EVENTS

Robert Hampshire

Our 2025 Wachs Lecture will be held on Monday, April 28 at UCLA, featuring Robert Hampshire, former chief science officer and principal deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation.

He is also associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

More information to come

Robert Cervero

Year: 2023
Location: UCLA
University: UC Berkeley

Robert Cervero works in the area of sustainable transportation policy and planning. He has consulted on numerous transportation and urban planning projects worldwide, most recently advising long-range planning in Dubai and Singapore. His most recent book, Beyond Mobility, won the 2019 National Urban Design Best Book Award. Dr. Cervero was a member of Berkeley’s city and regional planning faculty from 1980 to 2016, where he twice served as Department Chair, was the inaugural holder of the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies, and directed both the University of California Transportation Center and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. More recently he has held visiting faculty

Sarah Seo

Year: 2021
Location: UCLA
University: Columbia Law School

Columbia Law professor Sarah Seo‘s book “Policing the Open Road” is a thought-provoking look at how the automobile fundamentally changed the nature of police work, and thus the conception of freedom, in the United States. These themes are close to transportation studies, but too often ignored in transportation academia. These issues, moreover, will only become more salient as broader swaths of transportation academia seek to understand and study the role of race and ethnicity in freedom of mobility. Professor Seo will be joined by UCLA professor Genevieve Carpio, whose book, “Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race,” documents the effects of police-imposed limits to mobility on Latinx populations in Southern California’s Inland Empire.

Elizaben Deakin

Year: 2019
Location: UC Berkeley
University: UC Berkeley

Elizabeth Deakin’s research focuses on transportation and land use policy and the environmental impacts of transportation. She has published over 200 articles, book chapters, and reports on topics ranging from environmental justice to transportation pricing to development exactions and impact fees. She currently is carrying out a series of studies on urban development and transportation in China, Latin America, and India as well as in California.

Deakin is professor emerita of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, where she also is an affiliated faculty member of the Energy and Resources Group and the Master of Urban Design group. She formerly served as Director of the University of California Transportation Research Center (1998-2008) and co-director of the UC Berkeley Global Metropolitan Studies Initiative (2005-2008).

David Levinson

Year: 2019
Location: UCLA
University: University of Sydney

The 12th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture will be held May 16 at UCLA Luskin School of Pubic Affairs. David Levinson is professor in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney and adjunct faculty in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo-Engineering at the University of Minnesota. The 30-minute isochrone has long defined people’s use of cities — from ancient times through the trams era to modern times. Networks and land use co-evolve with technology subject to the constraints of available time. There are opportunities (low-hanging fruit) to use design to reduce the costs of travel and thus increase access for relatively little monetary outlay. This talk discusses both the measurement of accessibility, why it matters, and how it might affect traveler behavior, institutional behavior, and public policy. Looking at data from rail and tram development in Sydney from the 1800s and Australia today, implications about the effects of accessibility are described.

Levinson received the 1995 Tiebout Prize in Regional Science for the paper “Location, Relocation, and the Journey to Work.” From 1989 to 1994, he worked as a transportation planner, developing integrated transportation and land-use models for Montgomery County, Maryland. He then applied those models for multimodal network planning and growth management. Levinson has authored or edited several books, including Spontaneous Access, The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport, The Transportation Experience, and Planning for Place and Plexus, as well as numerous peer reviewed articles. He is the editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use. He has a PhD in transportation engineering from Berkeley and his dissertation “On Whom the Toll Falls,” argued that local decision-making about managing and financing roads will most likely lead to direct road pricing, which will allow the efficient allocation of scarce road resources (and thus reduce congestion).