Zhan Guo
Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation Policy

The focus of my studies is the travel behavior of individuals and the driving forces behind their travel decisions. It explores innovative ways to influence that decision-making process to produce better social outcomes such as reduced congestion and carbon emissions. I investigates both the micro-level picture (e.g., the importance of human psychology) and the macro picture (e.g., the influence of the broader built environment).

At the micro level, I focus on the role of each traveler’s perception and seek to answer questions such as how travelers perceive travel alternatives and attributes and what discrepancies exist between perception and reality. The ability to reinforce, change, or even deceive that perception to promote the "right" behavior, and the methods used to do so, also figure largely in my research. By pursuing these questions, I have investigated two types of perceptions formed through actual travel experience (street walking and transferring in public transit) and information acquisition (transit map design).

At the macro level, I research how the built environment affects individual travel decisions, whether land-use planning may solve transportation problems effectively, and how it interacts with other proposed solutions. Along this track, I have analyzed the different research designs in identifying causal relationships between the built environment and travel behavior, tested the synergistic effect between land-use planning and congestion pricing, and currently evaluate residential parking policies in major metropolitan areas in the U.S and U.K 

I was a trained designer in China (B. Arch from Tianjin and Master in Urban Design from Tsinghua), and obtain a Master degree and Ph.D in urban planning in the U.S. both from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Below are recent and ongoing research projects:

Residential On-Street Parking

Residential Off-Street Parking

Transit Map and Path Choice

Built Environment and Travel Behavior

Perception and Travel Behavior

Others