Erick Guerra

Erick Guerra, Ph.D., is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Associate Dean for Research at the Weitzman School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in transportation planning and quantitative planning methods. His research focuses on relationships between land use, transportation systems, and travel behavior with an emphasis on rapidly motorizing cities, public health outcomes, and transportation technologies. He has published recent articles on land use and transportation in Mexico and Indonesia, public transport policy, automated traffic enforcement, land use and traffic safety, and contemporary planning for self-driving vehicles. His 2017 book Beyond Mobility with Robert Cervero and Stefan Al explores global challenges and opportunities to creating safer, healthier, and more productive cities. His 2025 book Overbuilt focuses on US highway policy since 1991 and examines how the US roadway system became overbuilt, how public policy continues to encourage overbuilding, what the scale and consequences of overbuilding are, and how policymakers can stop and begin to correct overbuilding.

As a practicing researcher and consultant, Erick has completed projects on accessibility and transportation affordability for the Brookings Institution, the World Bank, the OECD, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Erick holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California Berkeley, a master’s in urban planning from Harvard University, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Gabon from 2002 to 2004.