Madeline Brozen

Transportation disruptions can persist after a disaster, yet little is known about who experiences transport challenges during the immediate post-disaster period. Using survey data collected from transit riders one month after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, this paper measures these challenges by using the Transportation Security Index. Findings indicate that 41% of respondents were transport insecure post-wildfire, and the odds of being transport insecure were four times higher for evacuees than for people who did not evacuate. Evacuation status was more strongly associated with insecurity than car ownership, a typical proxy for identifying people with additional transportation needs.

Temporary fare suspension may help maintain mobility during disasters, but little is known about how riders respond to such policies. This study examines who increased transit use during the fare-free period following the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, whether riders made trips only because fares were suspended, and which travel modes they replaced with transit. Using an online survey distributed to Los Angeles County Transit app users from February 3 to February 12, 2025, we apply a binary logistic regression and a Firth penalized logistic regression to identify who increased transit use post-fire and who specifically did so due to the fare free policy. We found that among respondents who answered the fare-free ridership question, 39.7% reported riding transit more than usual. Among those who completed the follow-up questions, 18.5% reported making a trip only because transit was fare-free. Walking was the most commonly replaced mode, followed by rides from others, ride-hail, personal vehicles, and carshare. We also identified demographic characteristics associated with an increase in transit use; Hispanic or Latino respondents, those reporting better health, and those living in areas with greater transit accessibility had higher odds of increasing transit use. Middle and high income respondents had lower odds of making a trip only because transit was fare-free, while respondents aged 65 or older had higher odds. The findings can help transit agencies design and implement emergency fare policies that reduce mobility barriers and support access during disasters.

Objectives: Fast-moving wildfire evacuations increasingly force evacuees to abandon their vehicles and flee on foot, yet existing post-event analyses only capture vehicles abandoned on roadways, leaving emergency planners and hazard researchers without an empirical understanding of the full scope of abandonment. This study identifies and empirically categorizes distinct typologies of vehicle abandonment during the January 2025 Palisades Fire evacuation using INRIX connected-vehicle trip data. Methods: We use INRIX trip trajectory data covering the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles to identify 550 abandoned vehicle trips during the initial evacuation window (10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.) of the January 7, 2025, Palisades Fire. We applied spatiotemporal density-based clustering to identify nine primary clusters, then applied nested hierarchical density-based clustering to detect stable sub-clusters within the two largest groups. We further developed four empirical abandonment typologies based on abandonment location, timing, and pre-abandonment trip characteristics such as travel time, trip distance, and speed traveled. Findings: Four empirical typologies emerged in our analysis: Major Corridors, Parking Lots, Neighborhood-Based/Strategic Abandonments, and Backflow Trips/Canyons. Roadway-based abandonments, which would be captured by existing abandonment classifications in the literature, accounted for only 24% of all identified abandonments. Kruskal-Wallis tests confirmed significant differences across the typologies. Novelty: This study is the first to use connected-vehicle trip data to detect and empirically categorize vehicle abandonments during a wildfire evacuation, capturing off-roadway, strategic, and backflow-driven abandonment behaviors that prior post hoc administrative datasets and observational methods could not observe. Practical Applications: The typologies developed can inform the placement of off-corridor refuge parking areas and the proactive development of contraflow traffic management protocols at bottlenecks. They can also be incorporated as empirically grounded behavioral inputs into future evacuation traffic simulation models.

Urban wildfires require large-scale evacuations where many populations may rely on public transit. Wildfire evacuation research has largely focused on car-based evacuations, limiting empirical understanding of evacuation needs for people with limited or no car access. This study examines evacuation mode choice among transit riders during the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires in Los Angeles. Through a rapid-response post-wildfire survey targeting transit riders through the Transit app, we capture rich data on evacuees’ behavior along with the stated intentions of non-evacuees. Through bivariate comparison using Fisher’s exact tests and binary logit models, we leverage this survey data to uncover novel findings about transit riders’ evacuation behavior. Results indicate that evacuation mode choice largely reflected pre-fire mobility patterns, with prior use strongly predicting evacuation behavior. Nearly half of evacuees relied on rides from friends or family - substantially more than anticipated - highlighting the central role of informal mobility networks during fast-moving wildfire events. Transit-based evacuation was disproportionately concentrated among low-income and racial/ethnic minority riders, suggesting that structural inequities shape feasible protective actions. These findings suggest that evacuation planning in dense urban regions must move beyond assumptions of universal vehicle access and explicitly account for mobility constraints and informal ride networks under extreme conditions.

Low-income households commonly lack access to quality and affordable transportation options, impeding their access to opportunities. Low-income households with children face additional challenges. We draw on data from thirty-nine in-depth interviews to examine the effect of children on the travel behavior and experience of low-income adults. We find that low-income households with children experience increased financial and temporal burdens related to travel. These unique and complex challenges result in fewer socioeconomic opportunities and financial resources and reduced time for non-travel activities. The findings underscore the importance of programs and policies to develop a multimodal, affordable transportation safety net.

Homelessness continues to grow and to affect the lives of an increasingly diverse group of individuals. Many scholars have studied people living in homeless shelters and outdoors in tents. An overlooked population is the growing number of the unhoused living in vehicles. We draw on data from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s Homeless Demographic Survey to understand the characteristics of people living in vehicles and the extent to which they differ from the nonvehicular unhoused population. Compared to those living in tents, in makeshift shelters, and in public spaces, people living in vehicles are more likely to be women and to live in larger households with children, and are less likely to be chronically unhoused. These findings will help effectively target policies and services. Safe parking programs can provide temporary relief to those living in vehicles and, if done well, the interventions necessary to transition into permanent housing.

Shelter is a necessity, yet approximately 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States are unhoused. Public attention to homelessness has centered on individuals sitting and sleeping in publi...