Spotlight Series Archives - UC Institute of Transportation Studies

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley

What are your research interests and what types of projects are you currently working on?

My research – including our staff and undergraduate, Masters, and PhD student team – focuses on sustainable transportation and innovation. It is centered on understanding sustainable mobility strategies with the goal of advancing accessible, equitable, low emission and low-energy options, and public health and safety.

This research encompasses many innovations including: autonomy, electrification, shared mobility, and electronic/wireless communication technologies. Policy and behavioral understanding are core to our work. The modes we focus on range from bikes and scooters to cars and buses, vans, and trucks. Our team also researches advanced air mobility. I created our lab in the early 2000s, shortly after I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). It is called “Innovative Mobility Research.” We are housed in the Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC), which I co-direct with Dr. Tim Lipman and Professor Arpad Horvath. In addition, I direct the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS)’ Resilient and Innovative Mobility Initiative (RIMI) and am honored to serve on the California Air Resources Board, as of January 2023.

The Innovative Mobility lab is focused on research that spans across modes, technologies, and propulsion systems. We aim to produce evidence-based research that informs policy making and planning, including understanding/quantifying how innovative mobility strategies impact auto ownership/use and vehicle miles traveled (VMT); what causes individuals to shift modes; and how to foster accessibility and social equity. As part of this work, we quantify VMT and emission changes, benefits and costs, and the impacts of incentives and pricing. We also evaluate opportunities and obstacles to scaling systems across spatial and temporal dimensions (e.g., shared micromobility, microtransit, and carsharing).

There is a lot of synergy with our work and the objectives/goals of the UC ITS RIMI program. RIMI is a cooperative research and policy engagement initiative led by the UC ITS in partnership with the State of California, regional and local governments, non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, and industry. The mission of RIMI is to direct transportation and mobility innovations toward the public interest through a holistic, integrated, and societal-building approach that addresses technological, environmental, resilient, and socio-economic impacts. RIMI develops informed, empowered, and proactive governments to anticipate future crises and innovative mobility disruptions. The initiative aims to enhance California’s economic and research competitiveness across the globe and train and educate the next generation of transportation leaders for California and the world. The RIMI program was generously funded by the California legislature. Nevertheless, its work can help to inform policy making and planning across the U.S. and the globe.

What would you consider your most significant research finding or accomplishment thus far?

While we have studied many research topics in sustainable mobility, I believe our most impactful research has been in defining and characterizing the shared mobility ecosystem (e.g., leading the development of the SAE taxonomy, ranging from shared micromobility to ridesharing and ridehailing to carsharing and microtransit). This work includes quantifying the impacts of shared mobility on auto dependency, modal shifts, energy/environmental metrics, social equity, and cost savings. Key metrics from our research have been employed in policy making and planning in the U.S. and across the globe.

We have dedicated a lot of our time to securing high-quality data sets (surveys and activity data from vehicles and mobility platforms); cleaning and linking the data to inform our analysis; developing our findings across numerous cities and nations; and sharing our work through publications, blogs and podcasts, and presentations.

What issues in transportation keep you up at night?

As a Master’s student and young professional arriving in Washington, DC, I focused on energy and the environment in my work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy. A few years later, I became more focused on transportation/mobility when I started my PhD at UC Davis with my advisor, Professor Daniel Sperling. I was deeply concerned and motivated by sustainability as early as my junior year in high school. I wanted to understand if technologies could be configured into systems that could reduce energy use and environmental impacts and improve society, including quality of life and social equity. I still think about this every day.

Looking back across my career, I see that we have advanced many innovative technologies and services, but we need to make a lot more progress and faster. There is a lot at stake. We need to scale strategies across the globe to improve air quality and public health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We need to foster social equity and environmental justice. How can we advance technology without leaving people behind, including the developing world and the workforce? This keeps me up at night.

Is there someone or something that has inspired your work?

I grew up in upstate New York. My family had a close connection to farming and agriculture, and I was raised in a beautiful natural environment. I grew up biking, swimming, skiing, and ice skating – spending time outdoors throughout the seasons. I was always connected to nature. Our family had flower and vegetable gardens and supported agriculture in our community in numerous ways. I grew up understanding the close relationship between people and the environment and how much we rely on the earth for our food and health. My family life has deeply impacted and inspired my work throughout my career – starting with my parents and siblings, nieces and nephews, husband, Tim, and children, Rowan and Griffin. Students, colleagues, and friends continue to inspire me and motivate my work.

What is your favorite book or author or what are you reading right now?

I am reading a book called Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Roy Schwarts, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. It is about communicating effectively by saying less. I hope the book’s insights will help me with my teaching, research, and professional activities.

What is a fun fact about you?

I love nature and travel. I feel a close connection to the environment, which is what brought me to transportation. Transportation has a big impact on the environment. My upbringing, dedication to family, and connection to the earth are core to who I am.

What’s something about you that most people don’t know?

My father was from Lebanon. His struggles upon arriving in the U.S., tireless work to support our family, and deep commitment to my education help to keep me motivated and focused. My parents met at work in upstate New York. Later, they opened their own restaurant; they were fabulous cooks. I am the youngest of their six children.

What is your superpower?

I would love my superpower to be recognizing the superpowers of others and encouraging them to grow and blossom. It is important to acknowledge the skills and talents of individuals in our lives and to share that with them. It is not always easy to recognize one’s own superpower. I really enjoy helping people accomplish their goals and helping teams to shine.

Professor of Urban Planning & Public Policy, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.

What are your research interests and what types of projects are you currently working on?

I work in three main areas of transportation. I study travel behavior: How people decide where to live, where to work, where to shop, where to play, and how they get around. In other words, how they access the things important for a high quality of life. Recently, my work in this area has looked at how the pandemic caused long-term changes to travel behavior.

The second topic I work on is public transit, which is specifically about the buses and trains that operate on fixed-schedules and fixed-routes. My primary focuses are on who uses transit and how they use it. There are mainly two very different groups of people who use transit: those who travel to places where it’s difficult or expensive to park; and those who ride because they aren’t able to drive due to their age, income, or ability.

And the third area I work in is the politics of transportation finance and how we go about deciding how to collect and spend money on transportation. Currently, I’m writing a book with UCLA colleagues on ballot tax measures for transportation and how they influence the transportation planning process. I also just published a book looking at the history of freeway development in the United States and how the politics of finance played an enormous role in shaping the freeway systems we see today.

How did you become interested in finance?

Before my academic career, I worked as a transportation planner in the San Francisco Bay Area. While there I realized we could do all the cool planning we wanted, and work with communities, developers, and others to come up with grand ideas, but unless we had the money to pay for those plans, nothing happened. I also learned that how we got the money was a highly political process, something that planners and engineers weren’t really plugged into. This experience, among others, motivated me to leave transportation planning practice and become a professor.

What is one of your most significant research findings thus far?

I’m really excited about a project I’m working on right now with a current student and a former student who is now a professor. We’re interested in how people decide what to do at home, when to go out, and where they go when they do go out. And how this all varies by gender, income, education, race/ethnicity, and all sorts of factors. In a nutshell, we found that personal travel was notably declining well before the pandemic – and that leaving home and traveling to places has declined much more dramatically post-pandemic.

I think this has big implications for transportation as well as social relations and mental health. People leave home to go to work, go shopping, see friends, go to the movies, and all sorts of things. But every year, year-over-year, they are spending a few minutes less each day traveling, on average. This is hard to grasp if you live in a place like LA, where congestion is still endemic. But congestion has eased somewhat, the timing and direction of delays have changed, and commercial trips are increasingly replacing personal travel. These shifts are consequential and appear to be enduring.

Can you give us some examples of other changes to travel?

When looking at different age groups, we see predictable patterns, such as people in their 80s going out less than those in their 20s. However, the time that people spend traveling, across generations, is going down. And worryingly, travel times for people in their 20s and for those who have never married are going down the fastest. Not only are people not commuting to work as much, they aren’t meeting other people as they did in the past, such as by going to hear music, or movies, or to bars…they’re meeting people online, I guess. And they are spending a lot more time at home gaming and streaming. This is getting out of my expertise as a transportation person, but it’s remarkable that these activity shifts have pushed personal travel down so much. We published a paper recently about this remarkable change. And then we got post-pandemic data and in a forthcoming paper show that these trends have accelerated dramatically since 2020.

How much of the decline in travel is due to working from home?

We did some statistical modeling and about a third of the decline is from working from home, but about a third of it is due to increased “screen time.” For example, instead of going to the movies, people are staying home and streaming, or instead of going to the beach or to play miniature golf or whatever, people are spending more time gaming and doing things like that. In regards to the remaining third, we couldn’t really account for what’s causing that change.

Do you think a lot of people will continue to work from home? Is this trend here to stay?

Working from home is much, much greater than it was before the pandemic. It went from about 5 percent before the pandemic to 60 percent in May of 2020. Since then it’s gone down to about 25 to 30 percent and has stayed there, which is five to six times greater than before the pandemic. This suggests that the world has changed in a fundamental way.

How has this change affected travel patterns overall?

Rush hour has gotten much longer in duration each day, but the worst part of rush hour is not as bad as it was before the pandemic. Before you’d be on, for example, the 405 freeway here in LA and you’d be crawling along between 3:00 and 7:00 pm. But now speeds are often faster in the peak-of-the-peak, but delays are stretching earlier and later, from, say, 1:00 pm to 8:00 pm. We have a paper just out on the underlying causes of these changes in Southern California.

What’s another example of how your travel behavior research has influenced the field of transportation?

A lot of people get into the transportation business because they want transportation systems to flow smoothly and they don’t want congestion…nobody likes to sit in traffic: there are more emissions per mile traveled and it’s a waste of time. I did some research a few years ago looking to see if congestion drives firms away and if it inhibits people’s ability to engage in activities. We found that new firms tend to move toward congested areas, not away from them. They’re not moving to the congestion per se, they’re moving to places that are crowded and vibrant. So Silicon Valley, Manhattan, these are places where there are a lot of firms doing very well; everyone wants to be where the action is and that’s also where things get really crowded or “congested.”

There is also this idea that we shouldn’t build more housing in the center of cities because it would make congestion worse. Well, maybe. But it doesn’t seem to make people worse off. In another paper we found that congestion tends to inhibit people’s participation in activities out on the suburban fringe, but has no effect on activity participation in central urban areas. In other words, increased development densities push destinations closer together, making them easy to get to, even in traffic. New York is horribly congested, but people there are not short of things to do.

If we’re just trying to optimize vehicle flows, we can get the idea that we don’t want development to occur in the central parts of the city because we want to keep vehicles flowing – that free-flowing traffic is more important than economic and social activities. But we should really care about transportation as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself. The end being people living active, full, and engaged lives. So maybe allowing development to occur in central cities is a good thing because people won’t have to drive so far, and not a bad thing because it might make traffic worse.

What do you consider one of your most significant career accomplishments thus far?

My most significant accomplishment without question is the opportunity to work with a string of incredible students who have gone on to do really important things as practicing professionals and within academia. I’m really proud of my role as a teacher and mentor for so many students who have accomplished so much and had a real impact in the world.

What issues in transportation keep you up at night?

Climate change and the people who are being left behind. Climate change is an existential threat to our future and transportation plays a big role in that. While I wouldn’t characterize myself as a “transportation and the environment” person, it’s gotten to the point where everybody has to care about this and to some degree be a “transportation and the environment” person.

A key climate strategy is reducing the amount of vehicle travel and thus emissions. However, our cities and transportation systems are structured primarily around people traveling by car, and goods by truck. If we try to do things to make it harder to travel in cars in pursuit of “green” transportation, then will we end up pushing the least advantaged among us out of cars?

My colleagues at UCLA and elsewhere have done a lot to show that if you build a city around access by cars, people who have access to cars accomplish a lot more. I also have colleagues who have shown how, when low-income people get access to cars, all sorts of good things happen. They get better jobs, they have greater access to healthcare, they buy more affordable and higher quality food, among other benefits. All these “good” things happen because we’ve designed cities around the car – well other than San Francisco, New York, and a few other places. Making sure we don’t pursue one goal of a greener transportation system at the expense of the least advantaged among us is something I really worry about and struggle with.

What or who has most inspired you?

I didn’t go to college out of high school; after high school I worked as a gas-pump jockey and mechanic. But I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a terrible mechanic interested in transportation. So I decided to learn about being a travel agent. I started taking classes at a community college in Long Beach and I wandered into an economics class because I thought it would help me in some aspects of becoming a travel agent. There I met a professor who just blew me away. He made me think about all sorts of questions that I hadn’t really thought about as an 18 year-old kid. He completely changed my life. He challenged me to think about what was right, what was just, what we had information about, and how economics could help us make sense out of complicated problems. I ended up really throwing myself into my academic studies, and he convinced me to transfer to Berkeley. While financial challenges led me to get my bachelor’s degree at UCLA, I went back to Berkeley to study transportation engineering and planning. After a few years as a Bay Area transportation planner, I went back to UCLA for a PhD and ended up becoming a professor – something I thought I’d never do.

What’s something about you most people don’t know?

That I always, always, wear two pairs of socks. I played basketball endlessly as a kid. Shoes weren’t as good then so at some point a coach said, “Wear two pairs of socks and lace your shoes up tightly and you won’t get as many blisters.” From then on I got into the habit of wearing two pairs of socks. I have a very close friend that, owing to my interest in mysteries, says, “If I ever hear that you’ve been found dead in a ditch somewhere, the first thing I’ll ask is how many socks was he wearing? If they found the body with just one pair of socks, I will know that it was foul play.”

What is your superpower?

I don’t have a superpower. I wish I did.

What would your wife say is your superpower?

Being a naive optimist.

UC ITS Scholar Spotlight: Daniel A. Rodríguez

Director, UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies
Chancellor’s Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning
University of California, Berkeley

What are your present research interests?

I work on the reciprocal connection between transportation and land development—how transportation affects where development happens, and vice versa. I also look at how development influences where and how we travel, by what mode, and with whom.
If a residential area is dense and walkable, or has good transit access, do we travel differently than if it’s suburban, or more auto oriented? Do we have distinct travel patterns depending on where we live? I also focus on what that connection means for other aspects of urban development.

What types of projects are you currently working on?

I am currently working on several research projects focused on the health impacts of transportation and urban development. For example, bicycling or walking to places may have a positive impact on health through exercise, but it could also have some negative impacts. If we’re walking along a busy road, but cars are spewing lots of emissions, then that’s a negative for our health and well-being.

What would you consider your most significant research finding or accomplishment thus far?

There are a couple of very interesting research findings that I’d highlight. One is that we’re seeing increasing evidence that it is not so much how long people travel…45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half…but rather travel delay, commonly referred to as traffic congestion, that seems to explain the impact of transportation on mental health. We’ve all experienced this. Some of us actually choose to take a longer route to our destination so long as we’re moving since we detest being in stop and go traffic or just stopped and not moving.

So, it’s that travel delay that seems to be mostly associated with depressive symptoms rather than overall travel time. That’s a novel finding maybe from the last five, seven years.

I would say the other major finding is really how much transit contributes to people’s health through walking, taking into account the fact that a lot of people walk quite far to get to and from transit. Transit is a wonderful drug, a miracle drug, in the sense that about 20, 22, 23 percent of Americans get the levels of physical activity recommended by the Surgeon General just from walking to and from transit.

We’ve looked at other countries and it’s the same. Transit riders are walking much more than they think. So transit’s benefit is kind of hidden in terms of how much walking and exercise people get. And it is a quite effective means to encourage people to walk more.

What issues in transportation keep you up at night?

There are two things around transportation finance that keep me up at night.

One is how should public transportation be funded given the challenges that we currently see in terms of financing? That is enormous. I think public transportation is in for a major reckoning. I don’t think that there’s going to be much of an appetite in the future to keep throwing money at it.

And related to that, we need to face the lack of a stable revenue source for transportation generally as more and more people switch to electric vehicles, which in California is about 25 percent of all new vehicles sold. In California, we raise money for transportation infrastructure primarily through the gas tax. That’s going away because of electric vehicle sales, which is a good thing, but policymakers and researchers need to put our heads together to consider other sources of revenue exist that are fair, equitable, stable, and predictable, so that we can maintain our roads, our sidewalks, make sure that the buses are running, and do everything else that needs to happen for California’s transportation system to operate.

Is there someone that has inspired you or your work?

Absolutely. There are a number of people that have done really remarkable things for urban transportation. Those individuals have been a big inspiration.

I want to call out three people in particular. Joe Sussman was a great systems thinker, connecting transportation organizations to information flows and the need for regional thinking. Ralph Gakenheimer, who recently passed away, always highlighted the importance of informal transportation and some of our ‘forgotten’ transportation modes, especially for low income residents. And Jonathan Levine who speaks with lucidity and clarity about the concept of accessibility.

In a more general way, from my hometown in Bogota, the implementation of the bus rapid transit system was very significant. The rapid buses that many world cities have now, including some in California, were part of an incredible paradigm shift worldwide. It resulted in a dramatic transformation of public transportation for cities around the world.

I admire the tenacity and the vision that those decision makers had to make these things happen.

What are you reading right now?

A book called The Bitch from a Colombian author, Pilar Quintana. It’s a beautiful book about the Pacific Coast in Colombia and a female dog who was abandoned and adopted by this person. It’s the story of their relationship and basically how the dog sometimes escapes and goes into the rainforest. The dog comes back off and on and they have this beautiful subtle connection. Through that, this author has just a fantastic way of describing the landscape in ways that are hard to convey. It’s very stimulating and just has gorgeous prose.

Is there anything that you’re watching or streaming right now?

I’m streaming a few different shows. Fisk, which is an Australian comedy. It’s really funny, very dark humor, but enjoyable. Babylon Berlin, which is a German series on Netflix. It’s dark and serious. It’s not a comedy. I’m also watching The Man in the High Castle, which was on Amazon until recently. A dystopian alternative history that makes you think about the past and future.

What is a fun fact about you?

I love to ride my bicycle to most places. Not exactly everywhere, but I ride my bicycle a lot, including for recreation. I go for very long bike rides.

What’s something about you that people don’t know?

I have one chicken and one dog at home. I used to have four chickens but sadly three have passed away.

What is your superpower?

Empathy. Sometimes it’s loaded with kryptonite, too. Once you empathize too much, it can actually prevent you from being able to move ahead or make a decision.

Distinguished Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, UC Davis; and Director, National Center for Sustainable Transportation

What are your research interests and what types of projects are you currently working on?

Most of my work has to do with how we reduce driving. I’m currently involved in several projects with state agencies, including the California Air Resources Board and Caltrans, mostly looking at the empirical evidence produced by the research community around various possible strategies for encouraging people to drive less. For example, what if we improve transit? How much difference can that make? Or what if we invest in bicycle lanes?

What would you consider your most significant research contribution thus far?

I feel the impact I’ve had on the field is more about how people think about transportation. A lot of my early work was about how neighborhood design can shape travel behavior. That was not something people were talking about at the time, but there’s been a whole lot of work on this topic since then. I think some of my approaches to thinking about that question helped shape what has come since, such as my later work on bicycling as a mode of transportation, and again, I was one of the first to study this. I like to think that my earlier work helped to shape and inspire the growth in the research that came after mine.

I’ve recently written a book called Shifting Gears about a new way of thinking about transportation—how the profession thinks about its work, the ideas that underlie what we do in transportation. For example, much of what we do reflects the fact that we think of cars as providing freedom and define efficiency in terms of speed. I like to think my book is getting people to think differently.

What issues in transportation keep you up at night?

The fact that we continue to pour billions and billions of dollars into expanding the highway system at the same time knowing we need to get people to drive less if there is any hope of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the amount we need to and by when we need to.

I’m also concerned about the impact of all of that driving, and all of that roadway space, on our communities and their quality of life, in particular with regard to safety. More driving means more emissions, more noise, more risk of injuries and fatalities. We made some good progress for a while, but now it’s stalled out.

Related to this is the growing size and weight of our vehicles. That definitely gives me nightmares. We’ve built a roadway system to move as many cars as we can, as quickly as we can, without much thought to the negative side effects. Heavy vehicles pose greater risks for bicyclists and pedestrians as well as having greater air quality and noise impacts.

Is there someone or something that inspired you to start this work?

I talk a lot in my book about my childhood experiences with transportation. I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to work in the transportation field, but when I look back, I see how important transportation was in my life. Whether it was family road trips, biking to and from school, or playing around after school on my bike. It all makes sense now how I ended up where I am today. Transportation is central to everything. It’s all around us. Yet, we need to do it so much better than we’re doing it now.

What’s your favorite book or your author? What are you reading right now?

I read a lot. I have huge piles of books. This weekend I finished the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club series, which I just adore. It’s about older people solving mysteries in the UK. I absolutely loved James McBride’s fabulous book, Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. It addresses some very serious issues with a touch of humor and lots of insight and just a richness about the characters and the lives they were leading.

Is there anything you’re streaming right now?

Yes, we seem to be on a kind of snowy northern streak right now. We’re streaming True Detective. The latest season is set in Alaska, but filmed in Iceland. Then we went back to Northern Exposure.

What’s something about you that most people don’t know?

I don’t like buttons, which I recently found out is a thing.¹ I have another friend who’s also anti-button.

What is your superpower?

My superpower is tidiness.

^{1. It is called koumpounophobia. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had an aversion to buttons.}

What are your research interests and what types of projects are you currently working on?

My research interests revolve around bicycling, particularly bicycling as an alternative mode of travel. This work stems from an overall research interest in environmental sustainability and equity.

My current projects are closely aligned with these interests, such as, quantifying the benefits of active transportation investments, evaluating e-bike rebate programs and the potential for e-bikes to substitute for car travel, and exploring how micromobility services such as shared fleets of scooters and bikes, could not only help with environmental sustainability by reducing automobile use, but also promote social equity by giving those without vehicles more affordable transportation choices.^1, 2, 3

A lot of my work on e-bikes and micromobility is about how it’s changing people’s behavior, whose behavior is changing, and whose behavior isn’t changing. Also, how we can leverage those services and programs for social good as well as reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Do you have any projects beyond bikes and micromobility?

I also have some projects on measuring accessibility statewide for cars, transit, biking, walking; and another on tracking whether regions are making progress on improving accessibility in their regional transportation plans as they’re supposed to under SB 375.⁴ This work relates to evaluating ways to reduce car use and the many strategies we can use to do that, whether through land use strategies, such as promoting mixed uses and compact development, pricing strategies, such as charging for parking, or promoting alternative travel modes to driving.

What do you consider your most significant research finding or accomplishment thus far?

A key finding from my research is that shared micromobility has potential to both advance equity and increase environmental sustainability. We’ve found some evidence ^5, 6 of this in the Sacramento region where people with lower incomes who used micromobility services did so at very high rates, and a large share of micromobility trips were substituting for car trips.

There’s still a lot more research that needs to be done on this topic. For example, there’s a lot of criticism that micromobility and shared micromobility only work in dense areas. The private sector has been running these services now for the past few years, and they’re focused just on trying to be profitable, so they’re not actually looking for micromobility to be a public transit option, which a lot of us working in this space want it to be.

If we can figure out how to incentivize the use of micromobility and reduce the overall cost, there’s a real potential to reduce GHGs and provide a new low cost transportation option for people whose accessibility is limited and don’t have a lot of good travel options. This outcome is something I’m excited about.

What issues in transportation keep you up at night?

That we have a car monoculture in this country and it’s growing across the world.

I agree with a lot of other scholars that people need to have more transportation choices that will enable them to change the way they travel. But having viable alternatives to traveling by car is often undercut by land use patterns and policies, such as single-use zoning, roadway expansion, low density development, and not capturing the true cost of driving (through pricing or other means) to account for the environmental and social harm it causes. We have some interesting new policies to promote compact development and mixed use, but these policies aren’t delivering at a rate that needs to occur.

The other problem related to this is that land use changes take decades. We’re looking for rapid interventions that can occur now and reduce emissions now. We need strong land use policies that can make communities more accessible so that people can easily walk, bike, take transit, or ride a scooter to daily destinations.

I don’t know how to solve this bigger issue. It’s a really challenging topic.

Is there something that inspired you to do this work?

When I think of inspiration for the work I do, I think about our town of Davis. It shaped a lot of how I think about transportation and how transportation could be better. We’re not perfect, we’ve got a lot of car use, but Davis is this unique little city where biking is somehow a norm and it took decades for that to take shape.

It inspires me in that it’s not that different from a lot of other places in the U.S. yet it’s got this integrated transportation network; travel distances are pretty short and we have pretty good accessibility at least within the city.

There are a lot of other places across the state and country that could be more like Davis. I’m inspired by that. Just living in this environment and realizing we can make other cities like Davis. For example, when talking about biking and walking as the norm for travel, sometimes I’ll hear people say “that’s fine in Europe, but it’s not going to happen in the U.S.” Well, I live in a city where this is happening, and some of our bigger cities in California are also pretty inspirational with a greater number of people using transit and walking. Cities across California are trying really hard to grow those shares, which I think is a powerful thing.

Is there any particular person who has inspired you?

My former advisor, Professor Susan Handy has inspired a lot of my work. She has long pushed back against a lot of the norms in transportation. The U.S. has a horrible history in planning, not only with redlining and exclusionary zoning, but also more generally through systematic environmental and social harms. Yet there also seems to be this movement in transportation that has the power to change for good. Susan has shown me that even though we have this dark past, we have the potential in our field to do a lot of social and environmental good. She teaches hundreds of undergrads every year. Not every one of them is going to go out and do something with transportation, but a lot of them do. It’s fun and inspiring to think about all those people Susan has impacted at some level. They’re out there in some field, hopefully helping out in the world.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Anne of Green Gables with my nine year old daughter. It’s about a girl who has big emotions but her community is kind of closed off, a little regimented, and she shines this light on their life. I think it’s a wonderful thing to see this beacon of light come into this community. I think that we all could use that in our lives a little bit more. It’s a very special book. Anne is an amazing character that is just timeless.

My daughter is a picky reader, but when she gets something that she likes she grabs onto it and just gets hooked. It’s really fun to read with her and experience the book as she’s experiencing it.

What are you streaming right now?

My kids have been super into Encanto. We’ve watched that tons of times.

What’s a fun fact about you?

People usually smile when I tell them I play the accordion. I grew up playing the piano. My wife got me an accordion for a birthday present more than ten years ago. I was really excited. I think I played it every day for a year just to learn it. I play for fun, just songs around the house. It’s a very interesting underappreciated instrument although it seems to be having some kind of resurgence.

What is your superpower?

I feel like that’s changed over time. If you asked me 5, 10, or 20 years ago, I could have given you what I thought were the best parts of me. Now, I look back and laugh at that because of how much I’ve changed. I have a growing sense of openness which is new, which is becoming one of the most powerful parts of me: openness to different ideas and perspectives.

Any last thoughts you’d like to share?

I think about my kids and how they’re growing up, and I wish there was a way to know how to pursue lasting change in younger generations. It’s not about convincing them to do it. It’s mostly about showing them the problems in our society, accepting where we are, and working together toward a better future.

^{1. Is Micromobility Being Used in Place of Car Trips in Daily Travel (or “Trip Chains”)?}
^{2. Micromobility Trip Characteristics, Transit Connections, and COVID-19 Effects}
^{3. What Travel Modes do Shared E-scooters Displace? A Review of Recent Research Findings}
^{4. Senate Bill 375 requires regional planning agencies to align their land use, housing, and transportation policies to achieve state mandated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.}
^{5. Investigating the Influence of Dock-less Electric Bike Share on Travel Behavior, Attitudes, Health, and Equity (Phase I)}
^{6. How Dock-less Electric Bike Share Influences Travel Behavior, Attitudes, Health, and Equity (Phase II)}

Distinguished Blue Planet Prize Professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science and Policy, and founding Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis

Tell us about the beginning of ITS-Davis.

I founded ITS-Davis about 35 years ago. From the very beginning we’ve had two major themes. One is sustainable transportation, including electric vehicles, hydrogen, low carbon fuels, cleaner burning cars and trucks, advanced mobility, sustainable communities, public transit, and active transportation. Our other theme is bringing science to policy. We’ve always engaged closely with industry, government, and non-governmental organizations, making sure our research is impactful.

More recently we’ve expanded our work on sustainable transportation internationally with centers in Europe, India, the Global South, and China.

What would you say is your most significant accomplishment so far?

My biggest accomplishment was in 2007, when Governor Schwarzenegger asked me, along with a professor from UC Berkeley, to design a low carbon fuel standard for the state of California.

We put together a research team from UC Berkeley and UC Davis and spent six very intensive months researching everything we could find about life cycle analysis of fuels and the role of oil companies and electric utilities. We interviewed a large number of stakeholders, including meetings with a number of industry and NGO delegations, including a group from Canada who explained to us the importance of oil sands in Canada, and what could be done about reducing their climate impact.

We provided our design of a low carbon fuel standard to the California Air Resource Board, and it was adopted with minor changes. It is now one of California’s most effective and important policies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, it’s been adopted by Oregon, the State of Washington, and Canada, with some modifications.

Since its adoption, I’ve had a team of researchers at ITS-Davis providing technical support to all of those states and entities and continuing to do research to support amendments and enhancements to the policy.

When you first began this work, what inspired you?

My experience at UC Berkeley as a graduate student led to my focus on sustainable transportation, and especially the energy and environmental impacts. While I was a student, I worked with ITS-Berkeley, which inspired me to form an ITS at Davis. My advisors at Berkeley were Bill Garrison and Adib Khanafani, both great mentors.

Going back further, I had a professor at my undergraduate school Cornell, Arnie Meyburg, who first got me interested in transportation. And my experience in the Peace Corps in Honduras as an urban planner also had a big impact on me. All these experiences reinforced the idea that if I was going to do research, I wanted to do research that has value and impact.

What innovative research has ITS-Davis been doing?

My most recent book in 2018 was called The Three Revolutions. It was about automation, electrification, and ride sharing. We started a research program specifically focused on those three revolutions and how they’re becoming more and more integrated–or at least should be.

One of our biggest centers at ITS-Davis is the Electric Vehicle Research Center headed by Gil Tal. It has 30 employees, and is truly having an impact. Globally, they’ve led delegations to Australia, for instance, to work with the government agencies and legislators there to figure out how to design policies for electric vehicles. They’re also heading up a big research program, primarily funded by the California Energy Commission, to determine how reliable electric vehicle chargers really are and how to make them more reliable.

Another example of linking research and engagement was with China. A number of years ago, our China Center for Energy and Transportation spent considerable time with the Chinese government helping them understand how California’s policies have evolved for electric vehicles, and then helped them design their own electric vehicle policies.

Overall, the electric vehicle part of our work has been very successful. Both in terms of our research program as well as disseminating that resarch.

Another important transportation revolution, just getting started is vehicle automation. The technology has quite a long history, including substantial research at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, but interest has gone through cycles. I co-wrote an op-ed recently for The Hill saying people are missing the point with automated vehicles. We need to be thinking about all the benefits automation could provide, not just safety, but all of the social justice benefits, all of the economic benefits, and environmental benefits. But for this to happen, automated vehicles must be shared, such as the robotaxi model carrying many passengers, not just solo riders.

One of the big challenges is how we get more sharing into the transportation system, especially shared rides and making sure that automated vehicles come on line as a commerical service that emphasizes ride pooling. This is a major interest of mine for California and the U.S. as well as the rest of the world–and i’m committed to helping the policy world encourage shared and pooled AVs.

Have you ridden in an automated vehicle?

Quite a few times. The first few times there was a safety driver, but the last time, there was no one in the vehicle, just me. It was in Phoenix and it took me from the hotel to the airport. It was an unnerving experience at first, because you want to say to the car, well, are you sure you know where you’re going? We’re used to having someone to talk to. But it really did such a great job. It handled all the turns safely, including unprotected left turns. I felt quite comfortable by the time I got to the airport.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading Shifting Gears by Susan Handy, my colleague at UC Davis and the Associate Director of ITS-Davis.

The book just came out a few months ago and it’s really very well written. She addresses whether we really need more roads and the various controversies in California these days about expanding road capacity, adding lanes, and other issues.

There’s also the question of induced travel. If you build it, will they just induce more travel, and then what have you gained? You still have the same amount of congestion and you’ve also increased vehicle use, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and cost.

What interesting shows are you watching?

The last series I watched was Drops of Gold. It’s about the wine industry in Europe and Japan. I love good wine. I am an enthusiastic participant in wine tasting. I actually watch movies about sommeliers.Some people accuse me of creating a center in Europe just so I can indulge my love of good wine and good food. Maybe there is a shred of truth to that.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I grew up on a chicken and egg farm, but now I love urban living. I like accessing everything without needing a car. My favorite zero emission vehicle is my bicycle. I gave my wife an electric bike for her birthday and she loves it.

What’s something about you that most people don’t know?

I was an avid motorcyclist in my younger days and spent a summer riding all through Europe with my brother. I’ve driven across the U.S on a motorcycle.

I am also an avid downhill skier. And I also used to love squash; it was my favorite sport, but then I had a hip replacement and the doctors said squash is the number one sport to avoid. It was so sad to give it up.

What is your superpower?

Maybe it’s inspiring and motivating lots of students and researchers to pursue ideas for making transportation more sustainable.