Dr. Savage specializes in urban transportation, and the analysis of safety regulation and safety performance. He has conducted research into the safety of most modes of transportation. He has also researched into and published widely on the economics of transit finances and operations and, more specifically, the impacts of competition and privatization.

His most recent work has focused on the railroad industry, culminating with the publication of The Economics of Railroad Safety (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). Prior to his work on railroad safety, he was part of a five-year project that evaluated federal programs to enforce safety regulations in the motor carrier industry. He has also analyzed safety issues in other transportation modes, including the economics of double-hulls on oil tankers, airline pilots' perceptions of safety-related job risks, the effect of airline deregulation on automobile fatalities, and the economics of safety inspections of aging aircraft. He has also worked on research investigating the interaction between psychological perceptions of risk and the valuation of life. He was the coordinator for a conference at Northwestern on the impacts of economic deregulation on airline and trucking safety, and co-editor of a book based on the conference, Transportation Safety in an Age of Deregulation (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Dr. Savage's extensive multi-modal work on safety has led to the authorship of several review papers on transportation safety. These include chapters in Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy: A Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer (Brookings Institution, 1999), the Handbook of Transport Systems and Traffic Control (Elsevier, 2001) and the Handbook of Transport and the Environment (Elsevier, 2003).