Rutgers lecture to investigate international trends in daily travel behavior

Ralph Buehler, an Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning and a Faculty Fellow with the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech will present Rutgers University's Edward J. Bloustein School’s annual Isadore Candeub Memorial Lecture in Planning on Wednesday, February 27, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. This year’s lecture will be “Making Urban Transport Sustainable: Comparison of Germany and the U.S.”

Professor Buehler’s presentation will investigate international trends in daily travel behavior with a focus on Germany and the U.S. Reliance on the automobile for most trips contributes to costly trends like pollution, oil dependence, congestion, and obesity. Germany and the U.S. have among the highest motorization rates in the world, yet Germans make a four times higher share of trips by foot, bike, and public transport and drive for a 25 percent lower share of trips as compared to Americans.

He will also examine transport and land-use policies in Germany over the last 40 years that have encouraged more walking, bicycling, and public transport use. Using a case study of policy changes in the German city of Freiburg, the presentation will conclude with policies that are transferable to car-oriented countries around the world.

Originally from Germany, much of Professor Buehler’s research has an international comparative perspective, contrasting transport and land-use policies, transport systems, and travel behavior in Western Europe and North America. His research falls into three areas: (1) the influence of transport policy, land use, socio-demographics on travel behavior; (2) bicycling, walking, and public health; and (3) public transport demand, supply, and regional coordination. Including national and international best practices, his work informs policy makers at local, regional, and federal levels.

Buehler is the author of reports to the German and U.S. federal governments, the Brookings Institution and BMW as well as over 25 refereed articles in academic journals in the area of urban planning, public health, and transport. He is co-editor (with the Bloustein School’s John Pucher) of the recently released book City Cycling (MIT Press), which offers a guide to urban cycling in Western Europe and North America. In 2008, his dissertation comparing travel behavior and transport policy in Germany and the U.S. was selected as the best dissertation in planning by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. Buehler serves as the Chair of the Committee on Bicycle Transportation of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.

Professor Buehler earned his PhD in Planning and Public Policy (2008), a Graduate Certificate in Transportation (2004), and his Master of City and Regional Planning (2002) from the Bloustein School.

The annual Isadore Candeub Memorial Lecture was established in the memory of Isadore Candeub in tribute to his long and successful career as a planning consultant and to his extraordinary dedication to planning in towns, cities and regions across America. Before his passing in 1986 he was chairman of the executive committee of Candeub, Fleissig & Associates, consultants in community development and environmental planning. Mr. Candeub, with Morris B. Fleissig, a lawyer, founded the firm in Newark in 1953. Earlier he had spent 20 months in the Federal Government as chief planner for the Northeastern region of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, precursor of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was a 1943 graduate of the City College of New York; did graduate work at Columbia University and received a master’s degree in 1948 from the School of Architecture and City Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

The lecture will be held at the Special Events Forum, Civic Square Building, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ. A reception will follow the lecture. Please RSVP by e-mail to RSVP@policy.rutgers.edu or by phone to 848-932-2733.