 PhD student Travis Dunn PhD student Travis Dunn recently answered questions about his graduate studies in Transportation, his involvement in MIT Portugal—even his philosophy about toll collecting. MPP: What is your hometown? TD: San Antonio, Texas, USA. MPP: What degree are you pursuing? TD: An interdepartmental PhD in Transportation at MIT. MPP: Where did you do your previous studies? TD: I have undergraduate degrees in civil engineering and in a humanities program called Plan 2, both from the University of Texas at Austin. I’m also a graduate of the MS in Transportation program at MIT. MPP: Have you had any work experience? TD: Before returning to MIT for the PhD program, I worked for two years in the transportation practice of the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton, in the Washington, D.C., area. MPP: What is your connection to the MIT Portugal Program? TD: I am working in the context of the Transportation Systems focus area project called Smart Combination of passenger transport modes and services in Urban areas for maximum System Sustainability and Efficiency (SCUSSE), which is a part of the Intelligent Transportation Systems program (ITS Lab). But my work also relates to several other Transportation Systems projects, including CityMotion, in that I am interested in developing new, strategic applications for information collected by advanced transportation technologies. My supervisor is Prof. Joe Sussman, the acting MIT focus area leader for Transportation Systems. I also work with several faculty and students at IST in Lisbon. MPP: What is your area of research interest? TD: I am looking at recent technological evolutions in how we gather data about surface transportation systems, and the impact these changes might have on the development of investment strategies for infrastructure networks. For example, we can now collect revenues on highways and transit systems directly from users and gather real-time data about users’ travel patterns. This data allows us to see in a more precise way the usage patterns and to predict investment needs at very local levels. I am interested in how this more targeted data can support policies and decision-making processes that are responsive to the needs of local populations. MPP: Is Portugal your only case study? TD: Yes, my doctoral research builds on our understanding of infrastructure investment decision-making processes at the national level and at more local levels, looking at the urban areas of Coimbra, Lisbon and Porto. Working in this program has been a great opportunity. Portugal has been a leader in developing some important institutional innovations in transportation systems, for example, in public-private partnerships for highways, as well as in technological innovation, such as the implementation of electronic toll collection (Via Verde) years before it was implemented in the United States. MPP: What do you hope to do when you complete your doctorate?
TD: I would like to stay in academia doing research and teaching. I will be in the United States, but I hope to stay connected to international projects like MIT Portugal. There is so much innovation happening worldwide, and the closer you are to those innovations, the easier it is to learn from them and to build on them. MPP: Finally, you have been driving all over Portugal and have paid lots of highway tolls. What do you think about toll prices?
TD: I think every country or region has to make a tradeoff between paying for infrastructure through user fees such as tolls and through general taxation. Of course, it’s difficult to agree on how much the users and other beneficiaries of infrastructure should pay for those resources, and infrastructure has always been difficult to pay off from usage fees alone. But personally, I am a believer in tolling as a fairly direct and transparent way to pay for infrastructure. Tolling has the added benefit of enabling us to use price signals to operate the system more efficiently and, back to my own research, providing data that may support more efficient strategic investment decisions. | 
