Martin Wachs

Martin Wachs was a professor of civil and environmental engineering and professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. Prior to this, he spent 25 years at UCLA, where he served three terms as chairman of the Department of Urban Planning. He retired as senior principal researcher and director of the Transportation, Space and Technology Program at the RAND Corporation.

Martin Wachs is the author of 160 articles and four books on subjects related to relationships between transportation, land use, and air quality; transportation systems; and the use of performance measurement in transportation planning. His research addresses issues of equity in transportation policy, problems of crime in public transit systems, and the response of transportation systems to natural disasters, including earthquakes. His most recent work focuses on transportation finance in relation to planning and policy.

His other areas of interest include professional ethics, transportation and aging, transportation and land use, transportation and the environment, transportation finance, and urban transportation planning.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a UCLA Alumni Association Distinguished Teaching Award, the Pyke Johnson Award for the best paper presented at an annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), and the Carey Award for service to the TRB.

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Transportation and Habitat Conservation Plans
Subtitle: Improving Planning and Project Delivery While Preserving Endangered Species
A comprehensive survey of Habitat Conservation Plans serving as a vehicle for streamlined environmental compliance authorization on major public infrastructure projects.
Author:Jaimee Lederman and Martin Wachs
Download file: PDF

A Very Brief History of Why Americans Hate Their Commutes
In a post on Atlantic Cities, Martin Wachs tracks the development of cities, detailing how work-to-home travel patterns have changed in the last 150 years.
Publication Link