Speaker: John Pucher, Ph.D  Professor of Urban Planning Rutgers University

Over the past few decades, urban transportation systems in Europe have evolved quite differently than in the United States. Most Western European Countries have standards of living at least as high as in the U.S. and similar levels of urbanization, industrialization, and technological development. Yet European cities have far more extensive and higher quality public transport systems than the U.S. and a much higher proportion of trip making is by public transport, bicycling, and walking. Automobile ownership has, of course, increased greatly in Europe since 1950, but the auto still accounts for a much lower proportion of total travel than in the U.S. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the extreme auto dependence of most Americans, Europeans have a wide range of attractive transport alternatives to the automobile.

John Pucher has spent most of the past ten years doing comparative analysis of urban transportation in Europe and North America. In his talk, he will describe the most recent trends in Europe and compare them to the U.S. His central hypothesis is that a wide range of public policies is largely responsible for eliminating most alternatives to the auto in the U.S. The auto addiction of most Americans has been produced by many decades of massive subsidies to automobile use and low-density suburban living. Auto drivers in the U.S. pay only a small fraction of the full social, environmental, and economic cost of auto use. In contrast, European governments have long made it very expensive and more difficult to own and operate an automobile. Moreover, they have complemented that policy with a long-term commitment to expanding and improving public transport, bicycling and walking alternatives to the auto. Professor Pucher will discuss the important policy differences between Europe and the U.S. and speculate on whether the more balanced European transport policies would be appropriate in the U.S.

Professor Pucher teaches urban planning at Rutgers University, where he has been since receiving his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978. He has conducted research in a wide range of topics in transport economics and policy. He has directed numerous research projects for the U.S. Department of Transportation and for various European ministries of transport. Currently he is writing a book on the emerging urban transport crisis in Europe and North America.