EMBARQ Director Nancy Kete will be in Evanston, Ill. this week, giving three lectures at Northwestern University about sustainable transportation, as part of the university's push to improve its focus on sustainability in research and education.

Kete was invited to speak as a Northwestern Institute of Sustainable Practices 2009 Distinguished Visitor. (For a full list of visiting scholars, click here.)

Transforming Transportation 1: Revitalizing mass transit in the motorized metropolis – case studies of Mexico City and Istanbul.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Noon - 2:00 p.m.
Chambers Hall

Since 2002, EMBARQ and its network of Centers for Sustainable Transport have been working in cities in developing countries to catalyze and help implement solutions to problems associated with urban mobility. EMBARQ fosters government-business-civil society partnerships to reduce pollution, improve public health, and create safe, accessible and attractive public space to make cities cleaner, more livable and more prosperous. This first lecture will present details on the EMBARQ Networks approach and outcomes in Mexico City and Istanbul and a brief overview of efforts in the Andean countries, India and Brazil.

Transforming Transportation 2: Do we have the future we wanted back in the early 20th century and can we invent the future we need by mid 21st?

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Pancoe Auditorium

It’s so broke it’s broken. So say many observers of America’s surface transportation policy and the highway trust fund that has been used to finance it. A veritable alphabet soup of NGO and special interests are aligning to cooperate and compete to reshape the surface transportation bill of 2009, with many determined that it should not be reauthorized but rather should take a fresh approach. The National Transportation Policy Project, a project of the Bipartisan Policy Center, will release its report in later this year. This second lecture will review some of the project’s key findings on short-comings of current policy and funding and ideas for how to shape surface transport law for coming decades to make it more performance based and more aligned with energy security and climate change – the other major national issues of the era.

Transforming Transportation 3: The National Transportation Policy Project and other efforts to reform surface transportation program structure and financing in 2009/2010

Thursday, May 21, 2009
Noon - 2:00 p.m.
Chambers Hall

It has been one hundred years since the first National Conference on City Planning took place in Washington, DC on May 21-22, 1909, and seventy years since GM brought us Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair. Looking back seventy or a hundred years to what we thought the future of transportation and land use would be like today – and comparing those futures to today’s reality - can help us make our own scenarios and visions for the future. Did we get the future we planned for? Why or why not? The challenge for the coming fifty to one hundred years is to meet our mobility and accessibility needs in a carbon constrained world – nominally an 80 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2050. In this last session of Transforming Transportation, I would like participants offer their own vision of future US transportation system in a carbon constrained world and ideas for how to get there from here.

Biography:

Nancy Kete is a Senior Fellow and Director of EMBARQ - The WRI Center for Sustainable Transport. Prior to joining WRI, she was a senior policy advisor in the U.S. government on matters of air pollution, global warming, and the interface of trade and environment issues. A geographer, Nancy Kete has always been attracted to large-scale problems at the energy/environment interface. She has been part of numerous US delegations to international environmental negotiations and served as the Science Advisor for Environmental Affairs for the US Mission to the OECD, where she co-chaired the Joint Experts Group on Trade and Environment. After resigning from the US government she directed the Climate, Energy and Pollution program for five years at the World Resources Institute, until she became managing director of EMBARQ, the WRI Center for Transport and the Environment.

+Download agenda and lecture descriptions below.