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About Me

Education
Research Interests

Transportation-land use connection, travel behavior, transportation policy, transportation finance, public transit, urban economics

Biography

A black and white image of a blue button.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.

Teaching

In my teaching, I aim to instill creative thinking about solutions to urban planning challenges, as well as promote critical thinking about both assumptions behind those solutions and ways to evaluate their effectiveness. Particularly in graduate classes, I achieve this through a combination of lecture and empirical readings. Rather than lecturing on textbook readings, I lecture on foundational concepts and ideas (i.e., my lectures are the “textbook”) and I have students immerse themselves in empirical articles that illuminate critical thinking on the topics. I also use course discussion and course projects to expose students to competing perspectives, including those that challenge their own perspectives and my perspectives.

Below are brief synopses of elective courses that I teach and recent syllabi that provide a more thorough outline of course content.

Transportation and Land Use Planning

In this course, I review with students the transportation-land use connection — that is, the intrinsic relationship between travel behavior and the built environment — and the many policy interventions employed for addressing challenges in this space. I dedicate one module of the course to review transportation plan modeling used in practice.

I currently teach this course in a seminar format, but intend to teach it in a traditional lecture format in the future.

Urban Mass Transit

In this course, I introduce students to transit’s evolution as a transport mode in the United States, including the competing policy objectives of transit in the United States today. I review both capital planning and operations planning, and equity and efficiency implications of planning decision-making are recurrent themes throughout the course.

Research

Overview

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.

Selected Writings and Publications

Refereed Articles

Mallett, Zakhary. “Bridging allocative and productive efficiency in US transit policy research: A Review.” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2024)

In this paper, I review literature that can build foundation for integrating allocative and productive efficiency research of transit provision in the United States. Both frameworks concern transit performance but use distinct methods and talk past each other. … This isolation in research approach and scale of focus leaves unclear the union between how much transit to produce, and when and where to produce it…

Mallett, Zakhary. “Spatial and Temporal Variability of Rail Transit Costs and Cost Effectiveness.” Transportation Research Record (2022)

Previous research has evaluated the temporal variability of bus transit costs and shown that peak period service costs more to operate in both gross and net terms. However, research on spatial variability of transit costs broadly, and for rail transit in particular, is quite limited. Using transit agency data on labor and train allocations, I develop a cost model that allocates labor and semi-fixed capital costs to times-of-day and each link and station of two regional rapid rail transit networks in order to evaluate temporal and spatial variability of costs and costs-per-rider…

Working Papers

Boarnet, Marlon, Clemens Pilgram, and Zakhary Mallett. “Borrowing the Smarts from other Cities: An Out-of-Sample Prediction Model for Dockless Scooter Trip Generation.” In Review

Mallett, Zakhary. “Inequitable Inefficiency: A Case Study of Rail Transit Fare Policies.” In Review

Mallett, Zakhary. “Transportation finance equity: A review of pricing equity, expenditure equity, and pricing-expenditure equity of transit.” In Review

Wei, Dan, Genevieve Giuliano, Kelly-Anne Moffa, and Zakhary Mallett. “Analysis of alternative commercial vehicle road user charges.” In Review

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