Wachs Lecture Series

UC Berkeley hosted the inaugural Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture--presented by Bent Flyvbjerg, professor of planning at Aalborg University, Denmark and a former Wachs doctoral student. Flybjerg discussed the tendency of megaprojects to go over budget, with nine out of 10 estimated to incur cost overruns. Demand for particular megaprojects are also significantly overestimated, while their budgets greatly exceed initial estimates, creating a costly, underutilized project. How should this overoptimism and overcomplexity be addressed through policy?

The 2nd annual Wachs Lecture, and the first held at UCLA, was delivered by Anthony May, professor at Leeds University. In his lecture, May explored the history and future of efforts to reduce the environmental footprint of transportation systems and increase their contributions to the sustainability and livability of cities, drawing on his decades of research in the United Kingdom. His lecture was followed by a commentary by Gail Goldberg, then planning director of the City of Los Angeles.

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.

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 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.