Adam Millard-Ball
Biographic Data
| ID | 4408738 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Millard-Ball |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Millard-Ball |
| SIGNATURE | MILLARD-BALL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2353-8730 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
From wheels to systems
Automobility’s global role in providing mobility services but with adverse impacts on climate change and land use makes it a critical topic at a planetary scale. So far the role of cars has been mostly addressed from a techno-economic perspective, with complementary but fragmented insights from other social sciences. We provide evidence that understanding automobility as a sub-system of the technosphere compromising human-made artifacts and struc…
A high-resolution global time series of street-network sprawl
Systems of street networks form a backbone for many aspects of human life and, once laid down, urban streets represent a nearly immutable influence on future urban form and concomitant travel, energy, and social outcomes. Moreover, as humanity is currently passing through its peak urbanization rate, decisions about how to design such networks at the local scale are being made faster than ever before. In this work, we quantify local street connect…
State Preemption in Theory and Practice
In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California's 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. We find that the law's complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpret…
Should Environmentalists Support the Gasoline Tax
Taxes on gasoline and diesel reduce vehicle travel by making driving more expensive -the price effect.But fuel tax revenue is used to build and widen urban highways, inducing more driving -the capacity effect.We show that in the United States, the capacity effect over the 1981-2021 period was more than five times greater than the price effect.As the rise of electric vehicles forces policymakers to consider replacing or supplementing fuel taxes, o…
Dividing Highways
We examine the barrier effects of freeways in California. We analyze the association between freeways and nearby street network connectivity and quantify the frequency and quality of crossings—underpasses or bridges that enable pedestrians and cyclists to cross the freeway. We find that barrier effects are most pronounced in communities of color. We also find that even where crossings exist, they are unpleasant or even hazardous for pedestrians a…
How land use patterns keep driving cheap
Economists tend to favour price-based approaches, such as gasoline and carbon taxes, to address the negative impacts of car travel, while urban planners tend to emphasise land use planning such as compact development. In this paper, we argue that the two approaches are synergistic. We use precinct-level data from two California referenda to show that land use planning makes pricing more feasible: voters in dense, transit-oriented neighbourhoods a…
Where ridehail drivers go between trips
We analyze what ridehail drivers do when searching for paid fares. We use a dataset of 5.3 million trips in San Francisco and partition each search trip into cruising, repositioning, and parking segments. We find that repositioning accounts for nearly two-thirds (63%) of the time between trips, with cruising and parking accounting for 23% and 14% respectively (these figures exclude short trips). Our regression models suggest that drivers tend to …
The Width and Value of Residential Streets
Problem, research strategy, and findings The width of street rights-of-way is normally determined by traffic engineering and urban design conventions, without considering the immense value of the underlying land. In this article, I develop an economic framework that can inform decisions on street width, and I use tax parcel data to quantify the widths, land areas, and land value of streets in 20 of the largest counties in the United States. Resid…
Notes From the Review Editor
Missing the Housing for the Trees
This paper examines equity’s incorporation into Climate Action Plans (CAPs), an increasingly important part of the urban sustainability planning landscape. We conduct a content analysis of 170 California CAPs and compare the plans’ treatment of equity to city characteristics such as size and income inequality. We find that equity language correlates with an increased presence of more systemic policy interventions, such as dense and/or affordable …
What do residential lotteries show us about transportation choices
Credibly identifying how the built environment shapes behaviour is empirically challenging, because people select residential locations based on differing constraints and preferences for site amenities. Our study overcomes these research barriers by leveraging San Francisco’s affordable housing lotteries, which randomly allow specific households to move to specific residences. Using administrative data, we demonstrate that lottery-winning househo…
Planning as Bargaining
Problem, research strategy, and findings Why would plans have an impact on the built environment when their provisions can be revisited in the context of individual development decisions? I examined the causal impacts of transit-oriented development (TOD) plans in San Francisco (CA) and Seattle (WA) using a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative interviews and a quantitative regression discontinuity design. I found that the Market and Octa…
Levine, Grengs, and Merlin
"Levine, Grengs, and Merlin: From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land-Use Planning." Journal of the American Planning Association, 87(1), pp. 141–142
Notes From the Incoming Review Editor
JAPA’s book review section occupies a distinctive niche in the ecosystem of planning journals. As with JAPA itself, the book review section straddles the divide between research and practice, focus
Diversifying Planning Education through Course Readings
We investigate diversity in urban planning education by analyzing the gender and race/ethnicity of authors who are assigned on reading lists for urban sustainability courses. Using a sample of 772 readings from thirty-two syllabi, we find that assigned authors are even less diverse than planning faculty. Female authors account for 28 percent of assigned readings on the syllabi, and authors of color for 20 percent. Wide variation between courses s…
Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris
"Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris: Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? Understanding the Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), pp. 132–133
Parking behaviour
The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete
OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the …
More connected urban roads reduce US GHG emissions
We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near-permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options. We provide new estimates of the environmental impact of low-conne…
Chapter 7. Paths to Carbon Neutrality
California is one of the least greenhouse-gas intensive states in the United States, and one of the most energy efficient economies in the world. Its success is partly an accident of geography, due to a temperate climate, and its service-based economy with little emissions-intensive industry. But California’s governors, state legislators, and local agencies have also shown a willingness to enact climate legislation and implement mitigation polici…
Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities
Autonomous vehicles, popularly known as self-driving cars, have the potential to transform travel behavior. However, existing analyses have ignored strategic interactions with other road users. In this article, I use game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks. Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave …
A century of sprawl in the United States
Significance Urban development patterns in the 20th century have been increasingly typified by urban sprawl, which exacerbates climate change, energy and material consumption, and public health challenges. We construct the first long-run, high-resolution time series of street-network sprawl in the United States. We find that even in the absence of a coordinated policy effort, new developments have already turned the corner toward less sprawl. Ini…
The Limits to Planning
If planning is to matter for urban development and policy, it is not sufficient for plans to be implemented. Plans and planning must also have a causal role—they must lead to outcomes that would not be realized otherwise. In case studies of municipal climate action planning in California, I find little evidence for any causal impacts. Instead, cities are using climate plans to codify policies that were likely to happen anyway. The results call fo…
Do city climate plans reduce emissions
Gentrification in a Residential Mobility Framework
Studies of the impacts of gentrification have traditionally taken a relatively narrow view, focusing on the gentrifiers who move in and those who they displace. This paper seeks to apply the broader framework of residential mobility, using the vacancy chain concept to examine the knock-on implications across the entire housing market. Taking the case study of Stockholm, it is shown that tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership are…
Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities
Autonomous vehicles, popularly known as self-driving cars, have the potential to transform travel behavior. However, existing analyses have ignored strategic interactions with other road users. In this article, I use game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks. Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave …
Gentrification in a Residential Mobility Framework
Studies of the impacts of gentrification have traditionally taken a relatively narrow view, focusing on the gentrifiers who move in and those who they displace. This paper seeks to apply the broader framework of residential mobility, using the vacancy chain concept to examine the knock-on implications across the entire housing market. Taking the case study of Stockholm, it is shown that tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership are…
The Limits to Planning
If planning is to matter for urban development and policy, it is not sufficient for plans to be implemented. Plans and planning must also have a causal role—they must lead to outcomes that would not be realized otherwise. In case studies of municipal climate action planning in California, I find little evidence for any causal impacts. Instead, cities are using climate plans to codify policies that were likely to happen anyway. The results call fo…
Do city climate plans reduce emissions
Missing the Housing for the Trees
This paper examines equity’s incorporation into Climate Action Plans (CAPs), an increasingly important part of the urban sustainability planning landscape. We conduct a content analysis of 170 California CAPs and compare the plans’ treatment of equity to city characteristics such as size and income inequality. We find that equity language correlates with an increased presence of more systemic policy interventions, such as dense and/or affordable …
Moving Beyond the Gentrification Gaps
Production-side theories of gentrification are generally confined to the rent and value gaps. In Stockholm, the value gap, involving tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership, is usually cited as the primary gentrification mechanism. However, results described here indicate that gentrification has taken place in rental properties even prior to tenure conversion. Together with the small number of conversions taking place, this means…
What do residential lotteries show us about transportation choices
Credibly identifying how the built environment shapes behaviour is empirically challenging, because people select residential locations based on differing constraints and preferences for site amenities. Our study overcomes these research barriers by leveraging San Francisco’s affordable housing lotteries, which randomly allow specific households to move to specific residences. Using administrative data, we demonstrate that lottery-winning househo…
Diversifying Planning Education through Course Readings
We investigate diversity in urban planning education by analyzing the gender and race/ethnicity of authors who are assigned on reading lists for urban sustainability courses. Using a sample of 772 readings from thirty-two syllabi, we find that assigned authors are even less diverse than planning faculty. Female authors account for 28 percent of assigned readings on the syllabi, and authors of color for 20 percent. Wide variation between courses s…
Moving Beyond the Gentrification Gaps
Production-side theories of gentrification are generally confined to the rent and value gaps. In Stockholm, the value gap, involving tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership, is usually cited as the primary gentrification mechanism. However, results described here indicate that gentrification has taken place in rental properties even prior to tenure conversion. Together with the small number of conversions taking place, this means…
Gentrification in a Residential Mobility Framework
Studies of the impacts of gentrification have traditionally taken a relatively narrow view, focusing on the gentrifiers who move in and those who they displace. This paper seeks to apply the broader framework of residential mobility, using the vacancy chain concept to examine the knock-on implications across the entire housing market. Taking the case study of Stockholm, it is shown that tenure conversions from rental to co-operative ownership are…
The Limits to Planning
If planning is to matter for urban development and policy, it is not sufficient for plans to be implemented. Plans and planning must also have a causal role—they must lead to outcomes that would not be realized otherwise. In case studies of municipal climate action planning in California, I find little evidence for any causal impacts. Instead, cities are using climate plans to codify policies that were likely to happen anyway. The results call fo…
Do city climate plans reduce emissions
A century of sprawl in the United States
Significance Urban development patterns in the 20th century have been increasingly typified by urban sprawl, which exacerbates climate change, energy and material consumption, and public health challenges. We construct the first long-run, high-resolution time series of street-network sprawl in the United States. We find that even in the absence of a coordinated policy effort, new developments have already turned the corner toward less sprawl. Ini…
Chapter 7. Paths to Carbon Neutrality
California is one of the least greenhouse-gas intensive states in the United States, and one of the most energy efficient economies in the world. Its success is partly an accident of geography, due to a temperate climate, and its service-based economy with little emissions-intensive industry. But California’s governors, state legislators, and local agencies have also shown a willingness to enact climate legislation and implement mitigation polici…
Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities
Autonomous vehicles, popularly known as self-driving cars, have the potential to transform travel behavior. However, existing analyses have ignored strategic interactions with other road users. In this article, I use game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks. Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave …
The world’s user-generated road map is more than 80% complete
OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced geographic database, provides the only global-level, openly licensed source of geospatial road data, and the only national-level source in many countries. However, researchers, policy makers, and citizens who want to make use of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have little information about whether it can be relied upon in a particular geographic setting. In this paper, we use two complementary, independent methods to assess the …
More connected urban roads reduce US GHG emissions
We quantify the importance of early action to tackle urban sprawl. We focus on the long-term nature of infrastructure decisions, specifically local roadways, which can lock in greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The location and interconnectedness of local roadways form a near-permanent backbone for the future layout of land parcels, buildings, and transportation options. We provide new estimates of the environmental impact of low-conne…
Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris
"Chapple and Loukaitou-Sideris: Transit-Oriented Displacement or Community Dividends? Understanding the Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities." Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(1), pp. 132–133
Parking behaviour
Planning as Bargaining
Problem, research strategy, and findings Why would plans have an impact on the built environment when their provisions can be revisited in the context of individual development decisions? I examined the causal impacts of transit-oriented development (TOD) plans in San Francisco (CA) and Seattle (WA) using a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative interviews and a quantitative regression discontinuity design. I found that the Market and Octa…
Levine, Grengs, and Merlin
"Levine, Grengs, and Merlin: From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land-Use Planning." Journal of the American Planning Association, 87(1), pp. 141–142
Notes From the Incoming Review Editor
JAPA’s book review section occupies a distinctive niche in the ecosystem of planning journals. As with JAPA itself, the book review section straddles the divide between research and practice, focus
Diversifying Planning Education through Course Readings
We investigate diversity in urban planning education by analyzing the gender and race/ethnicity of authors who are assigned on reading lists for urban sustainability courses. Using a sample of 772 readings from thirty-two syllabi, we find that assigned authors are even less diverse than planning faculty. Female authors account for 28 percent of assigned readings on the syllabi, and authors of color for 20 percent. Wide variation between courses s…
The Width and Value of Residential Streets
Problem, research strategy, and findings The width of street rights-of-way is normally determined by traffic engineering and urban design conventions, without considering the immense value of the underlying land. In this article, I develop an economic framework that can inform decisions on street width, and I use tax parcel data to quantify the widths, land areas, and land value of streets in 20 of the largest counties in the United States. Resid…
Notes From the Review Editor
Missing the Housing for the Trees
This paper examines equity’s incorporation into Climate Action Plans (CAPs), an increasingly important part of the urban sustainability planning landscape. We conduct a content analysis of 170 California CAPs and compare the plans’ treatment of equity to city characteristics such as size and income inequality. We find that equity language correlates with an increased presence of more systemic policy interventions, such as dense and/or affordable …
What do residential lotteries show us about transportation choices
Credibly identifying how the built environment shapes behaviour is empirically challenging, because people select residential locations based on differing constraints and preferences for site amenities. Our study overcomes these research barriers by leveraging San Francisco’s affordable housing lotteries, which randomly allow specific households to move to specific residences. Using administrative data, we demonstrate that lottery-winning househo…
Where ridehail drivers go between trips
We analyze what ridehail drivers do when searching for paid fares. We use a dataset of 5.3 million trips in San Francisco and partition each search trip into cruising, repositioning, and parking segments. We find that repositioning accounts for nearly two-thirds (63%) of the time between trips, with cruising and parking accounting for 23% and 14% respectively (these figures exclude short trips). Our regression models suggest that drivers tend to …
Dividing Highways
We examine the barrier effects of freeways in California. We analyze the association between freeways and nearby street network connectivity and quantify the frequency and quality of crossings—underpasses or bridges that enable pedestrians and cyclists to cross the freeway. We find that barrier effects are most pronounced in communities of color. We also find that even where crossings exist, they are unpleasant or even hazardous for pedestrians a…
How land use patterns keep driving cheap
Economists tend to favour price-based approaches, such as gasoline and carbon taxes, to address the negative impacts of car travel, while urban planners tend to emphasise land use planning such as compact development. In this paper, we argue that the two approaches are synergistic. We use precinct-level data from two California referenda to show that land use planning makes pricing more feasible: voters in dense, transit-oriented neighbourhoods a…
A high-resolution global time series of street-network sprawl
Systems of street networks form a backbone for many aspects of human life and, once laid down, urban streets represent a nearly immutable influence on future urban form and concomitant travel, energy, and social outcomes. Moreover, as humanity is currently passing through its peak urbanization rate, decisions about how to design such networks at the local scale are being made faster than ever before. In this work, we quantify local street connect…
State Preemption in Theory and Practice
In U.S. law, states can override actions of local governments that contravene state interests. In practice, preemptions are often more ambiguous nudges, and local responses can vary by interpretation and interests. This paper explores one such case of state preemption: California's 2022 law that limited local governments’ ability to require automobile parking. We find that the law's complexity and ambiguity created intense debates about interpret…
Should Environmentalists Support the Gasoline Tax
Taxes on gasoline and diesel reduce vehicle travel by making driving more expensive -the price effect.But fuel tax revenue is used to build and widen urban highways, inducing more driving -the capacity effect.We show that in the United States, the capacity effect over the 1981-2021 period was more than five times greater than the price effect.As the rise of electric vehicles forces policymakers to consider replacing or supplementing fuel taxes, o…
Business (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Engineering (13 works) · Urban Transport and Accessibility (12 works) · Transport engineering (11 works) · Political science (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Environmental planning (7 works) · Civil engineering (6 works)