Ian Savage has been a member of the faculty of both the Department of Economics and
the Transportation Center at Northwestern University since 1986. He is also the Associate
Chairperson of the Economics Department, and in 2000-01 was Acting Associate Director of the
Transportation Center. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of
Sheffield and a Ph.D. from the School of Economic Studies/Institute for Transport Studies at the
University of Leeds.
Dr. Savage specializes in urban transportation, and the analysis of safety regulation and
safety performance. He has conducted research into the safety of most modes of transportation.
He has also researched into and published widely on the economics of transit finances and
operations and, more specifically, the impacts of competition and privatization.
His most recent work has focused on the railroad industry, culminating with the publication
of The Economics of Railroad Safety (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). Prior to his work on railroad safety, he was part of a five-year project that evaluated federal programs to enforce safety regulations in the motor carrier industry. He has also analyzed safety issues in other
transportation modes, including the economics of double-hulls on oil tankers, airline pilots'
perceptions of safety-related job risks, the effect of airline deregulation on automobile fatalities, and the economics of safety inspections of aging aircraft. He has also worked on research investigating the interaction between psychological perceptions of risk and the valuation of life. He was the coordinator for a conference at Northwestern on the impacts of economic deregulation on airline and trucking safety, and co-editor of a book based on the conference, Transportation Safety in an Age of Deregulation (Oxford University Press, 1989).
Dr. Savage's extensive multi-modal work on safety has led to the authorship of several review
papers on transportation safety. These include chapters in Essays in Transportation Economics and Policy: A Handbook in Honor of John R. Meyer (Brookings Institution, 1999), the Handbook of Transport Systems and Traffic Control (Elsevier, 2001) and the Handbook of Transport and the Environment (Elsevier, 2003).
Savage has researched into and published widely on the economics of transit finances and
operations and, more specifically, the impacts of competition and privatization. Recent papers
have included examinations of scale economies in urban mass-transit rail systems, and the history
and economics of transit subsidies in Chicago.
Dr. Savage serves on the program committee of the World Conference on Transport
Research with responsibilities for sessions on safety analysis and policy, and the national
committee of the Transportation Research Forum.
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