About ITS>>Our Nobel Connection

UC Berkeley Professor Daniel L. McFadden won a Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work on how people make choices—work that dates back to a mode choice study he conducted at Berkeley in the 1970s when he was closely associated with the Institute of Transportation Studies.

The study used data collected for a BART impact study to analyze how people chose between alternatives such as driving, taking the bus or riding BART. With the help of many graduate student researchers on the Berkeley campus, McFadden looked at how people weighted attributes such as speed, comfort, cost and waiting time. Blending techniques from economics and statistics, he then created a model to predict how many travelers would use each mode.

This work by McFadden on "discrete choice theory" and "econometric modeling" had an immediate and lasting influence on transportation research and education.

McFadden addressed the 2002 University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) student research conference on the evening of February 1, 2002. An extended excerpt from his talk is available in the Spring 2002 issue of ACCESS magazine, published by UCTC.