Kelcie Ralph joined the Bloustein School from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, where she studied the travel behavior of special populations. She earned her Ph.D. from UCLA, where her dissertation project evaluated the causes and consequences of the decline in driving among young adults. Before attending UCLA, Kelcie studied as a Marshall Scholar in England where she earned a Masters of Environmental Policy from Cambridge University and a Masters of City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics. Kelcie studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Research Interests
My primary research focus since tenure addresses a frustrating puzzle for transportation planning scholars and practitioners: we largely have a sense of what we would like to do, but we have collectively struggled to make much progress. This work explores three themes:
- #1 Public sentiment: My work on public sentiment largely focuses on how the precise framing of reform proposals affects public support. My work explored three alternative justifications for automated speed enforcement (J21, J26, J30, J31) and a suite of reforms like widening roads, raising gas taxes, removing parking, and reducing driving (J20 and J22). In related work, I conducted a longitudinal survey before, during, and after a new e-scooter program and find that for many people, opposition to scooters declined with exposure (J28). Concurrent interviews with city staff revealed effective strategies to ride the wave of public opposition, most notably by launching as a pilot. A final publication illustrates that transportation preferences are increasingly partisan, a marked departure from decades of a bipartisan consensus (J19).
- #2 Contested concepts in the profession Reform efforts may be stymied if practitioners disagree about how to proceed. This is particularly likely in transportation where engineers and planners have distinct priorities and practices. My work explores the contested concept of induced travel demand. I find that engineering and planning students embrace this concept—and its policy implications—to starkly different degrees (J23). In subsequent work, I found that engineering students could be forgiven for their relative ignorance because induced travel is often not covered by their instructors (J27) or textbooks (UR1). Fortunately, experimental work suggestions that when people are taught about induced travel, their transportation policy preferences shift (J22). Inspired by these results, I developed open-source teaching materials.
- #3 Biking Deal Breakers Research on biking is often plagued by poorly developed theory, tautological variables, and flawed statistical analysis and as a result, findings are often contradictory and of little use to practitioners. In this milieu, I proposed a new theoretical approach called the Deal Breaker Theory of Cycling (J29).
Undergraduate Courses
- Transportation Planning
Graduate Courses
- Transportation and the Environment
- Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning
- Environmental Economics and Policy
- Introduction to Transportation Planning