This week, we’re joined by Madeline Brozen of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies to talk about universal basic mobility and research her team has done on the LA Mobility Wallet Pilot Program.
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Jeff Wood: The findings from the report that you put out are super interesting [and] they really do tell this larger story. And the first one was: the quality of life improved because people were using their money that they would’ve used for transportation for other things. But also it’s just like the quality of life. People feel better. That’s just from a public health perspective, that’s really good, right?
Madeline Brozen: Yeah. We asked people, we talked to them before they got their money during, and then about three to four months after. And one of the big things that we just tried to document in this approach was like, "How hard is it to kind of make ends meet in your household?" Right? And being poor is very difficult.
In the United States, being poor in Los Angeles is especially difficult with our kind of high cost of living as one indicator. One of the ZIP codes that this program people were eligible to participate has the most overcrowding of any ZIP code in the United States. Right. So like just the housing side of things crunches people’s budgets really hard and so they were really kind of struggling to make ends meet.
And $1,800 over a year is like a really good infusion. And so that was kind of the biggest thing is you know, we’d ask people at the end like, what’d you miss most? And they’re like, "I just had extra money. It was just really helpful. I just have one less thing to worry about because like, my transportation’s covered. This thing that I think about on a trip by trip, day by day, week by week, whatever. I just didn’t have to worry about it."
And so that’s why we’re really working on some more specific findings around like the stress outcomes. There’s a good body of work that just talks about how stressful it is to be a low-income person, but also just how bad stress is for your health. It can cause ulcers, it’s going to negatively affect your relationships.
It’s going to have really bad physical and mental health effects on your life. And so for a relatively small amount of money, on the aggregate, people were able to actually say, "It was easier for me to get through things." It would show up in a lot of ways. Like one of our interviewees works with kids and he would say that because he just didn’t have as much stress about how he’d get to work, he would just show up at his job feeling more ready to like interact with the kids and he felt like they could see it, you know?
And like that was just something that was really heartwarming, to be like, if we can make transportation easier for you, you’re just better at your job, then you feel better about being better for your job. And so it just kind of, you know, is a real positive cycle that these people were able to experience during the program.
Jeff Wood: What else did you learn about stress reduction?
Madeline Brozen: I think we just discount that transportation is kind of an inherently stressful thing. I mean, maybe if you’re like a cyclist in a city, there is some hairy part of your commute. I’ve been a pretty regular bike commuter to UCLA for a while and there’s this one part of the commute in West Hollywood that has a bike lane, but there’s on-street parking and sometimes you look at another person biking next to you and you get to the light and you’re just like, "Whoa, OK. that was a bit of a gauntlet, right? Yeah."
Driving is really stressful. It just like it makes your heart rate go up. They like being on the train or on the bus because they could just use their time differently. They just didn’t have to think about it.
And then the other part was being worried about whether you’re going to make it to somewhere on time. That was just like a really stressful situation. One person, a barista, worked super early in the morning — like four or five o’clock in the morning, when transit’s not running very frequently.
And so that would be the way she would get to work. But if she woke up late, or if that one bus every 20 minutes just didn’t come, it wasn’t like, "Oh my god, what am I going to do?" Instead, it’s, "OK, I actually, I just have an option. I can just take a ride hail to my job. I know I will get there on time."
And that’s just like a real relief for people. If you’re a person who doesn’t have to worry about paying for transportation, you’re just like, "Oh, my bus didn’t show up. I can just like tell my boss I’m working remotely today."
That's a privilege that not all people have.
There was another one of our interviewees who has a disability that like she has good days and bad days, but by and large, she would really rely on her family to take her to where she needed to go. She’s a substitute teacher and — this like blew my mind — substitute teachers learn where they’re going to be teaching sometimes the night before they need to go there, which is just a transportation nightmare if you don’t have a car, right?
It’s like, "OK, now I have to decide tonight how I’m getting to this other place." And she never really knew how she would feel when she’d wake up. And the family she lived with, they’d also have to get people to school.
She just didn’t want to be this other trip that someone in her house had to make. And it was just so freeing for her to like just get places on her own. That autonomy also just really gives people a lot of positive mental health benefits.
