I spent the latter fourteen years of my childhood in foster care, so was transit dependent as a youth and young adult. As a teenager, not only was transit my mode of travel, but trips on transit afforded me a mental escape from life’s stresses. These formative experiences seeded my intellectual curiosity about transportation generally and transit specifically. I voiced my experiences and ideas for improving transit to the governing board of my local transit provider, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. These meetings exposed me to the professional and political aspects of planning and informed my early career objective of becoming a transit planner.

As a graduate student, I was introduced to the study of travel behavior, that travelers are insulated from the full costs of travel, and how this facilitates dispersed travel and land use patterns. I became convinced that this “construct” of financing travel from secondary sources (i.e., sales taxes, property taxes, etc.) was an underlying impediment to efficient and equitable transit planning. So, while I still desired to improve transit, I began to want a career where I could work to change this construct more fundamentally. I also began to doubt if contemporary planning practice offered a space to do this.

After earning my master’s degree, I ran for public office and became the youngest person ever elected to the governing board of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). I imagined that being a policymaker on a transportation-focused board might position me to influence the direction of planning practice. Ultimately, my public service experience at BART validated concerns I developed as a graduate student and cemented my decision to pursue an academic career.

As an academic, I use my intellectual freedom and independence to explore wide-ranging analyses and methodologies beyond politically-convenient implementation considerations. Of course, I hope my research can influence the practice and policy decision-making to some degree, especially through opportunities to provide expert opinions or testimony to policymakers. I also honor the privilege of training future generations of scholars and practitioners through my teaching.

My research transcends the fields of urban planning, urban economics, and public policy.

I investigate the relationship between transportation and land use, or the transportation-land use connection, including how disaggregate travel behavior and location decisions impact aggregate urban spatial structure, and the effectiveness and equity implications of policy intervention strategies. I mostly use quantitative methods in my research but will supplement with qualitative methods if documenting individuals’ perspectives or lived experiences is an objective of the research.

Some of my active research includes investigating the incidence of transport subsidies and the equity, efficiency, and land use impacts of this. That is, given how transport subsidies are distributed and different populations’ travel patterns, are certain groups disproportionately subsidized? And to what extent and how do transport subsidies facilitate urban growth patterns? In another research series, I am evaluating how the physical geography and economic geography (e.g., types of employment, dispersion of employment) of regions influence travel behaviors like commute mode choice.