News

Amy Lee wins CUTC dissertation award!

Amy Lee, who received her PhD in September 2023, won the 2024 Charley V. Wootan Memorial Award for Best PhD Dissertation in Transportation Policy from the Council of University Transportation Centers for her ground-breaking dissertation, The Policy and Politics of Highway Expansion. She was honored at the CUTC banquet in Washington, DC in January. She is now a post doc at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. 

Shifting Gears - available now!

Susan Handy's new book, Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation, is now available for order from your local independent bookstore and other outlets.

ITE Panel on Creating People-Oriented Communities

Dr. Susan Handy shared the stage with other transportation experts to discuss what it takes to create people-oriented communities at the ITE International Meeting and Exhibition in Portland, Oregon on August 16, 2023.  Her message: Not only do we need to do things differently, we need to think about transportation differently.

Induced travel in the news!

On January 6, 2023, the New York Times asked, "Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?" 

“It’s a pretty basic economic principle that if you reduce the price of a good then people will consume more of it,” Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, said. “That’s essentially what we’re doing when we expand freeways.” 

Award-winning students!

In December, post-doc Jamey Volker and PhD student Amy Lee were named the inaugural winners of the newly instituted Mary Nichols Environmental Policy Award for their recent paper, "Induced Vehicle Travel in the Environmental Review Process," published in the Transportation Research Record. This award is given to the outstanding paper on environmental policy in transportation by current or recently graduated UC Davis students.  

E-Bikes are Taking Off, but Public Policy Must Keep Pace

By Dillon Fitch. 

It’s not just the wind at their back. That bicyclist you saw with a comfortable cadence flying down the road is a part of a new transport trend that’s good for rider health and the environment—the electric assisted bicycle, or e-bike. However, barriers and inequities in e-biking signal a need for new policies to promote bicycling in US cities and make bicycling safe and accessible for all people.  Read more

A COVID boost for bicycling

One small silver lining in the world of transportation amidst this tragic COVID pandemic is a resurgence in bicycling. News outlets are reporting booming sales of bicycles, with bike shops scrambling to keep up with demand. “They’re buying bikes like toilet paper,” one industry expert was quotedRead more.