Ian Savage is a transportation economist with appointments in both the Department of Economics and the Transportation Center at Northwestern University. He specializes in research into urban public transportation and the economics of transportation safety.

His work in urban transportation has dealt with the economics of transit finances and operations. He was an early author on the moves to liberalize ownership and regulation of urban bus services in the 1980s. His Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book The Deregulation of Bus Services (Gower Publishing Company, 1985). Subsequently he has written on costing methodologies for bus services, scale economies in mass-transit rail systems, transit demand, the optimal setting of fares and service levels, the growth of subsidies, and managerial objectives.

Dr. Savage’s initial work on transportation safety was as coordinator for a conference on the impacts of economic deregulation on airline and trucking safety in the United States. He was co-editor of a book based on the conference Transportation Safety in an Age of Deregulation (Oxford University Press, 1989). He has subsequently conducted research into the safety of most modes of transportation and authored several review papers on transportation safety.

In the early 1990s, his work measured the safety performance of different parts of the trucking industry and evaluated the effectiveness of federal government programs to enforce safety regulations. He then turned to analyzing the railroad industry. This research led to the publication of a book The Economics of Railroad Safety (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), and subsequent journal articles on safety at highway-rail grade crossings and on the risks to trespassers and other pedestrians around the railroad right of way.

Dr. Savage directs Northwestern University’s undergraduate Minor in Transportation and Logistics. He holds administrative positions as Associate Chair of the Department of Economics and has served as Associate Director of the Transportation Center.

He has served on the organizing committees of local, national and international professional organizations, including as President of the Transportation Research Forum (2017-18) and President of the Transportation and Public Utilities Group (2022). He served as a member of the Transportation Research Board’s committee for study of the domestic transportation of petroleum, natural gas, and ethanol (2015-17), and currently chairs the committee to study the criteria for installing automatic and remote-controlled shutoff valves on existing gas and hazardous liquid transmission pipelines (2021-23). He was the recipient of the Transportation Research Forum’s Distinguished Transportation Researcher Award in 2023.

He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Sheffield and a Ph.D. from the School of Economic Studies and Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds.

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Brief Biographical Introduction [1 page, 7 kb PDF]

Full Curriculum Vitae [6 pages, 27 kb PDF]