Donald Katz

This past spring, I got engaged to Amy Dessel. She’s from western North Carolina, and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, working as an attorney for King & Spalding. I proposed at nearby Tanyard Creek Park, and the proposal was inspired by the film Back to the Future! We are planning a wedding in Miami, Florida, for next summer.

Recently, we had an engagement shoot with Altmix Photography. Amy chose a great location, the Southeastern Railway Museum, based on my love of transportation. The photographers loved the site, and we had a great time exploring the trains and getting our photos taken. A sample of the photos is here.

I was selected as an Eno Fellow back in April, and I attended Eno Leadership Development Conference from June 5-9 in Washington, D.C. The week was spent with 19 other graduate students from across the country who focus on transportation policy. Our group met with a variety of professionals who are influencing our nation’s federal transportation policy including lobbyists, congress staff, USDOT employees, heads of associations, and members of transportation think tanks.

The week was packed full of meetings and presentations, which our group traveled to all over the city using WMATA’s Metro. Many of the conversations focused on potential upcoming transportation legislation, and the perceptions different groups had on what should be included. Two sentiments were shared by almost every policymaker we talked with: (1) we need to find a new revenue source in addition to or that replaces the gas tax; and (2) no new bill will get passed this year despite all efforts to do so. Perhaps the most enlightening conversation was with the Republican and Democrat staff directors from both the House and the Senate committees that deal with transportation. The four directors painted a great picture of where the next transportation bill is going, and why it is going to get held up until 2013.

The trip also entailed an airside tour of Reagan National Airport (DCA), presentations to policymakers on our own graduate research, and the annual Eno Foundation banquet.

Georgia Tech sent three of the twenty fellows, and I was joined by Brittany Luken and Elise Barrella.

In mid-May, the Georgia Tech transportation group was invited to tour Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL). The tour was organized by Dr. Seth Young, an associate professor at Ohio State, who was visiting our department to give a lecture on aviation. The tour was of both the airside and landside facilities at ATL, and lead by staff members of the airport authority.

Our tour bus took us around the airfield to visit Runway 10/28, and to visit one of the several fire stations that serve the airport. The tour also included stops at the airport’s main radar, freight facilities, maintenance vehicle shed, the Concourse E control tower, and the new taxiway that loops around the end of a runway. Below is a photo of me in front of an Air France 777. The picture after is most of my research group, with our advisor Dr. Laurie Garrow at the center.

The final meeting of the school year for our Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Georgia Tech student chapter was in April. Our chapter recently won runner-up for Chapter of the Year for the Southern District at the SDITE Annual Meeting. Clemson recaptured the Chapter of the Year honors which we held for one year.

Part of the meeting was an election for next year’s leadership. I was elected as next year’s Chapter President, and will transition with our former President this summer.

My fourth semester at Georgia Tech was a shift in focus back to classwork. I also spent a good deal of my time recovering from hip surgery in January; crutching around Georgia Tech was a course in itself! I took three real courses this semester, two in Civil Engineering and one in City and Regional Planning.

In my Land Use and Transportation course, I had the opportunity to present on the future of rail transportation in U.S. cities. Using The Transport Politic’s list and descriptions of various transit project statuses nationwide and a history of growth of new systems, I made the argument to the class that light rail will be the mode which we will see the heaviest investment in U.S. cities.

I’ve uploaded my group term paper from my Transit Systems Planning course to my Writings section. This term paper looks at the relationship between bus fare price in South Asian transit systems and the price of food (particularly rice) for the urban populations. It was an exploration into how price differences in food and mobility could be affected by the presence of different transit modes. Along the way, we detailed the differences in South Asian transit systems and examined also the relationships to city demographics.

Recently I was given the opportunity by the Park Scholarship office at NC State to present a Park Scholarship to a recent recipient. I drove up to Forsyth Central High School in Cumming, Georgia to present Patrick Cheeves a certificate at his high school’s scholarship and award night. Patrick will be part of the Park Scholar Class of 2016, and plans to major in Civil Engineering.

It brought me back to high school when an NC State alumnus visited my high school award ceremony to present me with my Park Scholarship certificate. I still remember that night and how impressed my family and I were that the Park Scholarship office would send someone out to make a presentation on my behalf.

In June of each year, the Eno Transportation Foundation holds an annual Leadership Development Conference in Washington, D.C. Annually the foundation selects 20 transportation graduate students from across the country to meet with top government officials, leaders of associations, and members of Congress to discuss the current issues in transportation policy. It provides a first-hand look at how transportation policy is developed, debated, and implemented.

Each university department can nominate one student to be selected. I was selected from the Georgia Tech Civil Engineering department, and was one of the 20 students selected by the national committee to be attend the week-long conference. In addition, I was awarded the Dr. Thomas D. Larson Fellowship, an award given annually to one of the attendees. Brittany Luken and Elise Barrella, fellow transportation students at Georgia Tech, will also be attending the conference. Brittany was the nominee from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department and Elise was awarded the spot reserved for the winner of a separate competition held by the Women’s Transportation Seminar and Parsons Brinckerhoff.  This makes Georgia Tech, with three representatives, the only school with more than one student.

The North Carolina State University alumni association hosted Chancellor Randy Woodson at the Buckhead Club yesterday evening. The Chancellor spoke on a number of topics relating to NC State, speaking primarily about our recent accomplishments, growth of the student body and alumni network, and highlighting recent research and student accomplishments. His talk also included the challenges the university faces currently, including the recent budget cuts, Sidney Lowe’s resignation, and how to raise our endowment.

I learned about the event from a fellow alumnus Seneca Toms, who I had not seen since I graduated. I also met up with other NCSU alumni who are in the Atlanta area, but who I did not know were attending until I got there: Cynthia Rouf, Alex Carter, and Taymour Hammoudi. I had an opportunity after the Chancellor’s talk to speak to him one-on-one, where we chatted about the new student center, the Park Scholarship program, the Krispy Kreme Challenge, and Hillsborough Street’s new roundabouts.

My graduate studies are now in their fourth semester at Georgia Tech. This semester I am taking the following courses.  They are listed below along with the instructors’ names.

CEE 6642 - Transit System Planning and Design (Dr. Michael Meyer)
CEE 8813 - Queuing Theory (Dr. Jorge Laval)
CP 6331 - Land Use and Transportation (Dr. Brian Stone)

This semester I am preparing my Ph.D. research proposal, which will culminate in a presentation to my committee, who will give me the go ahead to work on my dissertation if approved. Along with my advisors Dr. Michael Meyer and Dr. Laurie Garrow, I am working out the precise research question that I will pursue, and how I will accomplish seeking answers to it.

A paper I co-authored two summers ago at the Institute for Transportation Research and Education at NC State was accepted to the 2011 Transportation Research Board annual meeting in Washington, D.C. This is the same conference in which my first paper was accepted last year. The paper, entitled “Economic Effects of Access Management Techniques in North Carolina”, will be presented next Monday. The first author of the paper was my supervisor Chris Cunningham at ITRE. In it, we discuss our field study of access management techniques, such as median installations, particularly how business owners perceive it as a threat and what the real economic effects to a corridor are.