America's biggest universal basic mobility experiment is taking place in L.A.

trekandshoot // Shutterstock In May of last year, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and LA Metro launched the biggest Universal Basic Mobility experiment ever attempted in the U.S., giving 1,000 South Los Angeles residents a “mobility wallet” — a debit card with $150 per month to spend on transportation. The catch? Funds can be used to take the bus, ride the train, rent a shared e-scooter, take micro-transit, rent a car-share, take an Uber or Lyft, or even purchase an e-bike — but they can’t be spent on the cost of owning or operating a car. The year-long pilot, ending in April, has the dual goals of increasing mobility for low-income residents and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a radical experiment based on a simple idea: People know what they need. Give them the money to go where they want to go, and they will improve the quality of their lives. It’s the biggest experiment in Universal Basic Mobility in the U.S., but it is not the first. “Mobility wallets are catching like wildfire,” Mollie D’Agostino, executive director of the new Mobility Science, Automation, and Inclusion Center at UC Davis, told Next City. In California alone, Oakland, Bakersfield and Stockton (the site of a famous Universal Basic Income experiment that spurred an explosion of guaranteed income pilots and policies) have all implemented UBM pilots, as has Pittsburgh. How L.A.’s mobility wallet pilot works The pilot is targeted at low-income residents of South L.A. who don’t have access to a car. According to LA Metro, 80% of participants are enrolled in a financial assistance program, over 60% regularly take public transportation, 40% live in a non-car household and 50% don’t have a driver’s license. For the first phase, in addition to online enrollment, Metro partnered with 20 community-based organizations to get the word out about the program. “[With] eight of those, we went on to do actual in-person workshops with them at their community centers, at their churches — literally, a few of the workshops, we were actually signing up people in the pews,” says Avital Shavit, senior director at LA Metro. Participants receive a debit card that is loaded with $150 every month for a full year. Funds that are not spent are rolled over to the following month. Although the card functions like a normal debit card, the money can only be spent on pre-approved transportation expenses — for example, loading an LA Metro TAP card, buying an Amtrak ticket or paying for a taxi. Participants have also used the wallet in creative and resourceful ways, including saving up the monthly funds to purchase an e-bike and buying a subscription to an e-scooter platform. The mobility wallet is part of a larger Universal Basic Mobility pilot, funded by almost $18 million from the California Air Resources Board and the City of Los Angeles. In addition to the mobility wallet, the pilot includes an e-bike lending library, an expansion of BlueLA, an electric vehicle car-share program and the installation of electric vehicle charging stations, among other initiatives. There are currently three phases to the mobility wallet pilot, with future phases dependent on funding. The first phase is funded by $2.5 million from CARB and $2 million from the city. In the second phase, starting summer 2024 and funded by $4 million from the Southern California Association of Governments, the program will open up to 1,000 new South L.A. participants as well as 1,600 participants recruited from L.A. County as a whole. Phase three is already in the works: Metro is working with Caltrans to secure federal funding to continue the pilot. Not all agencies have access to the same resources or funding, but LA Metro is hoping to expand access to these types of programs to other regions and agencies. “We’re actually working with Caltrans to look at how we might do a statewide procurement for prepaid cards as a mobility wallet, so that it’s not just LA Metro or the city of L.A., but any agency across the state — that maybe anywhere in the nation could have the same purchasing power for these cards,” says Shavit. How the pilot is going