Tara Goddard

Tara Goddard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. After earning a master’s degree in civil engineering from UC Davis, she worked as an Associate Transportation Planner for the City of Sacramento and then served 2007-2011 as the Bicycle/Pedestrian Program Coordinator for the City of Davis, CA. Dr. Goddard then earned her PhD in Urban Studies at Portland State University. She joined the faculty of Texas A&M in 2017, where her research focuses on creating a just transportation system through safe roadway design and inclusive transportation planning. She is known internationally for her expertise on reducing traffic deaths and injuries, particularly for pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vulnerable road users, her work on roadway safety culture, and for studies examining racial and gender bias in transportation safety. Dr. Goddard studies both individual transportation behaviors and the socio-technical systems in which they occur and uses integrated mixed methods. She mentors students who study a wide variety of transportation issues in planning, engineering, and public health. Active in both local and national service, she is a member of the doctoral committee of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and served as Vice-Chair of the Transportation Research Board’s Standing Committee on Women and Gender in Transportation and as a member of the TRB Standing Committee on Bicycle Transportation. Dr. Goddard serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Her recent and on-going research focuses on transportation safety and justice in the context of wildfire evacuation, urban heat, and other issues of planning in the Pyrocene.

Vulnerable road user safety; evacuation planning and response; safety culture; partial/conditional autonomous technology and driver behavior; driver cognition and attention; transportation planning; traffic safety and crash reduction; design for sustainable transportation.