The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) is studying congestion pricing to manage the region’s heavy traffic and unpredictable travel times. We examined a century of programs to reduce congestion and found that several strategies were pursued over and over again in different eras. Los Angeles repeatedly built new street, highway, and transit capacity, regulated drivers and vehicle traffic flows, increased the use of information about traffic conditions, and controlled land use to influence traffic. Road pricing was proposed a century ago but not implemented and congestion grew despite these many efforts. In this webinar, learn how current studies are promising and can be informed by lessons learned from past congestion policies.
Speakers:
Martin Wachs, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning, University of California
Peter Sebastian Chesney, Ph.D Candidate and Fellow at the Center for History and Policy, University of California
Yu Hong Hwang, Master’s Candidate in Urban and Regional Planning, University of California
Jeff Davis, Senior Fellow, Eno Center for Transportation
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Martin Wachs is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Civil & Environmental Engineering and of City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directed the Institute of Transportation Studies and the University of California Transportation Center. He earlier spent 25 years at UCLA, where he was Chairman of the Department of Urban Planning for eleven years. After retiring from the University, Wachs became the Director of Transportation, Space, and Technology Program at the RAND Corporation. He now conducts research at UCLA in transportation policy. Dr. Wachs served on the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) for nine years and was the TRB Chairman during the year 2000. Dr. Wachs was Transportation Policy Advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, and was appointed by California Governor Pete Wilson to a “Blue Ribbon Commission on California Infrastructure.” He currently serves on a statewide committee created by the legislature to design a new system of road user charges for California and is a member of the Peer Review Group of the California High Speed Rail program.
Peter Sebastian Chesney is completing a Ph.D. in the Department of History and is a Fellow at the Luskin Center for History and Policy at UCLA. Peter holds a certificate from UCLA’s Urban Humanities Institute and writes regular blog posts about history, media, and theory as @historycritic on Instagram.
Yu Hong Hwang is a candidate for the Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning and a Researcher at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He holds a degree in Materials Engineering from UCLA.
