This article was originally published in USC Sol Price School of Public Policy on November 3, 2022 authored by Christian Hetrick and is reproduced with permission from Lance Ignon.

Lynn Feng and two AECOM colleagues in the Regional Connector tunnel in LA. (Courtesy: Lynn Feng)

Highlights

• Price School alum Lynn Feng was named to Mass Transit magazine’s “40 Under 40” list of emerging leaders.
• The Master of Planning graduate works for infrastructure giant AECOM, where she consults on transit projects around the world.
• She advised the LA28 Olympics organizing committee on mobility planning for the 2028 Summer Games.

As planning manager at infrastructure giant AECOM, Lynn Feng gets to work on some pretty high-profile projects. She consulted on mobility solutions for the 2028 Olympics, helped transit agencies navigate the pandemic, and even advised the Saudi Arabian government as it builds a city from scratch in the desert.

One project, though, is especially interesting to Feng, even if it’s not as well-known. That’s because it’s close to home.

Feng, a USC Price School alum who earned a master’s degree in planning back in 2016, is helping Los Angeles Metro fill a major gap in its rail network. Called the Crenshaw Northern Extension (CNE), the project would extend the Crenshaw/LAX light rail line north to Mid-City, West Hollywood and Hollywood.

For Feng, the rail line would provide a direct ride from her home in Koreatown to Hollywood, where she often meets friends and attends events.

“Working on projects like CNE that are closely related to my daily life gives me so much joy as I feel I’m actively doing my part to improve the life quality of people living in my neighborhood,” Feng said.

Born and raised in Urumqi, China, Feng is helping solve vexing mobility problems in her new home of L.A. and around the world. Her work is getting recognized, too. She was recently named to Mass Transit magazine’s 40 Under 40 list of emerging leaders in the transportation industry.

“I love this industry more every day as I learn more about it and get better at what I’m doing,” Feng said.

The veins of a city

Feng sees transportation as a crucial aspect of urban planning that affects people’s daily lives. Residents can’t leave their homes for work or school without some means of transportation, whether that’s on foot, by bike, in a car or aboard a bus or train. “If you consider a city more like an organic body, then transportation is really the veins,” Feng said.

Feng has called L.A. home since moving roughly 7,000 miles in 2014 to study at the USC Price School. She interned at L.A. Metro and continues to work on city projects at AECOM. She notably advised the LA28 committee during the bidding process for the 2028 Summer Olympics. To prepare for the swarm of sports fans and athletes, she proposed expanding transit service and leveraging remote work options to keep some residents home and ease the potential stress on the city’s transportation system.

Feng has also helped city and state agencies navigate challenges exacerbated by the pandemic, like service disruptions and reduced ridership on public transit. For example, she is advising the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) on ensuring social equity is considered in new policy decisions post-pandemic.

“In COVID times like this, a certain route might not have that high of a ridership,” she noted. “But it might be very important for certain disadvantaged communities. This could be their lifeline. Agencies like CMAP are beginning to understand the importance of looking beyond a performance-based system planning method going forward.”

From focused student to transportation leader

Feng was a focused student who worked hard to understand U.S. culture, the labor market and the transportation industry, said James Moore, a USC Price School emeritus professor who specializes in transportation. Moore said Feng joined professional societies like the WTS, formerly known as the Women’s Transportation Seminar, which has helped USC students network with prospective employers.

Feng is now a WTS board member and helps USC students get involved in WTS functions.

“She was particularly deliberate about trying to understand how she could conduct herself stateside and compete effectively, and she was successful in doing that,” Moore said.

Feng credits the USC Price School and the Trojan family of alumni for helping with her career. Problem-solving skills are especially important as a consultant, and the USC Price School provided valuable training to keep her mind sharp and flexible, she said. Because fellow Trojans know first-hand about the quality of the school’s professors and programs, many seek its students for new jobs or internships, she added. That includes the AECOM manager—a USC alum—who hired her.

Then there’s the wide breadth of courses, professors and perspectives Feng learned from at the USC Price School that provided a broad understanding of the transportation industry, helping Feng find her passion and strengths.

The USC Price School, she said, “helps you figure out what your interests actually are and what you’re good at.”

This article was originally published in USC Sol Price School of Public Policy on October 20, 2022 authored by Greg Hardesty and is reproduced with permission from Lance Ignon.

Professor Genevieve Giuliano has a landmark year as she continues her passion for transportation-related research.

From her home in Huntington Beach, Professor Genevieve Giuliano loves to hop on her bicycle for leisurely rides along the coast.

Once or twice a week for work, she’ll drive to the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, where she’s the Margaret and John Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government. And whenever possible, she’ll use public transportation to attend meetings elsewhere in Los Angeles.

How Giuliano gets around is, on a micro scale, the focus of her distinguished 34-year career at USC.

She’s an expert in travel behavior, transportation policy and metropolitan spatial structure, with some of her current research focused on examining the relationships between urban form, online shopping behavior, and local freight demand.

You could say, literally and scholarly, that Giuliano always has been on the move.

And early this year, Giuliano, who has published more than 200 papers and reports and has lectured around the world, was elected a fellow of the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), which globally recognizes her as a regional scientist with outstanding research credentials.

“I’m very proud of the honor,” says Giuliano, adding with a laugh: “I joke about this kind of recognition sometimes. The reward is more work.”

She’s referring to the scores of student papers she reviews for possible awards from RSAI, an international community of scholars interested in the regional impacts of national or global processes of economic and social change that was founded nearly 70 years ago.

But it’s clear Giuliano’s passion for transportation research hasn’t dimmed since she stumbled into the field as a graduate student at UC Irvine, where she earned a Ph.D. in social sciences.

“I just find this field of research fascinating,” she says.

A research powerhouse

In another milestone this year, Giuliano stepped down as director of the METRANS Transportation Consortium after more than 20 years.

A partnership between USC and Cal State University Long Beach, METRANS’ mission is to solve transportation problems of large metropolitan regions through interdisciplinary research, education, and research.

And it couldn’t be based in a more ideal region – the most congested metropolitan area in the U.S. and home to the largest container port in the country and an airport that is the fourth largest air cargo center in the U.S.

METRANS has grown under Giuliano’s tenure from a small operation to one that conducts about $8 million worth of research every year.

As her successor, Marlon Boarnet, said at the time: “METRANS is incredibly strong, and it’s energizing to think about how you can build from something with such a prestigious track record. Following in the footsteps of somebody like Gen Giuliano is both an honor and, of course, a little daunting.”

Giuliano says it simply was time to make the change, noting that METRANS was one of the first transportation consortiums to examine the movement of freight in cities.

“Nobody was really looking at freight at the time,” she says of METRANS’ establishment in 1998. “Most transportation planning experts think about passengers and people and how people move around the urban environment, but hardly anyone thinks about all those goods that are moving around at the same time and their effects on cities.

“How does freight behave?” Giuliano adds. “What is the difference in the way freight moves around and people move around? Freight packages do not have a choice. You can optimize the way freight moves around, but you can’t really optimize people’s movements, because they have their own ideas.”

Pandemic-related transportation trends may be here to stay

Two big transportation-related trends have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Giuliano says, but she’s not certain how things ultimately will shake out.

One trend is changes in consumer behavior.

The market share for online retail sales in the US has rocketed from less than 4% in 2008 to 13.5% in 2021. The global market share in 2021 is about 20%. Online sales continue to grow faster than total retail sales. But the rate of growth is slowing.

“We don’t know when online sales will taper off,” Giuliano says. “It’s not growing as fast as it did in 2021 and 2020, but what happens next will have huge implications for cities.”

The other big change is people working from home. According to a recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans primarily working from home tripled from 5.7% in 2019 to almost 18% in 2021.

“We’re not seeing a wholesale, 100-percent return to the office, but something in between,” Giuliano says. “We don’t know if that’s going to last or if, over time, the system will kind of go back to where it was. It’s too early to tell. And the implications for cities are enormous.”

Giuliano notes that experts have been arguing since the 1980s that the information technology revolution was going to change the role of cities – that as information technology advanced, there would be fewer incentives for workers to commute to urban centers.

“I can do Zoom all the time and text and email, so why would I need to be in the city?” Giuliano asks.

But over the last several decades, cities have continued to grow.

“Those of us who study this say there are really important benefits of being close together,” Giuliano says, “and those benefits, such as the value of meeting someone face to face, are not going away.”

Professor John Gunnar Carlsson, of USC’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, recently completed research on new continuous approximation approaches which simplify routing and tour planning problems in transportation. The research project used tools from geospatial optimization, computational geometry, and geometric probability theory to discover simple "continuous approximation models" for modern logistical systems with complex features such as ridesharing, crowdsourcing or teleworking. A "continuous approximation model" is a computational framework that identifies simple closed-form algebraic expressions that describe the behavior of a logistical system, rather than searching for solutions via large-scale computation, which can often be intractable. The goal is to approximate a cost metric of the system, such as vehicle miles travelled (VMT), into an expression that can be optimized by relatively simple analytical operations.

Carlsson proved various theorems that allowed his research to predict the tour lengths (in terms of VMT) of some modern routing optimization problems: one is called the "one-of-a-subset travelling salesman problem" (1-STSP), and arises when one seeks the shortest route that visits certain elements of a set of locations. Specifically, one is given a collection of sets of points, and the goal is to find the shortest tour that visits one member from each set. This is an important phenomenon to model in modern logistics systems analysis for its applications to numerous areas:

• The 1-STSP is fundamentally important in studying randomized strategies in warehouses, in which one stores a stock keeping unit (SKU) in any available location (as opposed to designating specific regions of the warehouse for different SKUs). This is because a warehouse picker will often select multiple SKUs at a time, and can benefit if those SKUs are dispersed throughout the warehouse. Amazon, for example, calls this process "random stow" and attributes its rapid growth to the efficiency that is realized as a result.

• The 1-STSP also arises organically in studying the consequences of trip chaining, that is, performing multiple errands during a single outing, because one has multiple choices of locations at which to perform errands. For instance, one might seek the shortest tour that visits a bank branch, a grocery store, and a pharmacy, and there are several alternatives for each of these to choose from.

• One proposed approach for mitigating the inefficiencies in “last mile” delivery has been the use of a socially networked system in which parcel recipients can “opt in” for packages to be delivered at multiple possible locations (as opposed to their doorstep), such as their workplace. The parcel delivery company then solves a 1-STSP, where each delivery has multiple potential destinations.

The research conducted under this project has led to simple managerial insights that categorize what quantities impact the cost metrics most significantly. We anticipate that they will be useful in high-level strategic planning for estimating the costs incurred in today's sophisticated logistical systems.

For more information, visit Pacific Southwest Region project number 21-22 for the full report or see research brief.

CSULB's Center for International Trade and Transportation was the big winner at the first annual Harbor Trucking Association Member Golf Tournament held in Long Beach in November. At the event, held at Skylinks Golf Course, CITT Executive Director and METRANS Deputy Director Tom O'Brien accepted a check for $25,000 to be used in establishing an endowment at CITT. The endowment will provide scholarships for students in trade and transportation-related programs offered through CITT, CSULB and the College of Professional and Continuing Education (CPaCE) including the award-winning Global Logistics Professional (GLP) program. It will also support student research into areas of interest to the HTA. The HTA is a coalition of intermodal carriers serving America's west coast ports with a mission of advocating, educating and promoting strategies with goods movement stakeholders and policy makers that will sustain emissions reductions, provide a dialogue for intermodal truck efficiency, and return cargo and jobs to America's west coast ports. 

The HTA Endowment is the newest partnership between CITT and trade and transportation-related business organizations with a strong commitment to education in the logistics and port sectors. Endowments and scholarship programs previously established by the LA Transportation Club, Harbor Transportation Club, Harbor Association of Industry and Commerce, Intermodal Association of North America and Port of Long Beach provide valuable access to employment opportunities that are vital to the state and regional economies. CITT's and CPaCE's programs are unique in that they are focused on students pursuing professional development opportunities and who may not be eligible for more traditional scholarship programs. 

HTA's generous financial support will help build capacity in a segment of the industry challenged by driver turnover and facing economic and regulatory pressures. 

For information on all scholarship opportunities, visit Center for International Trade & Transportation | CSULB