September 24, 2013
Two UC Berkeley transportation doctoral students, André Carrel and Rebecca Sanders, have received two of 20 awards given out nationally this year by the Washington-based Eno Center for Transportation.
The two will take part in the 21st annual Eno Leadership Development Conference in Washington, D.C., June 2-6 where they will meet with top government officials, members of Congress and their staffs in order to better understand how the country’s transportation polices are shaped, adopted and applied.
Sanders, who hopes to receive her Ph.D. from the Department of City and Regional Planning this summer, has focused her research on non-motorized transportation and road safety.She conducts research for UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Centerwhere she studies bicycling risk and has developed performance measures for Complete Streets.
“I grew up in Texas where the car is king, so I know bicycling and walking are not practical everywhere,” she said. “But they play an important role in many urban areas and represent the primary transport modes for some segments of the population. I look forward to learning from our policymakers and professionals how to manage competing interests in transportation for a country as diverse as ours.”
Carrel’s interests focus on travel behavior, particularly on why some people who give transit a try, later give up on that travel mode and return to their cars.
While reviewing literature on transit use, he discovered that while attracting new riders is a primary objective in investment decisions, transit agencies often have difficulty retaining passengers. To reduce the numbers of travelers who quit using transit for various reasons, he proposes expanding the tools used by the FTA to evaluate performance quality more accurately in order to attract and retain future transit users.Carrel, who is working toward his Ph.D. within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was also honored by the Eno Center with the Charles William Koch Award, which recognizes exceptional academic achievement and leadership qualities.
The non-partisan think tank was founded in 1921 by William Phelps Eno, who pioneered the field of traffic management in the United States and Europe. The organization focuses on all modes of transportation.