John L Renne, Ph.D., AICP

Dr. Renne has worked with state and local government on smart growth and transportation planning, particularly transit-oriented development (TOD), across the United States and Australia. He is currently advising state government in Perth and Sydney on TOD planning and policy.

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Renne launched the Transportation Equity and Evacuation Planning Program at the UNO Transportation Center. The charge of this program is to provide research and outreach to improve evacuation planning and practice for all members of society. As part of this, he organized the National Conference on Disaster Planning for the Carless Society, held in New Orleans, February 8th & 9th, 2007 (www.carlessevacuation.org). Dr. Renne is also leading a four-year national study of carless evacuation planning, sponsored by a grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The goal, in both the conference and research, is to bridge the transportation, emergency management, and health care professions as well as establish a dialogue between local, parish/county, state, and federal government.

Before joining the University of New Orleans, Dr. Renne worked as a Visiting Research Associate for the Planning and Transport Research Centre at Murdoch University in Western Australia, where he provided TOD research and advice to the State of Western Australia's Department for Planning and Infrastructure. He organized Australia's first national conference on TOD, held July 5 - 8, 2005. From 2001 - 2004, Dr. Renne worked as a Project Manager for the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers where he led TOD projects along with Research Professor Jan Wells on evaluating the New Jersey Transit Village Initiative and "Developing a Tool to Measure the Success of TODs" for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (published as NCHRP Research Results Digest 294). Professor Renne is a USDOT Eisenhower Transportation Fellow and Eno Transportation Foundation Fellow.