Daniel Rodríguez

Transportation Policy and Planning and Environmental Planning and Healthy Cities.

Daniel A. Rodríguez is Chancellor’s Professor of City and Regional Planning and Associate Director of the Institute for Transportation Studies. His research focuses on the relationship between transportation, land development, and the health and environmental consequences that follow.

Current projects include:

• Examining the mortality consequences of past extreme heat events; whether greenspaces and air pollution ameliorate or exacerbate those effects; and how mortality will change as heat events increase under high and low global emissions scenarios for the midcentury.
• Impacts of land development and transportation policies on urban health and urban inequalities in medium to large Latin American cities. See project description here.
• Effectiveness of cyclist education programs on cycling safety. See a policy brief here, a knowledge synthesis here, and a research report here.
• Validating cyclists’ level of traffic stress indicators with user crowdsourced data, and comparing agreement across widely used indicators. See report here and research brief here.

A majority of Professor Rodríguez’s work is driven by practical problems and finding solutions for planners and policy-makers. Working with researchers in health, economics, engineering, geography and public policy, he has examined how changes to the physical attributes of the environment, such as the location of bus routes, rail lines, supermarkets and trails, are related to changes in the built environment, individual behavior, health, and air quality. His work also examines how land management tools can be used to encourage transit development and recapture property value increases by public action.

Prior to joining Berkeley, Rodriguez served in the faculty of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Communities in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He is a faculty fellow of the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, and has been a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, Andean Development Bank, and the Clean Air Institute.

Inquiries from prospective doctoral students are welcome.

CP 190 Sustainable Mobility

CP 201B Planning Methods

CP 216 Planning for Active Transportation

CP 217/CE250 Transportation Policy and Planning

CP 213 Transportation and Land Use

CP 290A, Special Topics: PR/CR/Thesis Workshop

Best paper of the year, awarded by Risk Analysis, 2015

Excellence in Safety Research Poster Award, given by Active Living Research and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in conjunction with the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (with Bushell, M., Poole, B., and Zeeger, C.)

San Diego, CA Transportation Research Board’s Fred Burggraf Award recognizing excellence in transportation research by researchers 35 years of age or younger, 2000.

Transportation and Land Use

Braun, L.M. Rodriguez, D.A., Gordon-Larsen, P. (In press). Social (in)equity in access to cycling infrastructure: Cross-sectional associations between bike lanes and area-level sociodemographic characteristics in 22 large U.S. cities, Journal of Transport Geography. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140518302718 

Vergel, C.E., and Rodriguez, D.A. (In press) The ridership performance of the built environment for BRT systems: Evidence from Latin America Journal of Transport Geography, 13 pages. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692317303526 

Moran, M. Rodriguez, D.A., Corburn, J. (2018). Examining the role of trip destination and neighborhood attributes in shaping environmental influences on children’s route choice, Transportation Research Part D, 65, 63-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2018.08.001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920918301305

Yang, Y., Xu, Y., Rodriguez, D.A., Michael, Y., Zhang, H. (2018). Active travel, public transportation use, and daily transport among older adults: The association of built environment. Journal of Transport and Health, 9, 288-298.

Rodriguez, D. A., & Vergel-Tovar, E. (2017). Urban development around bus rapid transit stops in seven cities in Latin-America. Journal of Urbanism, 11, 2, 175-201.

Hirsch, J.A., Meyer, K.A., Peterson, M., Huh, J., Peng, K., Song, Y., Rodriguez, D.A., Gordon-Larsen, P. In press. Neighbourhood Sociodemographics and Change in Built Environment Infrastructure. Journal of Urbanism, 10,2, 181-197. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2016.1212914

Hirsch, J. A., Meyer, K. A., Peterson, M., Zhang, L., Rodriguez, D. A., & Gordon-Larsen, P. (2017). Municipal investment in off-road trails and changes in bicycle commuting in Minneapolis, Minnesota over 10 years: A longitudinal repeated cross-sectional study. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 14, 1, 21.

Rodriguez, D.A., Vergel-Tovar, E., Camargo, W.F. (2016). Land development impacts of BRT in a sample of stops in Quito and Bogotá. Transport Policy, doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2015.10.002

Health and Environment

Implementing Strategies to Enhance Public Health Surveillance of Physical Activity in the United States (2019) . National Academies of Science and Medicine, Consensus Study Report, Washington D.C.

Wang, X., Rodriguez, D.A., Sarmiento, O.L., Guaje, O. (2019). Commute patterns and depression: Evidence from eleven Latin American cities. Journal of Transport and Health, 14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2019.100607

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140518306169

Diez-Roux, A.V., Slesinski, C., Alazraqui, M, Texeira Caiaffa, W., Frenz, P., Jordan Fuchs, R., Miranda, J.J., Rodriguez, D. A. and other authors (2018). A Novel International Partnership for Actionable Evidence on Urban Health in Latin America: LAC-Urban Health and SALURBAL. Global Challenges, 11 pages. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hidc0Eul6NhGFBY5Bx033On7HFsXpSsq/view

Besser, L.M., Rodriguez, D.A, McDonald, N., Kukull, W.A., Fitzpatrick, A.L., Rapp, S.R., Seeman, T. (2018). Neighborhood built environment and cognition in non-demented older adults: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Social Science and Medicine, 200, 27-35.

Holliday, K. M., Howard, A. G., Emch, M., Rodríguez, D. A., Rosamond, W. D., & Evenson, K. R. (2017). Deriving a GPS monitoring time recommendation for physical activity studies of adults. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 49, 5, 939-947.

Avila-Palencia, I., de Nazelle, A., Cole-Hunter, T., Donaire-Gonzalez, D., Jerrett, M., Rodriguez, D. A., & Nieuwenhuijsen, M. J. (2017). The relationship between bicycle commuting and perceived stress: a cross-sectional study. BMJ Open, 7, 6.

Besser, L. M., McDonald, N. C., Song, Y., Kukull, W. A., & Rodriguez, D. A. (2017). Neighborhood environment and cognition in older adults: a systematic review. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 53, 2, 241-251.