Reid Ewing

Professor
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Phone: (801) 585-3745
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Office:
375 South 1530 East
Salt Lake City Utah 84112
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Reid Ewing is a Professor of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah, associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, columnist for Planning magazine, Fellow of the Urban Land Institute, and member of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED LP-Technical Advisory Group. Earlier in his career, he was director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University and research professor at the National Center for Smart Growth. He served two terms in the Arizona legislature, and worked on urban policy issues at the Congressional Budget Office. He holds masters degrees in Engineering and City Planning from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Transportation Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His research and writing are aimed at planning practitioners. He authored Developing Successful New Communities for the Urban Land Institute; Best Development Practices and Transportation and Land Use Innovations for the American Planning Association; and Traffic Calming State-of-the-Practice for the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Best Development Practices made him APA's top selling author for many years and is listed by the American Planning Association as one of the “100 Essential Books of Planning” over the past 100 years. His most recent books are Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, written for EPA and published by the Urban Land Institute, and U.S. Traffic Calming Manual, co-published by the American Planning Association and American Society of Civil Engineers.

His study of sprawl and obesity, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, received more national media coverage than any planning study before or since, reaching an estimated 41 million Americans. It was the most widely cited academic paper in the Social Sciences as of late 2005, according to Essential Science Indicators. His 1997 point-counterpoint on urban sprawl is listed as a classic by the American Planning Association. In 2008-09, he has co-authored research published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Literature, Journal of Urban Design, Urban Design International, Environmental Practice, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Journal of Urbanism, Housing Policy Debate, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Transportation Research Record, and ITE Journal. In 2010, Ewing's article with Robert Cervero of UC Berkeley, entitled "Travel and The Built Environment: A Meta-Analysis," won the best article of the year award from the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Ewing has worked for EPA’s Division of Development, Community, and Environment in many capacities. He authored two of the Smart Growth Network’s primers on smart growth, one on Best Development Practices and the other on Pedestrian- and Transit-Friendly Design. With Professor Robert Cervero of UC Berkeley, he conducted the first meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature and produced elasticity estimate that fed directly into the Smart Growth Index modeling system. He developed the nation’s most widely used sprawl indices with seed funding from the Division, and studied the impact of sprawl on a host of transportation outcomes. He conducted the first comprehensive study of the impact of the built environment impact on student travel to school. He wrote Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, again with seed funding from the Division. And most recently, he updated the meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature and led the team that has developed new models for predicting the traffic impacts of mixed-use developments.

His other work on smart growth includes background studies for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighborhood Development guidelines, the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Recommended Practice for Context-Sensitive Thoroughfares, the National Wildlife Federation’s Endangered by Sprawl, context-sensitive highway design guidelines for New Jersey DOT; pedestrian- and transit-friendly design guidelines for Florida DOT; and the first traffic calming manual in the United States for Delaware DOT. He has given hundreds of talks around the nation on smart growth and its relationship to travel, public health and safety, and climate change.

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