Graduate Group in Transportation Technology and Policy
Although ITS-Davis was created as a research center, advanced interdisciplinary education is central to our mission and critical to the Institute’s future success. Students are our principal product. A strong effort continues to be made to strengthen both undergraduate and especially graduate education. The key initiative in this area was the creation of a new degree-granting graduate program (MS and PhD) in Transportation Technology and Policy.
In the past, the central transportation challenge was how to expand the supply of infrastructure to meet growing demands for travel. Accordingly, most transportation professionals were trained as Civil Engineers. But the central challenge is no longer the same. The focus is now more on managing demand and curtailing pollution and other negative impacts, while maintaining the societal benefits of a widespread, smoothly functioning transportation system.
More than building roads and other transportation facilities, the next generation of transportation professionals and researchers will be exploiting technological revolutions in materials, information, propulsion, and electronics, and applying them to the transportation sector; turning to the behavioral sciences to better understand travel behavior; harnessing computer capabilities to develop more sophisticated and policy-sensitive transportation models; harnessing market forces to curtail adverse environmental impacts and to supply transit and other transportation services more efficiently; mitigating the inequities resulting from car dependence and employing a greater use of pricing in transportation; and creating more effective institutions for managing and regulating the transportation system. The future will be very different from the past.
Civil Engineering is now too limiting as the single disciplinary home for transportation education. So is Mechanical Engineering, with its focus on the design of mechanical propulsion systems, and so is any other single traditional discipline. A new format and approach is needed that reflects changes in the professional and research communities. This Graduate Group aims to do just that.
The Graduate Group in Transportation Technology & Policy (TTP) provides a modern interdisciplinary education for addressing pressing transportation, environmental, economic, and social problems facing the nation and the world. Students may pursue either a technology track or a planning and policy track. The technology track is for students trained in engineering and the physical sciences and interested in systems-level planning, analysis, management, and design of advanced transportation technologies (especially vehicle propulsion and “intelligent transportation systems”). The planning/policy track is aimed at students from a broader range of disciplines, who are interested in the analysis of public policy and planning issues related to transportation (especially the social and environmental impacts).
The curriculum for both tracks includes courses in civil, mechanical, and environmental engineering, economics, policy sciences, statistics, behavioral sciences, management, technology assessment, and environmental studies.
Master's degrees require a minimum of 36 quarter units if completed with a comprehensive exam, or 30 units if a thesis is completed. Doctoral degrees require a minimum of 54 units. Full time students can expect to complete a master's program in 1-2 years and a doctoral program in 3-4 years after a master's degree.
The administrative home for the Graduate Group is the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS-Davis). ITS-Davis is the center of transportation research activities on the Davis campus, managing about $8 million in grants and contracts and employing about 50 graduate students. ITS-Davis is a national leader in advanced transportation technologies, travel behavior analysis, and energy and environmental aspects of transportation.
Students enrolled in this Graduate Group will take classes and work as research assistants alongside transportation graduate students enrolled in Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Environmental Studies, Economics and other departments. The advantage of enrolling in this Graduate Group is greater flexibility in formulating a program of study, especially for those students with interdisciplinary interests and without Civil Engineering degrees. To help you decide if TTP is right for you (compared to a traditional departmentally-based program), see "TTP versus CEE".