Dr. Rachel Weinberger is the Peter W. Herman Chair for Transportation at Regional Plan Association. She has over 30 years of transportation planning experience in the public and private sectors and in academia. Weinberger is an internationally recognized expert in sustainable transportation with specializations in travel behavior, land use transportation interactions, economic impacts of the transportation system, and parking policy.
As the former Senior Policy Advisor on transportation to the New York City Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, she was a key contributor to the first PlaNYC and has since assisted the New York City Department of Transportation with their current strategic plan, an on-going curb management study, and an analysis of commuter vans. She was the Director of Research and Policy Strategy for Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, and she is the Founding Principal of Weinberger & Associate, LLC.
She has published dozens of journal articles and book chapters covering topics as disparate as racial and gender differences in commuting behavior, peer pressure in auto ownership decisions, land value capitalization of transportation infrastructure investments and the use of Big Data in analyzing travel patterns. Along with her book Auto Motives: Understanding Car Use Behaviours. Weinberger has contributed over 25 chapters to various books including “Parking: Not As Bad As You Think, Worse Than You Realize”, “Is the Curb 80% Full or 20% Empty? Assessing the Impacts of San Francisco’s Parking Pricing Experiment”, and “Death by a Thousand Curb-cuts: Evidence on the effect of minimum parking requirements on the choice to drive.” She has been invited to speak on sustainable transportation in Zurich, Bogota, Budapest, Istanbul, and Guangzhou and Dongguan, China, and across the United States.
Weinberger holds her Ph.D. in Urban Planning and a M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. A native New Yorker she has her B.A. and M.U.P, from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Weinberger served on the urban planning faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University.
Weinberger lives in Brooklyn with her two children.