UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies

What’s Wrong with U.S. Public Transit Policy?
2011-02-01
What’s Wrong with U.S. Public Transit Policy?
Martin Wachs Lecture || February 3, 2011 || UC Berkeley
Presented by: Genevieve Giuliano, USC
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 the audience 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. Major barriers to achieving public transit’s urban planning objectives she discussed included investment and service decisions that generate public support. Evidently, effective U.S Public Transit Policy will compromise the public want with the desired technical objectives.
Read more about this event here.

Equity, Pricing, and Surface Transportation Politics
2010-04-08
Equity, Pricing, and Surface Transportation Politics
Martin Wachs Lecture || April 8, 2010 || UCLA
Presented by: Alan Altshuler, Harvard University
The 4th annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture by Alan Altshuler, professor of urban policy and planning in the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, examined the new debates about funding for surface transportation, and posed to the audience the question of how managing road congestion will occur in an era when major capacity expansion is rarely feasible. He described how these debates are also routinely framed around conceptions of equity and sought to explain the distinctive nature of equity debates in U.S surface transportation, with particular attention to congestion pricing and High Occupancy Toll Lanes.
Read more about this event here.

Gender and Mobility
2008-03-01
Gender and Mobility: A Feminist Geographer’s Perspective
Martin Wachs Lecture || March 1, 2008 || UC Berkeley
Presented by: Susan Hanson, Clark University
In the 3rd annual Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture, Susan Hanson, professor emerita of geography at Clark University, tackled the complex issues surrounding gender and mobility. Lending her perspective to this conversation, Hanson emphasized how feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. In her talk, she discussed that tackling these complex societal problems will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility. Hanson illuminated the gaps in scholarship, as we saw how work on how mobility shapes gender has emphasized gender, to the neglect of mobility, whereas research on how gender shapes mobility has dealt with mobility in great detail and paid much less attention to gender.

Keeping the City
2007-03-01
Keeping the City: A 40-Year Quest for Sustainable Urban Transport
Martin Wachs Lecture || March 1, 2007 || UCLA
Presented by: Anthony May, Leeds University
In November 2007, 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.

Why the Worst Megaprojects Get Built
2006-10-17
Why the Worst Megaprojects Get Built and How Better Policy and Planning Can Stop It
Martin Wachs Lecture ||October 17, 2006 || UC Berkeley
Presented by: Bent Flyvbjerg, Aalborg University
The inaugural Martin Wachs Distinguished Lecture was held on October 17, 2006 with Bent Flyvbjerg, professor of planning at Aalborg University, Denmark and a former Wachs doctoral student, told a packed auditorium of current and future transportation, urban and regional planners the bad news about megaprojects. The lecture discussed the tendency of these projects to go over budget, with nine out of 10 estimated to incur cost overruns. As the audience learned, demand for particular megaprojects are also significantly overestimated, while their budgets greatly exceed initial estimates, creating a costly, underutilized project. Flyvbjerg left the audience to consider how this overoptimism and overcomplexity should be addressed through policy.
