Hixon Fall Speaker Series: Sustainable Urban Mobility
Abstract
As Deputy Chief of Urban Design for Boston, Diana Fernandez Bibeau is driven by the transformative vision of sustainable and walkable communities for all ages and abilities. She will share her department’s work reforming existing urban design processes to better serve the mobility needs of community members. With over a decade of private practice experience, Diana has built a design portfolio that reassesses policies that have perpetuated inequality, and created design methodologies to correct them. She will speak to this experience, as well as her role in aligning urban design efforts across city departments to execute Mayor Wu's Green New Deal for transportation sustainability and equity.
Speaker Information
As Deputy Chief of Urban Design, Diana Fernandez Bibeau will elevate the importance of urban design, and champion the transformative power of sustainable and walkable communities for all ages and abilities. In partnership with Chief Jemison and the Boston Planning Department’s Urban Design Division, Fernandez will work to strategically transform existing urban design processes to promote predictability and quality for both the community members and the development industry. With over a decade of private practice experience, Diana has built a design portfolio that reassesses the policies that have perpetuated race, gender, environmental and socioeconomic inequality, and created design methodologies that can respond to and correct them. As part of her work, Fernandez will partner on the Mayor's Green New Deal agenda with the City departments, including the Boston Transportation Department, the Environment Department, Parks, Office of Housing, Public Works, Public Facilities, Boston Public Schools, and Boston Public Libraries, to align urban design efforts into a comprehensive vision for Boston
Abstract
Join us for a talk by Felipe Ramírez, Urban Mobility Director at the World Resources Institute (WRI) Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. Prior to joining WRI, Director Ramirez served as the Secretary of Mobility for Bogotá, Colombia, and as General Manager of TransMilenio, the city's Bus Rapid Transit system. He will share lessons from his impactful term, which saw the electrification of Bogotá’s buses and the launch of Latin America’s most inclusive bike-sharing program. He will also offer key insights into WRI’s current global efforts promoting public transportation systems that meaningfully improve residents’ quality of life.
Speaker Information
Felipe Ramírez leads the Urban Mobility Work at the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. He has extensive experience in urban planning and transport, having served as Secretary of Mobility for Bogotá, Colombia, and as General Manager of TransMilenio, the city's Bus Rapid Transit system. Felipe has worked on implementing critical infrastructure and policies to improve public transit and broader urban transport systems. His expertise includes developing sustainable mobility strategies, enhancing public transport services, and promoting inclusive urban development. Felipe's work is focused on creating efficient, equitable, and environmentally friendly urban mobility solutions.
Abstract
Is there a hidden downside to the design ideal of the15-minute city? Join us for a talk by incoming YSE Professor Arianna Salazar-Miranda, whose work focuses on how emerging technologies can be leveraged to design more sustainable urban environments. She will present her recent analysis of the possible unexpected consequences of the 15-minute city, including increased social segregation. She will also provide an overview of her ongoing research exploring how urban planning paradigms can lead to more sustainable mobility outcomes.
Speaker Information
Arianna Salazar-Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Data Science at the Yale School of the Environment. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban planning, the built environment, human behavior, and sustainability. To study this topic, she uses a wide range of computational methods and large-scale, high-resolution data such as street imagery, social media, GPS, LiDAR, and sensors.
Recently, she has studied the impact of urban planning policies that aim to reduce vehicular traffic and promote local living on environmental and social outcomes. Additionally, she has developed digital tools in partnership with cities and communities to inform their sustainability efforts. Some examples include developing a framework for measuring transportation modes from real-time imagery and mapping one of Brazil's largest informal settlements using LiDAR data.
Professor Salazar-Miranda received her Ph.D. in Computational Urban Science and Planning, an M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, and a Licentiate degree in Architecture from Veritas University, Costa Rica.
Speaker Information
Rob Klee is a Lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale School of the Environment in industrial ecology, a law degree from Yale, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton in geology and environmental science.
Dr. Klee most recently served as the Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), from January 2014 until January 2019, for former Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy. DEEP is the state agency charged with conserving, improving and protecting the state’s natural resources and environment; providing first-rate outdoor recreation opportunities; and integrating energy and environmental policies to build a sustainable and prosperous 21st-century economy for Connecticut. Dr. Klee originally joined DEEP in April 2011 as chief of staff to then-Commissioner Daniel C. Esty.
Prior to his state service, Dr. Klee was an attorney with Wiggin and Dana LLP, in New Haven, where he specialized in appellate and complex litigation, and energy and environmental law. He also served as a law clerk for both the U.S. District Court in Connecticut and the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
Speaker Information
Dr. Rachel Weinberger is the Peter W. Herman Chair for Transportation at Regional Plan Association. She has over 30 years of transportation planning experience in the public and private sectors and in academia. Weinberger is an internationally recognized expert in sustainable transportation with specializations in travel behavior, land use transportation interactions, economic impacts of the transportation system, and parking policy.
As the former Senior Policy Advisor on transportation to the New York City Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, she was a key contributor to the first PlaNYC and has since assisted the New York City Department of Transportation with their current strategic plan, an on-going curb management study, and an analysis of commuter vans. She was the Director of Research and Policy Strategy for Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, and she is the Founding Principal of Weinberger & Associate, LLC.
She has published dozens of journal articles and book chapters covering topics as disparate as racial and gender differences in commuting behavior, peer pressure in auto ownership decisions, land value capitalization of transportation infrastructure investments and the use of Big Data in analyzing travel patterns. Along with her book Auto Motives: Understanding Car Use Behaviours. Weinberger has contributed over 25 chapters to various books including “Parking: Not As Bad As You Think, Worse Than You Realize”, “Is the Curb 80% Full or 20% Empty? Assessing the Impacts of San Francisco’s Parking Pricing Experiment”, and “Death by a Thousand Curb-cuts: Evidence on the effect of minimum parking requirements on the choice to drive.” She has been invited to speak on sustainable transportation in Zurich, Bogota, Budapest, Istanbul, and Guangzhou and Dongguan, China, and across the United States.
Weinberger holds her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and a M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. A native New Yorker she has her B.A. and M.U.P, from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Weinberger served on the urban planning faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University.
Weinberger lives in Brooklyn with her two children.
Speaker Information
Garrett Eucalitto was confirmed as Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation in January 2023. He also currently serves as Vice President of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and President of the Northeast Association of State Transportation Officials (NASTO). Prior to becoming Commissioner, Eucalitto served as Deputy Commissioner of the CTDOT from 2020 until 2023. Before joining CTDOT, he worked as Transportation Program Director for the National Governors Association, Undersecretary at the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, and began his career as a Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill. Eucalitto earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of the Holy Cross and a master’s degree from Boston University. He is a native of Torrington and currently lives in New Haven.
