We examine the effect on the incidence of casualties and crashes of a city-wide vehicle speed limit reduction in New York City (NYC) streets. The law change, part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Vision Zero Action Plan to improve traffic safety, cuts the default speed limit for streets with no speed limit signs from 30 to 25 mph beginning November 7, 2014. We use a monthly panel dataset with crash statistics for the entire population of NYC streets, from July 2012 through March 2019. Several difference-indifferences regressions show a statistically significant and meaningful decline in injuries and crashes.

In this paper, the conventional disaggregate travel demand model, a probability model for the modeling of multiple modes, generally called random utility maximization (RUM), is expanded to a model of count of mode choice. The extended travel demand model is derived from general economic theory—maximizing instantaneous utility on the time horizon, subject to a budget constraint—and can capture the dynamic behavior of countable travel demand. Because the model is for countable dependent variables, it has a more realistic set of assumptions to explain travel demand than the RUM model. An empirical test of the theoretical model using a toll facility user survey in the New York City area was performed. The results showed that the theoretical model explained more than 50% of the trip frequency behavior observed in New York City toll facility users. Travel demand for toll facility users increased with respect to household employment, household vehicle count, and employer payment of tolls and decreased in terms of travel time, road pricing, travel distance, and mass transit access.

Our study proposes a housing location choice model where a household faces a trade‐off between proximity to place of employment and proximity to amenities. We consider subsamples of high amenity cities and low amenity cities and households with and without children. We show that the roles of gender, education, homeownership, household composition, and public transportation vary significantly depending on level of amenities. Households with a female head of household, those with a working spouse and with older children prefer locating closer to downtown amenities. Female workers with and without children locate closer to work, in high and low amenity cities.