What About Time in Transportation and Health Research?

UCLA hosted the 6th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture featuring Mei-Po Kwan, now Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Systems at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Transportation researchers have long recognized the role of time in influencing activity-travel behavior. Kwan examined a different notion of time and its implications for transportation and health research, revisiting some fundamental concepts like distance, accessibility, and geographic context, while exploring new conceptualizations that take time into account.

Wachs Lecture: Edward Glaeser

The 7th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, hosted at Berkeley, featured Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics at Harvard Kennedy School. He studies the economics of cities, and has written scores of urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He has been particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation. His work focuses on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission.

Utility of Travel

UCLA hosted the 8th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture where Patricia Mokhtarian, faculty at Georgia Tech, lamented that travel is now viewed primarily as a “derived demand” : travel occurs only so that people can enjoy the goods and experiences attained at their destination but not because the journey in and of itself brings enjoyment. Her aim is to restore balance to how we conceive of travel by placing travel into the category of behaviors that have a dual nature: those that have on the one hand a utilitarian (functional) aspect, yet also bring a hedonic (pleasing) dimension.

A Transportation Agenda for the Global Era

The 9th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, hosted at Berkeley, featured Catherine Ross, Professor of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, who spoke about the challenges in maintaining and growing economic well-being in an era of new transportation modes. With increased transportation capacity and greater mobility comes congestion, air pollution, and urban sprawl as well as other issues. This current dilemma and hypermobility demands a transport agenda for this global era to be set.

When Forecasting Fails

UCLA hosted the 10th annual ‘Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture”, where invitee lecturer, Joe Schofer, Faculty at Northwestern University, provided a wide-ranging view about forecasting – a prominent feature of transportation planning. He explains that learning to accept the inherent limitations of the forecasting process is a necessary first step in helping planners improve their predictions of cost, utilization, performance and impact, and that systematic learning from experience is vital when predicting the outcome of major infrastructure projects

Smart Cities: The Future of Urban Infrastructure

The 11th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, hosted at Berkeley, featured a panel of transportation and planning experts: Jeff Morales, Ryan Russo, Tom Maguire, Maria Mehranian, and Susan Shaheen. The talk addressed the fact that with increased capacity and greater mobility undergirding economic viability and quality of life comes congestion, increased energy consumption, air pollution, and urban sprawl. This current dilemma and hypermobility demands a transport agenda for this global era to be set.

Designing the 30-Minute City

The 12th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, held at UCLA, was presented by David Levinson. The 30-minute isochrone has long defined people’s use of cities — from ancient times through the trams era to modern times. There are opportunities to use design to reduce the costs of travel and thus increase access for relatively little monetary outlay. This talk discussed both the measurement of accessibility, why it matters, and how it might affect traveler behavior, institutional behavior, and public policy.

Integrating for Social Justice

Professor Emerita of City and Regional Planning and Urban Design, Elizabeth “Betty” Deakin presented the Martin Wachs Lecture, “Integrating Transportation, Land Use, and Environmental Planning for Social Justice and Carbon Reduction: Finding a Way that Works.” Deakin’s research focuses on transportation and land use policy and the environmental impacts of transportation.

Policing the Open Road

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.

Accessibility, Social Equity, and Contemporary Policy Debates

California Nanosystems Institute, UCLA Campus 570 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Part of the Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture Series and Meyer and Renee Luskin Lecture Series. 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 appointments at Tongji University in Shanghai and NYU-Abu Dhabi. During his doctoral studies in urban planning at UCLA, he worked under the supervision of his long-time mentor, Martin Wachs. Martin Wachs’ seminal 1973 paper on accessibility as a social construct continues to influence urban planning policy and practice a half-century later. It also shaped a generation of research on, broadly speaking, the ‘transport-land use connection’, including my own. This talk probes a number of policy initiatives that implicitly [...]

Go to Top