Wachs Lecture Series

Berkeley hosted the 5th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture where Genevieve Giuliano, faculty at the University of Southern California, examined outcomes of four decades of transit policy. Using two examples, mobility for the disadvantaged and transit impacts on land use, Giuliano showed that little progress is being made in achieving transit’s objectives. Yet, as she demonstrated, public transit continues to receive strong public support, and subsidies continue to grow. Investment and service decisions have created major barriers to achieving public transit’s urban planning objectives.

UCLA hosted the 4th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture by Alan Altshuler, professor of urban policy and planning at Harvard. He examined the new debates about funding for surface transportation, and posed the question of how managing road congestion will occur in an era when major capacity expansion is rarely feasible. These debates are routinely framed around conceptions of equity. Altshuler explores the distinctive nature of equity debates in U.S surface transportation, with particular attention to congestion pricing and High Occupancy Toll Lanes.

Berkeley hosted the 3rd annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture where Susan Hanson, professor emerita of geography at Clark University, tackled the complex issues surrounding gender and mobility. Hanson emphasized how feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. She noted that tackling these complex societal problems will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility.