John L Renne, Ph.D., AICP

Dr. John L. Renne is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation Studies at the University of New Orleans.  He serves as the Director of Transportation Studies and the Associate Director of the University of New Orleans Transportation Center.  He is also the Managing Director of The TOD Group (www.theTODgroup.com), a company that specializes in Transit-Oriented Development. 

Dr. Renne is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).  His research focuses on transportation and land use planning, including smart growth, sustainable development, and evacuation planning.  Dr. Renne is leading a national study on carless and accessible evacuations for the Federal Transit Administration.  Dr. Renne is affiliated with research centers in Australia and Europe, including the Urban Sustainability through Environmental Design (UStED) research network, the Planning and Transport Research Centre of Western Australia, the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, and the Planning Research Centre at the University of Sydney.  Dr. Renne has written extensively and has lectured around the globe on these issues.  Dr. Renne is an author and co-editor of Transit-Oriented Development: Making It Happen (forthcoming 2009, Ashgate) which is the first international book on the topic and includes chapters by top scholars in the field including Professor Robert Cervero (Berkeley) and Professor Peter Newman (Australia).  Dr. Renne has led two projects on transit-oriented development for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.

Dr. Renne has worked with state and local government on smart growth and transportation planning, particularly with transit-oriented development (TOD), across the United States and Australia.  In the days following Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Renne launched the Transportation Equity and Evacuation Planning Program at the UNO Transportation Center. The charge of this program is to provide research and outreach to improve evacuation planning and practice for all members of society. As part of this, he organized the National Conference on Disaster Planning for the Carless Society, held in New Orleans, February 8th & 9th, 2007 (www.carlessevacuation.org). Dr. Renne is also leading a four-year national study of carless evacuation planning, sponsored by a grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The goal, in both the conference and research, is to bridge the transportation, emergency management, and health care professions as well as establish a dialogue between local, parish/county, state, and federal government.  
 
Before joining the University of New Orleans, Dr. Renne worked as a Visiting Research Associate for the Planning and Transport Research Centre at Murdoch University in Western Australia, where he provided TOD research and advice to the State of Western Australia's Department for Planning and Infrastructure. He organized Australia's first national conference on TOD, held July 5 - 8, 2005.  While in Australia, he was also an associate director for the EG Property group.  From 2001 - 2004, Dr. Renne worked as a Project Manager for the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers where he led TOD projects along with Research Professor Jan Wells on evaluating the New Jersey Transit Village Initiative and "Developing a Tool to Measure the Success of TODs" for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (published as NCHRP Research Results Digest 294). Professor Renne is a USDOT Eisenhower Transportation Fellow and Eno Transportation Foundation Fellow.