International Transportation Economics Association Conference

I just arrived home from the Annual Conference of the International Transportation Economics Association, which was held at Northwestern University earlier this week.  This is the first time this conference was in the U.S., having been held in Europe since its inception.  Click here to see the conference program.

At the conference I presented our newly published report, which is available here.  The slides from my talk are available here.

I’m very glad I went to this conference.  It was useful to be exposed the broad range of topics transportation scholars from around the world are studying.  That said, there were not many papers that studied political economy aspects of transportation, and therefore I think our paper helped to round out the program. 

As a result of meeting so many interesting researchers I must now send many follow up emails.  This is the mark of a good conference indeed!

In addition to being a productive experience, the conference was also a lot of fun!  One night they took us on a sunset cruise on Lake Michigan, which afforded spectacular views of the Chicago skyline.  The picture below illustrates why being a transportation researcher is a fun job!