Contact:
Stan Paul
(310) 206-8966
paul@sppsr.ucla.edu

This year's annual UC Transportation Conference (UCTC) was held Feb. 6-8 at UCLA. The ninth annual conference was organized by graduate students from the Department of Urban Planning at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research.

The conference rotates among the four UCTC campuses (UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UCLA), and offers students the opportunity to present their work, share ideas, evaluate each other's research and generate new research direction, according to Urban Planning Ph.D. student and organizing committee co-chair Allison Yoh. More than 100 students and faculty from the fields of economics, urban planning, transportation planning, and engineering took part in the conference.

"This year we invited practitioners from both the public and private sectors to attend the conference, so we could showcase and transfer the excellent research we generate, and to get practitioners' feedback on the applicability of the research to the industry," said Yoh.

The three-day conference began with at reception featuring Leslie Rogers, Regional Administrator for the Federal Transit Administration, and Roger Snoble, Chief Executive Officer for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Authority. Rogers and Snoble framed the conference with a discussion titled
"Public Transit Policy: The View from Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles County."

The second day of the conference included panels and presentations on a number of transportation issues by students and faculty ranging from new developments in transportation operations and management to spatial analysis of travel and travelers. Former Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, was the keynote speaker for the afternoon program. Dukakis, a visiting lecturer at the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, and vice-chair of the Amtrak Reform Board, spoke about high speed rail developments in California and the United States.

"This year we tried to mix different levels of policy making perspectives, ranging from federal to local, and to integrate research on populations that are often overlooked in the profession," said Yoh, who is also a member of the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority board of directors. Keynote speaker for this year's conference was Dr. Sandra Rosenbloom, Professor of Planning and Director of the Roy P. Drachman Institute for Land and Regional Development Studies at the University of Arizona. Rosenbloom's research focuses on transportation issues facing women, the elderly and people with disabilities.

The conference concluded with a tour of the newest region of the L.A. Metro Rail system known as the Pasadena Gold Line which is scheduled to open in July 2003. Conference attendees had the opportunity to view the new line's stations in their varying stages of construction.

The organizing committee included Urban Planning M.A. students Monica Davis, Camille Fink (co-chair), Amy Ford and Kevin Holliday, and Ph.D. students Dan Chatman and Lisa Schweitzer. Norman Wong, research assistant to Urban Planning professor Brian Taylor, also was on the the planning committee.