Todd Litman

Todd Litman is the executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

Member for
19 years 4 months

Contributed 446 posts

Full Bio

Todd Litman is founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative solutions to transport problems. His work helps to expand the range of impacts and options considered in transportation decision-making, improve evaluation methods, and make specialized technical concepts accessible to a larger audience. His research is used worldwide in transport planning and policy analysis.

Mr. Litman has worked on numerous studies that evaluate transportation costs, benefits and innovations. He authored the Online TDM Encyclopedia, a comprehensive Internet resource for identifying and evaluating mobility management strategies; Transportation Cost and Benefit Analysis: Techniques, Estimates and Implications, a comprehensive study which provides cost and benefit information in an easy-to-apply format; and Parking Management Best Practices, the most comprehensive book available on management solutions to parking problems. Mr. Litman is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops. His presentations range from technical and practical to humorous and inspirational. He is active in several professional organizations, including the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Transportation Research Board (a section of U.S. National Academy of Sciences). He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Transportation Research A, a professional journal.

Greetings from Manila

Greetings from Manila where I'm attending the Asian Development Bank's Transport Forum 2012. It is an exciting and important event: the types of transport planning investments that the bank supports now can have huge impacts on the nature of future.

Share Your Ideas for Evaluating Transport System Performance

<a href="http://www.dot.gov/map21">Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21)</a>, the new U.S. federal transportation law, has the following main goals: <ol style="margin-top: 0cm"> <li class="MsoNormal">Safety</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Infrastructure condition</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Congestion reduction</li> <li class="MsoNormal">System reliability</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Freight movement and economic vitality</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Environmental sustainability</li> <li class="MsoNormal">Reduced project delivery delays</li> </ol>

Toward More Comprehensive Understanding of Traffic Congestion

Conventional planning tends to consider traffic congestion asignificant cost and roadway expansion the preferred solution. It evaluates transport system performance based on indicators such as roadway Level of Service (LOS) and peak-period traffic

Be Careful With Statistics

Last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a report, In Search of the Global Middle Class: A New Index, by researcher Uri Dadush, which uses car ownership rates as an indication of the size of a country's middle class

Land-Use Regulation, Income Inequality and Smart Growth

A recent paper by Harvard economists Daniel Shoag and Peter Ganong titled, <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2081216">Why Has Regional Convergence in the U.S. Stopped?</a> indicates that land development regulations tend to increase housing costs, which contributes to inequality by excluding lower-income households from more economically productive urban regions. Does this means that planners are guilty of increasing income inequality?