighborhoods. Her research contributes to understanding access to jobs and non-work opportunities comprehensively, ethnic neighborhoods, and the formation of polycentric urban structures. After introducing the measures and data, she shared her research conclusions: 1. Low-income ethnic neighborhoods, on average, have better access to both work- and non-work opportunities than other neighborhoods, regardless of travel modes. 2. Ethnic neighborhoods are heterogeneous. 3. Relative access to opportunities differs by opportunity type. 4. Modal mismatches are more severe than spatial mismatches. 5. Each accessibility measure has its own meanings and implications

The final speaker was Raul Santiago-Bartolomei, a third-year Ph.D. student. His research interests lie in international development, economic development, institutional analysis, and economic sociology. In his research, he assessed the spatial pattern of residential moves near rail transit. Before sharing his work, he introduced others’ previous research work and a brief background of the various aspects of policy issues. His research builds on the existing, using geo-coded California income tax information for LA County to track individual households by income, to analyze household mobility before and after rail investment occurs (station opening), to develop a like for like counterfactual from the same dataset, and to analyze displacement trends at frequencies as often as annual over several years. After presenting his research method and data, he concluded by stating that the presence and opening of rail transit stations can have a negative and significant effect over the rate of “staying” households in neighborhoods. To be concrete, TOD could increase displacement and baseline household movement is larger than expected.

At the close of the seminar, Professor Boarnet advised that, in addition to content, an academic presenter should also pay attention to visual design including map design choice of logos, and the format of the presentation. He emphasized that presenters should make their presentation brief and clear enough for attendees to understand and focus on the main points.

Meiduo Ji

Meiduo Ji is a first-year graduate student majoring Urban Planning at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. Her concentration is transportation planning and real estate. She also has a GIS and Map Design background. She can be reached at [email protected].