Maggie Dennis | J-PAL North America

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Presentation Description

Meeting: Pre- and Post-Project Analysis of
Economic Development and Land Use
Outcomes

Historic levels of funding and support to advance equitable transportation decarbonization present a critical window to address both the climate and inequity crises. This presentation reviews a synthesis of experimental evidence on transportation decarbonization, identifies gaps where academic research and local priorities are not aligned, and presents three recommendations for researchers and governments to leverage randomized evaluation to identify high-impact, equitable, and cost-effective transportation decarbonization policies. Because the transportation sector is the fastest-growing contributor of global CO2 emissions and is linked to environmental and economic inequities, advancing equitable transportation decarbonization is a unique opportunity to advance multiple goals.

Researchers and policymakers have the opportunity to collaborate to integrate learning through randomized evaluation into the design and implementation of policy innovations that leverage behavior change. Findings from randomized evaluations help policymakers measure the magnitude of impacts and understand the behavioral mechanisms behind results. Understanding behavioral mechanisms, in turn, helps us better anticipate the economic, land, and financial impacts of a policy. This presentation will outline how to effectively leverage the potential of policy that drives behavior change to support transportation decarbonization, helping to address inequitable distribution of pollution and improve transportation systems for all users.

This session will draw from our systematic literature review of 42 journals in the economic, environmental, and transportation space and themes from a series of informal conversations with state and county transportation policymakers. In our review, we found 28 studies employing experimental evaluation strategies to quantify the causal impact of policies on behavioral changes related to transportation decarbonization. Just eleven quantify the welfare impacts of transportation policies, three quantify distributional impacts, and four address the cost efficacy of policies.

In the literature review, we outline recommendations for future randomized evaluations to support state and local jurisdictions in advancing their transportation decarbonization goals around fleet transition, traffic congestion, and public transit ridership. We also delineate frameworks for quantifying distributional equity impacts and incorporating the marginal value of public funds into policy evaluation.

Through this presentation we aim to 1) contribute our knowledge of evaluation tools for measuring progress towards equity and climate decarbonization, 2) share the findings from our systematic literature to advance equitable transportation decarbonization, 3) invite input on the research agenda and action plan, and 4) build relationships with others working at the intersection of transportation, decarbonization, equity, and evidence.

Speaker Biography

Maggie Dennis is a King Climate Action Initiative Fellow at J-PAL North America. Her work aims to synthesize existing evidence on transport decarbonization interventions and identify remaining policy-relevant questions, define a transport research agenda for the North America region, and build researcher-practitioner partnerships to launch experimental transit decarbonization studies. Prior to joining J-PAL, Maggie worked as a Research Associate at the World Resources Institute, where she focused on systems change and decarbonization. Maggie holds a BS in Economics from Santa Clara University and an MSc in International Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

Co-presenters

Andrea Cristina Ruiz
Vanderbilt University

Robert Metcalfe
University of Southern California

Presentation File