Peter Stopher
BSc(Eng) PhD Lond.; FIEAust MASCE MASA MITE
Professor
peter.stopher@sydney.edu.au
Room 202A
C37 - Newtown Campus
The University of Sydney
Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
Phone: +61 2 9351 0010
Fax: +61 2 9351 0088
Professor Stopher is Professor of Transport Planning at the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney, a position he has held since the beginning of 2001. He was educated at the University of London, where he received both his BSc (Eng.) in Civil Engineering and Ph.D. in Traffic Studies. He has been a professor at Northwestern University, Cornell University, McMaster University, and Louisiana State University, where he held the endowed chair of the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company. He spent 11 years from 1980 through 1990 as a full-time transport planning consultant in private industry. Prof. Stopher has 40 years of professional experience in transport planning, travel forecasting, travel-behaviour modelling, and associated areas. He has an international reputation in travel-demand modelling, and the development of new procedures for travel forecasting. He was one of the pioneers of the development of disaggregate travel-demand models and was the first to use and apply the logit model in the 1960s. He has been in the forefront of work to assess the shortcomings of conventional travel-forecasting models with respect to the demands of clean air legislation and goals. He was selected by the US Federal Highway Administration to develop one of four concept papers on a new paradigm for travel forecasting. He was a founding member of the Transportation Research Board?s Committee on Traveler Behavior and Values, serving as its first Chairman from 1971-1977, and again from 1995-1997 and was awarded Emeritus Membership of the Committee in 2002; he also founded the series of International Conferences on Traveller Behaviour that began in 1973 and which will hold its next meeting in Kyoto, Japan in 2006.
In addition to work in travel forecasting, Dr. Stopher has also developed a substantial reputation in the field of data collection, particularly for the support of travel forecasting and analysis. He pioneered the development of travel and activity diaries as a data-collection mechanism, and has also written extensively on issues of sample design, data expansion, nonresponse biases, and measurement issues. He recently completed a report on standardising household travel surveys, and is working on use of GPS devices in connection with personal travel surveys and for evaluation of voluntary travel behaviour change. Dr. Stopher initiated the TRB Subcommittee on Survey Methods, which is now a Committee of the TRB. He co-chaired the international conference on Transport Surveys: Raising the Standard, in Eibsee, Germany in May 1997, the following conference in Kruger Park, South Africa in 2001, and the International Conference on Travel Survey Methods in Costa Rica in 2004.