Dr. Clifford Winston presented a Visiting Scholar Seminar on April 13th on the topic, “Performance and Policy Reform of the U.S. Transportation System”. The seminar was very well attended by transportation experts in academia and private & public sectors. Dr. Winston is a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Economic Studies program, has been with Brookings since 1984. He is an applied micro-economist who specializes in the analysis of industrial organization, regulation, and transportation. In his presentation, he assessed the performance of the urban and intercity components of the U.S. transportation system on efficiency and equity grounds. After identifying pervasive inefficiencies in how the current system is managed and operated, he outlined public sector reforms to improve the system’s performance and concluded that such reforms are inadequate. Instead, he argued that privatization and deregulation offer the potential to greatly improve Americans’ satisfaction with their transportation services.

On April 27th, 2012, Dr. Daniel Graham delivered a presentation, "Wider Economic Benefits of Transport Investment and the Role of Agglomeration Economies," at the UTRC Visiting Scholar Seminar Series and shared his expertise on transportation economics. Dan Graham is a Reader in Transport Economics and Statistics in the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London. He specialises in the statistical modelling of transport systems. His main research themes are concerned with the implications of transport investment for productivity and economic growth; modelling efficiency in public transport provision; and with the wider consequences of travel demand patterns particularly in relation to safety, congestion, and environmental impacts. In his presentation, he provided an overview of the measurement of wider economic impacts in transport appraisal focusing in particular on the role of agglomeration economies. He described how agglomeration effects can be estimated and included within a standard Benefit Cost Analysis framework to assess the productivity benefits of investment. Examples from around the world were used to illustrate the potential significance of agglomeration externalities. The talk also discussed limitation of the existing approach, particularly in relation to econometric modelling, and suggested future areas for research.

Oliver Hartlben, a Guatemalan architect and city planner who recently graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a public administration degree, presented a seminar on May 18th, 2012, titled "Connecting the Dots: Future Housing Development in Post-Recession America." Before coming to Boston, he worked for seventeen years with the City of Guatemala, lastly as Director of Urban Planning, where he oversaw the complete revision of the zoning and subdivision ordinances and the planning of the city’s first bus rapid transit line. Mr. Hartleben’s presentation focused on the subprime mortgage crisis that plunged the world into the Great Recession of 2008 which had a devastating effect on the US housing market, leading many to question if the market will return to pre-crisis levels, or whether a paradigm shift has occurred that will pave the way to a ‘new normal. In his talk, he presented his argument that the US housing market will increasingly focus on the infill, retrofit, and redevelopment of inner suburbs and neighborhoods, where the new demand for walkability and urban amenities can be better combined with the latent demand for single family homes, while at the same time being less likely to encounter opposition by local officials, homebuilders, and current neighbors. This new form of development, which we call ‘Pedestrian-oriented development’, or POD, will constitute the largest opportunity to shift the pendulum back towards higher densities and more responsible urban forms and to prepare urban areas for high-capacity transit service in the future.