No abstract

More than half a million people in the U.S. experience homelessness every day. Lacking other options, many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also ride public transit to reach various destinations. With affordable housing scarce and the numbers of unhoused individuals often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets and support systems, transit operators face homelessness as a pressing issue on their systems and must implement policy measures from other realms beyond transportation to address it. Because of the health and safety implications for transit of the COVID-19 pandemic and the anticipated further rise in homelessness from the resulting economic downturn, studying and responding to the needs of these vulnerable travelers is critical.We conduct a comprehensive literature review to identify articles discussing homelessness in transit systems. While only a handful of articles exist from the 1990s, there is an emerging literature in the last 20 years that examines different aspects of homelessness in transit systems. We identify and review 63 articles on homelessness in transit systems and other public settings to better understand the extent of homelessness in the U.S., and how transit agencies perceive its impacts. We also summarise literature findings on the travel patterns of unsheltered individuals, which show that public transit represents an important and common mode of travel for them. Lastly, we focus on responses to homelessness from the part of transit operators. We find two types of responses: 1) punitive, in which criminalisation, policing and enforcement of laws and codes of conduct prevail, and 2) outreach-related, which aim towards providing help and support to unsheltered individuals. We conclude by summarising our findings as well as the existing gaps in the literature.

No abstract

Traffic impact analysis (TIA), which estimates the nearby traffic effects of proposed land development, tends to bias against higher density developments in urban areas where traffic is often heavy and travel alternatives plentiful. This has important implications for housing supply and affordability, suburban sprawl, and private vehicle dependence. We examine the understudied implications of TIA on housing by drawing on empirical evidence from distinct bodies of research in the transportation and land use planning literatures to describe the mechanisms through which TIA may affect housing markets. We conclude that TIAs likely have negative effects on both urban housing production and affordability.

This paper provides analyses of operating environment features of urban tunnels in building, traffic, hydrology, vertical alignment, social environment and examination of key issues in operation and maintenance risk evaluation for urban tunnels: diversity and complexity of evaluation factors; timeliness of evaluation result; uncertainty of rating, etc. Relevant countermeasures are proposed for the above-mentioned key issues, including information collection technology based on the Internet of big data technology and risk dynamic assessment and management platform, etc., to provide a solution path for the real-time, intelligent and informatization of urban tunnel risk management and control.