Dr. John Pritchard

Dr. Pritchard is interested in efforts to ensure equal accessibility to transport, stating that “accessibility is, in an essential way, a measure of a person’s freedom.” Building on a Bachelors’ degree in Civil Engineering, he did his PhD in Transport Studies as part of the MIT Portugal Program at the University of Lisbon. There he studied the impacts of accessibility and daily mobility on social exclusion in low-income areas of Lisbon. He showed the relationship between social exclusion and subjective well-being (SWB), and how these factors relate to people´s daily mobility and travel behavior (which is affected by the accessibility of their homes to transport). He also did postdoctoral research at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

At the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Dr. Pritchard plans to analyze and compare accessibility patterns in a set of US metropolitan areas. He hopes that a better understanding of transport inequities in US cities could provide lessons for other places that are going through rapid population growth, such as Israel and countries in Asia, and could help contribute to the planning of inclusive transport systems in a rapidly urbanizing world.