This dissertation examines the role that finance plays in shaping transportation planning and policy making and concludes that the key to understanding the development of metropolitan transportation systems is found in the political negotiation and compromises made to secure public investment in those systems. The particular circumstances leading to or preventing a tax increase of appropriation for a program or project explains most of the success or failure of that program or project. Three cases from California are examined: (1) the planning and finance of urban freeways prior to 1960, (2) the shift from "freeway-first" to "multi-modal" urban transportation policies after 1960, and (3) the development of state subsidies of public transit after 1970. Each of these cases is a significant chapter in the transportation history of California and each will show that the goals of the rational planning model have largely gone unfulfilled; in each case, the politics of finance superseded planning at the local level and policy making at the state level.

Freeways have profoundly influenced the form and function of U.S. cities, yet urban planners generally played only a peripheral role in their development. This article traces the history of freeway development in California to show how political negotiations between local and state governments over street and highway finance resulted in urban freeways financed, designed, and built by the state highway department. To fund their ambitious transportation plans, local officials and planners in cities like Los Angeles turned over control of the planning and development of urban freeways in the 1940s and 1950s to state departments of transportation. This shift in control led to, among other things, the construction of freeways too large to fit easily into cities and freeway networks too sparse to adequately disperse urban traffic. While federal surface transportation legislation returned significant control over metropolitan freeways to regions and planners in the 1990s, the influence of modern freeways on urban life endures.

This dissertation examines the role that finance plays in shaping transportation planning and policy making and concludes that the key to understanding the development of metropolitan transportation systems is found in the political negotiation and compromises made to secure public investment in those systems. The particular circumstances leading to or preventing a tax increase of appropriation for a program or project explains most of the success or failure of that program or project. Three cases from California are examined: (1) the planning and finance of urban freeways prior to 1960, (2) the shift from "freeway-first" to "multi-modal" urban transportation policies after 1960, and (3) the development of state subsidies of public transit after 1970. Each of these cases is a significant chapter in the transportation history of California and each will show that the goals of the rational planning model have largely gone unfulfilled; in each case, the politics of finance superseded planning at the local level and policy making at the state level.

Federal subsidies of public transit, particularly transit operations are declining and the responsibility for supporting transit is falling increasingly on states and localities. In California, the Transportation Development Act (TDA) has become the state's principal source of transit operating subsidies. This paper shows that the strict per capita allocation formulas of the TDA strongly favor lightly patronized suburban transit service over more heavily patronized service in the central cities. Transit riders in San Francisco, for example, receive a TDA subsidy of $0.13 per trip, while the TDA subsidy to transit patrons in suburban Livermore is over $5.00 per trip. The built-in suburban bias of the TDA is the result of partisan compromises made to secure passage of the Act in 1971; compromises to assuage a Republican governor opposed to new taxes and to include the interests of rural and suburban counties. The result has been a proliferation in California of new, well-funded, and expanding suburban transit operators that attract few riders while older, heavily patronized central city transit operators are forced to cut service because of funding shortfalls. The paper concludes by proposing a more efficient and equitable method for allocating TDA funds than the current formula which, in the name of equity provides all Californians with a "fair share" of public transit, whether or not they use it.

Traffic congestion, metropolitan growth, and air pollution are three of the most important issues facing urban policy makers in the 1990s. Often considered separately in the past, these issues are increasingly linked as regions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco grapple with the effects of growth. To explore the transportation, land use, and air quality connection, the UCLA Extension Public Policy Program conducted a research symposium under the guidance and support of a cross-section of public and private sponsors.

This thesis describes a framework leveraging occlusions as a cue for detecting objects and accurately localizing their boundaries throughout the course of a video. Triggered by the motion of objects in the scene, occlusions provide coarse knowledge of the spatial relationship of objects with respect to the viewer. While effective for detecting objects when motion is sufficient, we explore ways to reliably detect and track objects when motion is inadequate or difficult to estimate.

In the first half, we incorporate semantic classifiers to provide cues when occlusions are weak, and observe occlusion and appearance information to be mutually beneficial, yielding results more resilient to failures of the component systems acting alone. Our system is evaluated on the semantic segmentation task. In the latter half, we drop semantics and instead devise a causal framework integrating segmentation results and occlusion cues from frames processed in the past. So long as objects move sufficiently with respect to the viewer at some point, they will be detected and subsequently tracked for the rest of the video. We evaluated our approach on the video object segmentation problem. The resulting system has the capability to automatically discover objects from occlusions in video and track their shapes as they evolve over time. Coarse depth is provided as a byproduct and the assignment of semantic category labels can be integrated in a natural way.