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CE Home > People > Faculty Directory > David M. Levinson
David M. Levinson
Associate Professor
Richard P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation Engineering
Contact Information:
- Office: CivE 138
- Phone: (612)625-6354
- Fax: (612)626-7750
- E-mail: levin031@umn.edu
- Web: http://nexus.umn.edu/
Research Interests:
Infrastructure, particularly transportation infrastructure, employs the network in both social and physical dimensions. My principal interest is to link the social and economic aspects of networks with the physical. Questions about the underlying cost structure, the financing mechanism, and the price charged for use cannot be divorced from the organization of the industry providing the service and the nature of supply and demand. These questions depend on the available technology, while the rate of technological change cannot be separated from the industrial organization and market conditions which spawns it.
Measuring the benefits of new infrastructure is essential for a comprehensive evaluation. Benefits from deploying new infrastructure in an area with little or no service may have far-ranging impacts involving restructuring the other aspects of industrial and human activity patterns. Benefits to users and non-users need to be identified and measured over a range of infrastructure deployment levels, from infant to mature systems. This has particular relevance for Intelligent Transportation Systems, which serve new markets and in many cases employ linked technological systems.
Benefit measures require an understanding of how networks emerge over time. The utility of a transport network depends on the number of users, while the number of users depends on its utility. The more connected a network the more valuable it is, and the less the average cost of the use of its fixed assets, recognizing that too much use relative to the network's capacity creates congestion. For instance, there is a desire to deploy a new transportation technology such as advanced highways systems in the upcoming years. There remains the sticky chicken-and-egg problem, that unless there are widely deployed smart highways, few will buy advanced cars, and if there are no advanced cars, there will be no demand for smart highways. This underlying problem of critical mass is faced in every new network, from telecommunication and electricity to the historic transition in the highway system from animal powered vehicles and dirt roads to cars and paved roads. It is repeated in many locations, as networks grow from small nodes to become linked.
Selected Publications:
Garrison, W. and D. Levinson. 2006. The Transportation Experience: Policy,
Planning and Deployment. New York: Oxford University Press.
D. Levinson and K. Krizek, eds. 2006. Access to Destinations. Oxford:
Elsevier.
Levinson, D., K. Harder, J. Bloomfield and K. Carlson. 2006. Waiting tolerance:
ramp delay vs. freeway congestion. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic
Psychology and Behavior,Volume 9, Issue 1 , January 2006, Pages 1-13
Zhang, Lei and Levinson, D. (2004b) Optimal Freeway Ramp Control without
Origin-Destination Information. Transportation Research part B, Volume
38, Issue 10, December 2004, Pages 869-887
Levinson, D. and L. Zhang. 2006. Ramp meters on trial: evidence from the
Twin Cities metering holiday. Transportation Research A Policy and Practice,
Volume 40, Issue 10 , December 2006, Pages 810-828
Zhang, L. and D. Levinson. 2005. Road pricing on autonomous links. Journal
of the Transportation Research Board, in press.
Levinson, D. and B. Yerra. 2005. Self organization of surface transportation
networks. Transportation Science, Vol. 40 No. 2 May 2006 pp. 179-188
Levinson, D. 2005. Micro-foundations of congestion and pricing: a game
theory perspective. Transportation Research Part A, 39(7-9): 691-704.
Levinson, D. and Wu, Y. 2005. The rational locator re-examined. Transportation,
32: 187-202.
Levinson, D. 2002. Financing Transportation Networks. Northampton, Mass.:
Edward Elgar Publishers.
Education:
- B.S., 1988, Georgia Institute of Technology
- M.S., 1991, University of Maryland
- Ph.D., 1998, University of California at Berkeley
Experience:
- Researcher, University of California-Berkeley
- Transportation planner, Montgomery County, Maryland
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