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. David Schrank has been involved in urban mobility research for over 35 years. He has co-authored the Urban Mobility Report utilizing performance measures to assess area-wide traffic congestion levels and costs for all urban areas in the United States. The information in these reports has been used to describe patterns and trends in mobility to a wide range of audiences, including transportation professionals, public policy decision makers, the media, and the general public.

Much of David’s work involves accessing and systematizing large transportation datasets, compiling information from various sectors within the transportation industry into one comprehensive database. These data aid transportation professionals, urban planners, and lawmakers in various stages of the decision making process at the municipal, state, and federal levels. David has spent almost three decades working with the U.S. roadway inventory data, known as the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS), a large database maintained by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Additionally, for more than fifteen years, he has worked with probe vehicle movement speed data collected by private sector companies. The HPMS traffic count and road characteristic data as well as these private sector speed data have been applied in countless research studies and scenarios at both the state and federal levels during this timeframe.

David has also utilized statewide roadway inventory databases and private sector state-level speed datasets from sources such as INRIX, HERE, and NPMRDS to perform numerous congestion and bottleneck analyses for multiple state Departments of Transportation. He has also produced the annual Texas 100 Most Congested Road Sections report for the Texas Department of Transportation since 2009, monitoring traffic congestion for over 2,000 Texas road sections (about 11,000 miles).

Furthermore, in several freight commodity value studies, David has conducted analyses of the Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) dataset from the FHWA and Global Insights Transearch database to calculate freight flows across the U.S. and between urban regions in order to determine the value of truck freight movements on U.S. roadways.

In the last five years, many of the performance measures generated in David’s research studies have been used to develop innovative planning tools. These tools allow agencies to monitor mobility changes across years for all vehicles and trucks, identify roadway segments with higher safety concerns, and provide estimates of benefits from potential roadway improvement projects.