Monisha Reginald

Monisha Reginald is pursuing a Master of Urban and Regional Planning with a concentration in transportation policy and planning at UCLA. Her research interests are centered in understanding how to make sustainable ways of traveling — walking, bicycling, and public transit — equitable, safe, comfortable, and convenient. She is also passionate about the potential to use data to uncover inequities in the transportation system and increase transparency in the transportation decision-making process.

Before enrolling at UCLA, Monisha spent five years working at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, where she led the agency’s survey program, leveraging quantitative survey data to understand transit riders’ demographics, travel behavior, and satisfaction with services. She is currently employed as a graduate student researcher in the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. In this role, she is working on a project led by Professor Adam Millard-Ball to understand determinants of high rates of walking and biking in cities across the globe, and she has recently started working with doctoral student Sam Speroni on a project focused on K-12 student experiences with public transit as a form of school transportation.

Project Overview

My project focuses on shade and lighting at bus stops in Los Angeles. Despite the city’s progress in increasing the overall number of bus shelters and developing an equity-focused prioritization framework for shelter distribution, there are still critical research gaps. We need to further understand the limitations of current approaches to delivering bus stop amenities and the solutions for providing necessary levels of shade and lighting where they are most needed. My research will focus on understanding the distribution of bus stops in Los Angeles that lack adequate shade and lighting. I will analyze site-constraints to identify which of these stops cannot accommodate existing shade and lighting amenity designs. Additionally, I will investigate whether other sidewalk elements, such as trees, fill in gaps or exacerbate disparities.

Why is this topic, specifically, important to you?

In many cities, Los Angeles included, public transit plays a crucial role in enabling many residents to get to the places that they want or need to go. Unfortunately, many bus stops lack adequate shade during the day and lighting after dark. This transforms these stops from gateways of opportunity into unsafe and uncomfortable spaces, disproportionately inhibiting the mobility of women and people of color. I am passionate about this topic because improving bus stop amenities is a key community-defined priority in Los Angeles, and because this issue is profoundly personal for me as someone who has relied on public transit to get around independently throughout my life.

Who are the partners involved in this project and how will you be working with them?

My primary partner for this project is Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), who has been working with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation on a variety of efforts to understand and address gender inequities in the local transportation system. I am coordinating with the firm to affirm that this work effectively builds on and informs their existing efforts related to gender-equitable transit.

How do you hope that this project will impact the field moving forward?

I believe that one of the most impactful ways of advancing transportation justice is by supplementing or improving the data that are used in decision-making processes. There are critical issues with equitable provision of shade and lighting amenities that are masked by existing quantitative data, therefore a lot of my work will be focused on integrating original data collection into analyses done with existing data sources. I hope this work will provide quantitative support for community members’ lived experiences, demonstrate the importance of filling these data gaps, and highlight methods for filling in these gaps at scale. Bigger picture, I hope that this project will successfully demonstrate the limitations of providing amenities with current shelter designs and to highlight potential ways of providing a basic level of shade and lighting at priority transit locations to create real change in the lives of transit riders in Los Angeles.