Enjoy a welcome from Dean Christopher A. Schuh and other McCormick leaders, and receive a Northwestern Engineering T-shirt. A free breakfast on the Tech East Plaza will follow.

Register Now

Enjoy a welcome from Dean Christopher A. Schuh and other McCormick leaders, and receive a Northwestern Engineering T-shirt. A free lunch on the Tech East Plaza will follow.

Register Now

Abstract

Dr. Joshua Schank will discuss his latest book, written with Emma Huang and Marla Westervelt Berg, which offers pragmatic lessons for driving change inside public agencies from the people who've done it.

Transit agencies across the country are navigating shrinking budgets, pressure to attract new riders, and growing demands to bring on new technologies. New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies, written by three veterans of Los Angeles Metro's Office of Extraordinary Innovation (OEI), is a guide for those in public transit, and people who care about the mission of any government organization. It offers a practical, honest account of what it actually takes to drive change from inside a large public agency.

While working at OEI, an office within LA Metro, Dr. Schank launched on-demand transit, enabled automated bus-lane enforcement, advanced congestion pricing, and built a strategic plan that still guides Metro today, all while learned hard lessons about what makes change stick and what makes it stall.

Dr. Schank is now a partner at InfraStrategies LLC, Professor at UCLA, and the Executive Director of the ACES Mobility Coalition, a public sector led advocacy organization dedicated to advancing shared autonomous mobility. He works with transit agencies across the country to advance new ideas.

Bio

Joshua Schank is the Managing Partner at InfraStrategies, a transportation and financial advisory firm, where he leads a practice focused on innovation, strategic planning, and technology. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared (ACES) Mobility Coalition, and is a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Research Associate at the Mineta Transportation Institute. His latest book is “New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Public Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector”.

Prior to joining InfraStrategies and UCLA, Dr. Schank was the first-ever Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Dr. Schank joined Metro in 2015 to establish the agency’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation (OEI), which fostered innovations to improve mobility, equity and environmental outcomes across LA County. Dr. Schank led an office that shaped Metro’s high-level strategic vision, serving as a liaison to the academic community, designing, piloting and implementing innovative programs and policies, and engaging entrepreneurs and businesses to develop public-private-partnerships. Dr. Schank helped create and lead numerous transformative Metro projects including the Vision 2028 Strategic Plan, Metro Micro, Mobility on Demand, Metro’s Traffic Reduction Study, Better Bus, two Pre-Development Agreements for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor, a Public-Private-Partnership for the West Santa Ana Branch, and an aerial tram from Union Station to Dodger Stadium.

Dr. Schank previously served as President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, a leading national transportation policy think-tank based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that he led the National Transportation Policy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center and has worked as a consultant for Parsons Brinkerhoff (now WSP) and ICF International. Dr. Schank served as Transportation Policy Advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) during the authorization ofSAFETEA-LU and is also the co-author of All Roads Lead to Congress: The $300 Billion Fight Over Highway Funding. Dr. Schank holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, and a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his career working on behalf of the riders of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City and has never lost that spirit. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons.

Abstract:

Human mobility is often described through aggregate quantities such as origin-destination flows, travel distances, or traffic volumes. While these representations reveal important regularities, they can obscure how individuals actually move through transportation networks: the paths they take, how previous movements shape subsequent decisions, and how behavior varies across people and environments. In this talk, I will present recent work that shifts the focus from aggregate mobility patterns toward the structure and heterogeneity of individual movement. Drawing on empirical GPS data, agent-based simulations, and higher-order network models, we investigate how sequential dependencies shape mobility and its predictability, how faithfully commonly used benchmarks and synthetic populations reproduce observed human movement, and how mobility behavior changes across different built environments. Across these studies, a common picture emerges: systems that appear remarkably similar at an aggregate level can differ substantially in their path structure, behavioral diversity, and predictability. These findings highlight the opportunities offered by emerging mobility data and simulation models and motivate new network-based approaches for understanding, predicting, and designing transportation systems that better reflect how people actually move.

Bio:

Dr. Jürgen Hackl is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where he leads the Complex Infrastructure Systems group. His research lies at the intersection of network science, transportation, and infrastructure systems, with a particular focus on human mobility, spatial-temporal and higher-order networks, uncertainty quantification, and data-driven modeling of complex systems. His work develops new methods to understand how people, information, and resources move through infrastructure networks and how these dynamics can be represented, predicted, and incorporated into simulation and decision-making.

He received his PhD from ETH Zürich in 2019 and subsequently held research and faculty positions at the University of Zürich, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Cambridge before joining Princeton in 2023. His research spans transportation, power, and urban infrastructure systems and combines methodological advances in network science with applications to the analysis, design, and resilience of complex engineered systems.

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Abstract:

Past literature has explored the degree to which ride-hailing complements or competes with public transit. The evidence suggests that while individual trips sometimes do connect to transit or occur in areas or not well served by transit, ride-hailing trips are most concentrated in the densest parts of urban areas where transit service is good. The result is a shift from transit to ride-hailing, adding congestion to the roads that are most congested already. This talk presents two studies exploring how we might counteract that effect through pricing.

The first evaluates Chicago's Ground Transportation Tax (GTT) update of January 6, 2020, which increased fees on solo rides and all downtown ride-hailing between 6am and 10pm. Using a novel policy-sensitive direct ridership model estimated on open data before and after the GTT update, we measure the effect of the pricing change on ride-hailing volume, mode choice, and ride-sharing behavior across Chicago census tracts.

The second study proposes and evaluates a revenue pricing scheme in which per-trip taxes on transit-competitive rides are used to subsidize rides that serve areas or times with limited transit access. Applied over a full day, the scheme would diminish transit competition, reduced vehicle miles traveled, andreduces passenger cost — providing the potential to shift ride-hailing from transit competitor to complement.

Bio:

Greg Erhardt is a Raymond-Blythe Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Kentucky, a Hans Fischer Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, and a Senior Advisor to Bay Area Metro. He earned an MS in Civil Engineering from Northwestern in 2002. The first study was co-authored with Richard Alexander Mucci at the University of Kentucky, and the second with Zhihua Jin, Rolf Moeckel and Allister Loder at Technical University of Munich.

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