UC Davis alum wins CUTC award for best dissertation

Amy Lee, who received her Ph.D. from UC Davis, won a national award for her recently completed dissertation on the politics of highway expansions.

Lee received the 2023 Charley V. Wootan Memorial Award from the Council of University Transportation Centers for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of transportation policy and planning.

As a doctoral student at UC Davis, Lee studied a range of topics related to transportation policy and governance in California, specifically the continued investments in highway construction and expansion despite the state’s clear goals to mitigate climate change and air pollution. Her comparative analysis of regional transportation plans and programming determined that auto infrastructure received the most funding in four of the five metropolitan regions studied. Plus, she found agencies’ near-term spending plans were more likely to include auto-centric projects than their long-range regional plans.

Through interviews and case studies, Lee discovered that traffic congestion, land development, goods movement, and job creation are the main drivers of highway expansion in the state. She found that local and district-level institutions prioritize differently from state ones, favoring short-term problems and solutions over long-term concerns like climate change.

Lee is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, where she studies the impacts of parking policy in California.