CTS Webinar: Accessibility in US Cities—Where Is Transportation Most Sustainable?

Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 12:00–1:00 pm
Virtual

About the Event

In this webinar, Eric Lind and staff from CTS's Accessibility Observatory introduced the newest Access Across America report, quantifying access to opportunity at a national scale. The 2022 report reflects continued change in transportation in cities following the COVID-19 pandemic, as economic and travel behavior trends solidified. Highlights from the data on access to jobs by walking, biking, transit, and auto for the top 50 US cities were combined with a discussion of these urban adaptations—and the contrast between auto access and more sustainable modes.

Watch a recording of the webinar

Speakers

Eric Lind
Eric Lind

Eric Lind is the director of the Accessibility Observatory at the Center for Transportation Studies. In this role, he provides leadership, direction, and strategic management to the Observatory and oversees its research and outreach activities. Lind formerly served as manager of research and analytics at Metro Transit and as a researcher with the Nutrient Network program at the University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences. He has also held various positions in research and data systems with nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.  

Andrew Owen
Andrew Owen

Andrew Owen is the lead researcher at the Accessibility Observatory and a research fellow with the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota. Andrew’s work focuses on building and applying systems for collecting, calculating, analyzing, and communicating data describing transportation systems. At the Accessibility Observatory, he leads the development and maintenance of tools to calculate nationwide, multimodal accessibility to a variety of destination types. Andrew holds master’s degrees in civil engineering and in urban and regional planning, and he joined the field of transportation research following a career in computer science and network security. His MS thesis work focused on accessibility evaluation for public transit systems.

Saumya Jain

Saumya Jain is a researcher for the Accessibility Observatory at the Center for Transportation Studies. In this role, she works with geospatial and data analytics tools to address transportation access and equity concerns in decision making, closely working with state departments of transportation and local transportation agencies. She also supports business development at the Observatory through project management, stakeholder partnership building, and grant writing. Saumya holds a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before she joined CTS in January 2022, she worked at UW Madison's State Smart Transportation Initiative as a transportation planning and policy researcher. She also worked for a year at a transportation engineering consultancy in St. Louis, MO, before moving to applied transportation research and multimodal accessibility. She currently serves on the board of Our Streets Minneapolis and lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and two cats.