Jeff Zupan is a senior fellow for transportation at RPA and the Peter W. Herman Chair for Transportation. A nationally recognized policy expert and consultant, he has more than 50 years of experience in the transportation field.
His work with RPA began in the 1960s, and from 1969 to 1980 he was the organization’s chief planner. He has led the organization’s work in all facets of transportation planning and policy, including airports, transportation financing, pricing, transportation systems management, transit planning and pedestrian circulation issues and studies. He has been a lead analyst and author on many of RPA’s influential projects and publications, including the mobility section of the third regional plan, A Region at Risk, and the author of major portions of the fourth plan’s transportation section. He was the co-author of the influential 2011 RPA study Upgrading to World Class: The Future of the Airports in the New York Region.
Jeff left RPA in 1980 to serve as director of planning for NJ Transit, where he oversaw the formulation and evaluation of that agency’s new initiatives program, leading to more than $2 billion of transit investments. He returned to RPA in 1990.
As an independent transportation consultant, Jeff has worked with a wide range of clients, including the Long Island Rail Road, NJ Transit, Metro-North, Amtrak, SEPTA, the Conservation Law Foundation, the Transportation Research Board, the Los Angeles County MTA, the American Public Transportation Association and the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University, and many others.
Jeff is co-author of three major books, Urban Rail in America, Public Transportation and Land Use Policy, and Urban Space for Pedestrians, and author of many reports and technical papers on a wide variety of transportation matters. Jeff also has taught graduate-level transportation courses at five universities. He is a graduate of City College of New York in civil engineering and Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in transportation engineering. Mr. Zupan is a registered Professional Engineer in New York State.