David Schrank, Ph.D.

TTI Senior Research Scientist
Division Head

Education

• Ph.D., Urban And Regional Science, Texas A&M University, 2004
• M.S., Land Development, Texas A&M University, 1995
• B.S., Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 1990

Short Biography

Dr. Schrank has been extensively involved in urban mobility research for over 30 years. He has been involved in research that has developed and applied a methodology to assess areawide traffic congestion levels and congestion costs. The Urban Mobility Report includes information on 101 cities throughout the U.S. from 1982. The study examines trends in urban area mobility and documents the effect of transportation investments including several congestion reduction strategies. Several measures of effectiveness have been developed and used to describe mobility to a wide range of audiences including transportation professionals, public policy decision-makers, the media and the general public. He has been involved in research to develop methods to incorporate GPS-based speed data from several different sources into mobility analysis projects. The Urban Mobility Report now utilizes private sector speed data from all 50 states for its congestion statistics. The "Texas Top 100 Bottlenecks" project for the Texas Department of Transportation uses speed data from another vendor to help determine the top bottlenecks in the state. He has also provided assistance to several public agencies outside of Texas to help them begin using private sector speed data in their internal analyses. Dr. Schrank has also been involved in many additional projects involving freight mobility. Some of these projects involved developing solutions to mobility problems and improving decision-making processes and performance measurement. A recent project with Transport Canada involved developing a methodology to measure freight mobility and reliability that integrated data from the various freight modes across all of Canada. This work focused on the entire supply chain from ports in Asia and Europe to the final destination in Toronto, Montreal, and Chicago. The results of this work were published in the March 2011 edition of the ITE Journal of Transportation. A separate project developed a conceptual framework and an application to estimate the impact of congestion on trucking. The results of this project were published in Transportation Research Record 2168 in 2010. One additional project created a methodology to generate truck freight commodity values to be included in truck congestion analyses in specific regions and states. These truck freight values were shown as a performance measure in the 2011 Urban Mobility Report.