San Jose State University's Hilary Nixon presented Financing the Future of Mobility: What Does the Public Think? on Sept. 14, 2018 in 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building at 4 p.m.
Abstract
Contemporary conventional wisdom holds that Americans hate taxes, including the tax that the nation has used for more than a half a century used to fund much of its roadway infrastructure: the gas tax. Popular media and transportation industry stories regularly include statements about how much people hate the gas tax, but is conventional wisdom actually true? This presentation explores public opinion about raising new federal transportation revenues using the results from a series of annual, national, random-digit-dial phone surveys. The specific research questions explored are: (1) How does support vary according to the specific features of a transportation tax? (2) What socio-demographic, attitudinal, and travel behavior variables correlate with support for the taxes? (3) How do support levels vary over time? This research was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal and supported by the Mineta Transportation Institute.
Presenter
Dr. Hilary Nixon is the Deputy Executive Director at the Mineta Transportation Institute at San José State University. Previously, she served as MTI's Director of Research and Technology Transfer and as a Research Associate for MTI. Prior to her current role at MTI, Dr. Nixon was a Professor in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at San José State. She specializes in transportation and environmental planning and policy, and her research focuses primarily on the factors that influence pro-environmental behavior and the relationship between transportation and the environment. Her research has been published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals. She earned a B.A. from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in Planning, Policy and Design from the University of California, Irvine.