I am an Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning at Alabama A&M University’s College of Agricultural, Life and Natural Sciences.
Learn more about me and my research.
About Me
- Ph.D., Urban Planning and Development — University of Southern California
- Master of City Planning — University of California, Berkeley
- B.A., Urban Studies — Stanford University
- A.A., Communication Studies; Philosophy — West Valley College
Transportation-land use connection, travel behavior, transportation policy, transportation finance, public transit, urban economics
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. While I hope my research can influence practice and policy in some form, and welcome collaboration opportunities when they arise, I value academia as a space where my work’s worth is not contingent on these factors. Apart from my research, 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.
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.
In this course, I survey with students what “transportation” is and competing ideas about the role of a transportation planner. I begin by reviewing principles and structures that underlie transportation planning and policy, including equity, efficiency, governance, and transportation economics. I then facilitate discussion with students to relate their career motivations with competing ideas about the job of transportation planners, before applying these learnings to a review of trending issues in transportation.
In this course, I provide students an introduction to urban economics. Much of the course focuses on mastering foundational material, including transportation as a transaction cost, agglomeration, bid-rent, and the monocentric model. In the latter segments of class, I explore with students more advanced urban economics topics (e.g., spatial equilibrium, Zipf’s Law), empirical research on the legitimacy of urban economics theory, and the application of urban economics to planning practice.
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
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
Mallett, Zakhary and Nicholas Wilsey. “Beyond Dispersion: Density, Industry, and Political Fragmentation in the Geography of Regional Job Centers.” Journal of Regional Science (2026)
Most research on the spatial organization of employment focuses on individual metropolitan areas, limiting insight into cross-regional and generalizable patterns. At the same time, recent studies often rely on broad indicators of employment dispersion — such as the share of urbanized land occupied by jobs — while methodological advances in identifying job centers have lagged… [W]e adapt a spatial clustering model to identify job centers across the 100 most populous regions of the United States at three relative density thresholds. We then document variation in employment centralization and concentration across regions and density strata, and test — via regression models — how these patterns relate to metropolitan age, industry composition, and political fragmentation, serving as proxies for car orientation, agglomeration dynamics, and inter-municipal competition, respectively. Our findings show that professional services are strongly associated with dense employment clustering, health care tends to agglomerate at lower densities, and the regional prevalence of finance is linked to greater employment concentration and central business district (CBD) dominance. Additionally, denser regions tend to have fewer but more dominant job centers, and political fragmentation is associated with flatter job center hierarchies and weaker CBD primacy.
Mallett, Zakhary. “Transportation finance equity: A theoretical and empirical review of pricing equity, expenditure equity, and pricing-expenditure equity in US transit provision.” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2025)
Research concerning transit pricing and expenditure equity overwhelmingly emphasizes pricing disparities or expenditure disparities without consideration of the other. Findings broadly indicate that transit investments and fare policies in the United States disproportionately burden marginalized populations or disproportionately benefit socioeconomically advantaged populations. However, disparities in what different populations pay relative to the costs of services they receive—that is, the economic subsidies they receive—are surprisingly underexplored in the literature. Yet, this analysis is essential for evaluating whether government subsidies are being used effectively, efficiently, and equitably. In addition, by overlooking how costs and benefits vary across locations and times of travel, the literature often treats the amount people travel as fully reflective of both the benefits they receive and the costs they impose…
Mallett, Zakhary. “Inequitable inefficiency: A case study of rail transit fare policies.” Journal of Transport and Land Use (2025)
…[In t]his study[, I] measure equity by analyzing spatial and temporal cost recovery variability of two rail systems… I scale origin-destination trip cost recoveries to stations and operating time periods and find that travel associated with outlying areas and off-peak times receive more subsidy. I further find that subsidy patterns are marginally progressive; they positively correlate with select disadvantaged socioeconomic groups…
Wei, Dan, Genevieve Giuliano, Kelly-Anne Moffa, and Zakhary Mallett. “Analysis of alternative commercial vehicle road user charges.” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2025)
As fuel tax revenues decline from increased fuel efficiency and the transition to alternative fuels, governments are searching for new revenue sources to support the transportation system. User fees are among the most widely considered substitutes. They could increase both system efficiency and the equity of transportation taxes by more closely aligning prices with costs imposed. We conduct an analysis of mileage-based user charges (MBUC) for trucks in California. We explore the differences in MBUC relative to current state fuel and weight fees in terms of revenues generated, changes in cost sharing among truck classes and commodity categories, and implications to the State economy as well as households from different income groups. Revenue neutral scenarios have little economy-wide impacts, but shares of fees paid differ across vehicle classes. Increasing the charge to include pollution costs results in negative economic outcomes. Distributional impacts are negligible.
Mallett, Zakhary. “Explaining Variation in Commute Time: The Role of Age, Region, and Travel Mode.” In Review
Mallett, Zakhary and Nicholas Wilsey. “Transit Commute Mode Share: The Role of Employment Geography and Spatial Constraints.” In Review