Prof. David Levinson teaches at the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney (official profile), where he leads TransportLab and the Transport Engineering research group, and directs the Master of Transport. He is an honorary affiliate of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, where he is also a member of the Board of Advice. His research interests span transport, from engineering and design, through policy and planning, to geography and economics. His most recent research emphasises transport-land use interactions, accessibility, and transport system evolution as well as traffic programming.

He was at the University of Minnesota from 1999 to 2016, where he held the Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation (2006-2016). He was Managing Director of the Accessibility Observatory, and directed the Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems (NEXUS) research group. He served on the graduate faculty of the Applied Economics and Urban and Regional Planning programs at the University of Minnesota, in addition to Civil Engineering.

In 2006-07 he was a visiting academic at Imperial College in London. In January 2005 he was awarded the CUTC/ARTBA New Faculty Award.

He earned a Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1998. His dissertation “On Whom the Toll Falls“, argues that local decision making about managing and financing roads will most likely lead to direct road pricing, which will allow the efficient allocation of scarce road resources (and thus reduce congestion). He has also conducted research into travel behavior.

He received the 1995 Tiebout Prize in Regional Science for the paper “Location, Relocation, and the Journey to Work”. From 1989 to 1994, he worked as a transportation planner, developing integrated transportation and land-use models for Montgomery County, Maryland. He then applied those models for multimodal network planning and growth management.

Levinson has authored or edited several books, including:

• Applications of Access
• The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access
• A Political Economy of Access,
• Elements of Access,
• Spontaneous Access,
• The End of Traffic and the Future of Access,
• The Transportation Experience, and
• Metropolitan Transport and Land Use: Planning for Place and Plexus,

as well as numerous peer reviewed articles. He chaired the Committee of the Transport Access Manual.  He is a founder of streets.mn and of WalkSydney, both of which he was the initial leader.  He is the founding editor of the Journal of Transport and Land Use and at Findings Press. He writes regularly at The Transportist.

He has served as an advisor to Coord, a unit of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs. He has consulted with numerous organisations.

Current_CV (November 2022)

He is married to TF Carpenter.

ResearchGate

Google Scholar