Marlon Boarnet

Biography

Dr. Marlon Boarnet, Professor of Public Policy and Director of the METRANS Transportation Research Consortium. METRANS is the center for transportation research at USC and has partnerships with over a dozen universities worldwide. Boarnet is a renowned authority on urban economics, urban growth patterns, transportation, and regional science. He is an expert in transportation and land use, and has served on the National Research Council committee that authored “Driving and the Built Environment.”

His research focuses on land use and transportation; links between land use and travel behavior and associated implications for public health and greenhouse gas emissions; urban growth patterns; and the economic impacts of transportation infrastructure.

Marlon Boarnet has published extensively in leading journals such as Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Urban Economics, National Tax Journal, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research (Parts A, C, and D) Urban Studies,  and is also co-author of Travel by Design: The Influence of Urban Form on Travel (Oxford University Press, 2001).

For twelve years, Dr. Boarnet co-edited the Journal of Regional Science, serving as managing co-editor for eight years. Dr. Boarnet has also served an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Planning Literature, Journal of Transport and Land Use, Papers in Regional Science, and Transport Policy.

In recognition for lifetime scholarly achievement, Dr. Boarnet is fellow of both the Regional Science Association International and the Weimer School of the Homer Hoyt Institute for Real Estate. He served as the elected president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (2019-2021).

Dr. Boarnet is the director of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center, a 10-university transportation research, education, and outreach consortium serving the states of Arizona, California, Hawai’i, Nevada, and the Pacific territories. He has been an Executive Committee Member for the National Center for Sustainable Transportation since 2014 and has acted as principal investigator on approximately 30 million dollars of funded research, supported by agencies that include the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the California Air Resources Board, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Selected Publications

• Li, W., Zhong, H., & Boarnet, M. G. (2024). Effects of new transit lines on commuting: Evidence from restricted-use Census Bureau microdata. Applied Geography, 164.
• Wang, B. S., Rodnyansky, S., Boarnet, M. G., & Comandon, A. (2024). Measuring the impact of COVID-19 policies on local commute traffic: Evidence from mobile data in Northern California. Travel Behaviour and Society, 34.
• Boarnet, M. G., Shao, Q., & Pilgram, C. A. (2024). Monetary cost, time cost, and mode choice: Transit and ridehailing in California. Transportation Research D: Transport and the Environment, 130.