Director's Message

We are pleased to report that in the past two years the Carolina Transportation Program (CTP) has made tremendous progress in accomplishing its goals of increasing the transportation research funding at Carolina, enhancing interdisciplinary research activities in transportation, and strengthening partnerships with local/state government and non-profit organizations.

Based at the Center for Urban Regional Studies, CTP focuses on the study of transportation planning, transit, non-motorized transportation, and land use patterns, and their impacts on health, environment, energy and economic development at local, regional, national, and global scale. Evidence of CTP’s widening recognition and success is our strong record of funded research, peer-reviewed publications, emerging partnerships and collaborations, and educational successes. Consider the following for the last two years alone:

• CTP has experienced a remarkable growth in research funding, from $101,000 per year in 2004 to $460,000 per year in 2006. Funders include federal and state agencies, foundations and non-profit organizations. This level of research would not have been possible without partnerships forged with the Institute for the Environment, the School of Public Health, the Highway Safety and Research Center, the Center for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economic Development (CSEEED), the Kenan-Flagler Business School, Duke University, NCSU, NCA&T, and UC Berkeley, to name just a few. These partnerships and collaborations are formed largely around grant-funded research ideas, and encompass a wide range of non-research activities such as student internships, advising, and co-sponsoring seminars.
  
• Thirty peer-reviewed manuscripts have been published or are in press in top-rated journals in various fields such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Urban Health, Energy Policy, Urban Studies, and Transportation. In that timeframe CTP researchers were co-authors of eight books and book chapters and are working on two other books.
  
• As a result of CTP’s increasing prominence, the number and quality of graduate students interested in transportation continues to rise. The enrollment of graduate students interested in transportation increased has doubled since 2004. In addition, transportation students have received numerous external recognitions and awards, including an Environmental Protection Agency STAR fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, an Eisenhower fellowship, the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship from the Women's Transportation Seminar (WTS), the American Planning Association’s Environment, Natural Resources and Energy fellowship, the Travel Demand Management Institute Young Researcher Award, the Center for Transportation and Environment Student-of-the-Year-Award, and the University Transportation Centers’ Outstanding Student of the Year Award.
  
• We continue to provide professional service in and outside the University. CTP researchers provide technical assistance about Carolina North, serve on several committees for the National Academies of Science and Engineering, and are editorial board members of the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Architectural Planning and Research, and the International Journal for Sustainable Mobility.
  
• CTP hosted or co-hosted ten seminars, including those of nationally-recognized transportation researchers such as Robert Cervero (University of California, Berkeley), John Pucher (Rutgers University), Paul Waddell (University of Washington), David Greene (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Ralph Gakenheimer (MIT), and David Garman (Under Secretary of Energy for Energy, Science and Environment, U.S. Department of Energy).
  

Looking ahead, we remain optimistic about the sustained growth of CTP and its increasing collaborations. We have over $5.3 million in grant proposals as PIs awaiting funding decisions. We have a similarly sizeable amount in other proposals as co-investigators. We relish at the opportunity to add more collaborators to our growing list of partners and hope that the University continues to prioritize transportation as an area of growth. We are proud of the tremendous success we have had in the last two years. We are grateful for supports of our program and look forward to continuing to play a leadership role in transportation research, education and engagement at Carolina, the State, the nation, and the world.