For me cities have always been about balancing the proximity of amenities and opportunities with the physical embodiedness of mobility. I grew up in a very rural area which had few opportunities, so I only sometimes find myself taking for granted the tremendous opportunities afforded by living in the GTHA. Canadian cities - despite their lack of housing and life affordability, fiscal challenges, and transportation issues - are special places. I grew up in the US and have strong connections to German cities, so I have seen how the physical built environment intersects with social, economic, and environmental policy - leading to very different opportunities and outcomes.

My own work is at the nexus of transportation planning and policy and land use planning and urban spatial restructuring. In my work, I have addressed this theme in multiple ways, including estimating how traffic congestion affects urban economic growth, exploring what automated vehicles and other new mobility options mean for land use patterns, and identifying how urban fiscal policy affects the success, distribution, and broader implications of major transportation infrastructure projects. I love exploring how people travel and how policies can improve social and environmental outcomes related to their travel behavior. But increasingly, in my career, I have become interested in the power and politics of how policies come to be and how infrastructure is funded. I can't escape my fascination not just with the ideas but with the tangible results of those possibilities.

My approach towards scholarship is not typical for a transportation planning & policy scholar. While my background is also steeped in urban economics and quantitative modeling, which I still find very important for my work, I also have a strong bent towards theory and ethics. To me, theory isn't just a pie in the sky idea; it's a question of what the "good city" is and what the role of transportation policy should be in that story. Currently, I am finding a lot of promise in integrating Sen and Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach into transportation scholarship using the long-discussed construct of accessibility. There has already been a lot of work on accessibility, but there is still so much to do.

I teach courses in planning ethics and enjoy reflecting on the journey of how "planners" constantly adjust their understandings of problems and solutions and frequently contribute towards new challenges by overcorrecting for past misdeeds. This journey of striving towards "better," is fundamental to our very being and I love seeing each of my students and how they go on their own journeys with respect to understanding, affecting, and appreciating the world around them. Beyond my love of learning about cities and transportation systems, I find the most promise and optimism in the future of Canadian cities when I think about the impacts that my students will have throughout their careers. If even more important planning policy decisions of public interest were made with the guidance of my former students, I believe that the world would be a better place.