Brian D. Taylor

Brian D. Taylor, PhD, FAICP is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. His research centers on transportation policy and planning—most of it conducted in close collaboration with his many exceptional students. Professor Taylor’s research examines travel behavior, traffic congestion, transportation economics and finance, public transit, and transportation equity and politics. His book, The Drive for Dollars: How Fiscal Politics Shaped Urban Freeways and Transformed American Cities, was co-authored with two former students and published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. Prior to UCLA, Professor Taylor was on the planning faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, he was a planner with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was recently named one of the Top Ten Academic Thought Leaders in Transportation by the Council of University Transportation Centers and the Eno Center for Transportation, and was recently honored as a National Associate by the National Academies for his work with the Transportation Research Board.