About

Alex Karner is an Associate Professor and Program Director for Community & Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. His work critically engages with transportation planning practice to achieve progress toward transportation equity and mobility justice. He has a deep commitment to practice and community engagement, collaborating with community members, non-profit organizations, and public interest law firms to identify pressing research needs and improve conditions in communities experiencing transportation disadvantage. His research focuses on areas such as accessibility—quantifying how easily people can reach destinations necessary for a meaningful and dignified life—civil rights and environmental justice—helping agencies and advocates analyze the true impacts of transportation projects on low-income and BIPOC populations—travel demand modeling—incorporating identity and individual experiences into transportation frameworks—and community engagement—evaluating efforts to strengthen the link between community input and decision-making. Karner uses mixed methods and draws upon his training in civil engineering, transportation planning, and history. Prior to his current role, he was an assistant professor at Georgia Tech and held postdoctoral research positions at Universidad Católica de Chile and Arizona State University. His work has been funded by various federal agencies, foundations, and university transportation centers.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Engineering
• Transport engineering
• Business
• Law
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law and economics
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Public relations
• Environmental health
• Economic growth
• Public economics
• Public administration
• Marketing
• Geography
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Defining sufficient accessibility: Linking perceived accessibility with well-being outcomes across spatial accessibility contexts

  2025-10-31

  preprintSenior author

  Sufficient accessibility—the idea that individuals should have a minimum level of access to essential opportunities—hasgained traction in transport equity research as a normative basis for evaluating transport-land use systems. Yet definingwhat constitutes adequate levels of accessibility remains an unresolved challenge, partly because existing approachesrely on spatial accessibility measures that may not reflect how residents actually experience their access to desiredopportunities. We developed an empirical framework for determining accessibility sufficiency using community surveydata from 2,042 residents in Austin, Texas. We found that spatial indicators are only weakly associated with how residentsevaluate their access, indicating mismatches between people’s accessibility needs and accessibility provided by land use andtransport system. Then, we applied a linear regression model to examine the interrelationships among spatial accessibilitymeasures (cumulative and travel-time-based auto and transit access), perceived accessibility dimensions (satisfaction withaccess to opportunities and mobility conditions), and perceived satisfaction with quality of life (QoL). The model showedthat perceived accessibility is a far stronger predictor of quality of life than any spatial measure. Although residentsrate their mobility conditions less favorably than their access to opportunities across all spatial contexts, satisfactionwith available opportunities proves roughly twice as consequential for well-being. To determine accessibility sufficiency,we classified residents based on whether their perceived accessibility falls below the neutral point of the satisfactionscale, and validate this classification against quality-of-life outcomes. Multinomial logistic regression identifies long-termresidents, renters, and lower-income households as the groups most likely to report both low perceived accessibility andlow quality of life, while spatial context itself is not a significant predictor of this outcome. These findings suggest thatspatial measures alone cannot tell us who has sufficient access and that integrating residents’ evaluations with well-beingvalidation offers a more grounded basis for identifying where and for whom the accessibility falls short.

  PublisherDOI

• Is Title VI enough? A review of bus network redesign equity analyses

  Transportation Research Part D Transport and Environment · 2025-07-19 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• U.S. Transportation Research at a Crossroads

  2025-07-25

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Science in the United States has become increasingly politicized, with a wave of recent federal grant terminations and censorship of equity and climate-related work. U.S. transportation research has not been immune. The Transportation Research Board (TRB), a stalwart of U.S. transportation research, has canceled research contracts, undertaken a dramatic internal restructuring, and appears poised to censor research presented at its marquee annual meeting. These shifts are significant in part because TRB espouses the values of scientific objectivity, independence, and integrity. Accordingly, TRB has historically funded work identified as needed by the broader research community and has been a home for the free and open exchange of ideas at its conferences, meetings, and events. We argue that TRB's recent actions suggest that it is no longer able to act with scientific integrity. In this commentary, we provide a brief history of TRB and its objectives, discuss its recent actions, and propose paths forward for researchers and practitioners interested in pursuing equity, justice, and climate change-oriented work.

  PublisherDOI

• All Aboard: Light Rail, Mobility Justice, and the Future of Public Transit in Austin, TX

  Urban Affairs Review · 2025-02-17 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Activists and advocates are increasingly inserting themselves into urban governing regimes. Austin, TX offers a powerful example where these actors shifted public transit planning and decision making toward mobility justice—away from the demands of capital and toward everyday transit riders. Using primary source documents and 13 semistructured interviews with key participants, we demonstrate that a multibillion dollar voter-approved public transit expansion plan called Project Connect was undoubtedly shaped by activists and conceptions of mobility justice. Our results illuminate how these actors were able to influence the plan despite the marginalization of similar concerns in the American context. By engaging in the process early, shaping the initial investment plan that was put before voters, influencing project governance, and coalescing around a first-of-its-kind antidisplacement fund, activists created a permanent seat at the decision-making table from which they are able to fight for just processes and outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Where to Draw The Line: Impacts of Threshold Choice on Measures of Transport Poverty

  2025-01-06

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Distributive concerns in transportation equity can be evaluated either in terms of inequality (e.g., how equal are distributions?) or sufficiency (e.g., how many and what kinds of people lack access to the transportation resources they need?). Sufficiency analyses offer more actionable insights that can be used to mitigate transportation disadvantage, but related analytical methods are not well developed. To advance this area of research and practice, this paper investigates three approaches to measuring sufficiency through the lens of public transport access to jobs: (i) Fraction of total regional destinations, (ii) Competitiveness with auto access, and (iii) population-weighted percentile measures. We use a class of decomposable Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures to understand the sensitivity of overall levels of disadvantage to the choice of disadvantage lines and other parameters, in the context of seven U.S. urban regions. We find that fractional and auto competitiveness measures produce similar results and are highly sensitive to the choice of disadvantage line, that population-weighted percentile measures may allow for better comparisons across demographic groups, and that by most reasonable definitions of transport poverty the vast majority of residents (80+%) in an area might be considered to be in transport disadvantage.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Shifting Priorities from Equity to Exclusion: Investigating US Transportation Policy Changes in the Anti-DEI Era

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-03

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In early 2025, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) presented new criteria for discretionary funding prioritization based on marriage rates, birth rates, and compliance with Federal immigration policy. This policy diverges from the previous equity and justice-focused prioritization. We analyze how the new DOT policy will affect discretionary transportation spending priorities across geography, sociodemographics, transportation burdens and barriers, and voting lines. The new 2025 DOT policy shifts funding priorities towards white, Trump-voting areas and away from Black, Latino, and lower-resourced populations and those experiencing higher travel burdens and barriers.

  PublisherDOI

• All Aboard: Light Rail, Mobility Justice, and the Future of Public Transit in Austin, TX: Authors’ Response to Commentaries

  Urban Affairs Review · 2025-02-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• U.S. transportation research at a crossroads

  Transport Policy · 2025-09-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Science in the United States has become increasingly politicized, with a wave of recent federal grant terminations and censorship of equity and climate-related work. U.S. transportation research has not been immune. The Transportation Research Board (TRB), a stalwart convener and funder, has canceled research contracts, undertaken a dramatic internal restructuring, and appears poised to censor research presented at its marquee annual meeting. These shifts are significant in part because TRB espouses the values of scientific objectivity, independence, and integrity. Accordingly, TRB has historically funded work identified as needed by the broader research community and has been a home for the free and open exchange of ideas at its conferences, meetings, and events. We argue that TRB’s recent actions suggest that it is no longer able to act with scientific integrity. In this commentary, we provide a brief history of TRB and its objectives, discuss its recent actions, and propose paths forward for researchers and practitioners interested in pursuing equity, justice, and climate change-oriented work.

  PublisherDOI

• Shifting Priorities from Equity to Exclusion: Investigating US Transportation Policy Changes in the Anti-DEI Era

  Findings · 2025-03-21 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  In early 2025, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) presented new criteria for discretionary funding prioritization based on marriage rates, birth rates, and compliance with Federal immigration policy. This policy diverges from the previous equity and justice-focused prioritization. We analyze how the new DOT policy will affect discretionary transportation spending priorities across geography, sociodemographics, transportation burdens and barriers, and voting lines. The new 2025 DOT policy shifts funding priorities towards white, Trump-voting areas and away from Black, Latino, and lower-resourced populations and those experiencing higher travel burdens and barriers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• U.S. Transportation Research at a Crossroads

  2025-08-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Science in the United States has become increasingly politicized, with a wave of recent federal grant terminations and censorship of equity and climate-related work. U.S. transportation research has not been immune. The Transportation Research Board (TRB), a stalwart of U.S. transportation research, has canceled research contracts, undertaken a dramatic internal restructuring, and appears poised to censor research presented at its marquee annual meeting. These shifts are significant in part because TRB espouses the values of scientific objectivity, independence, and integrity. Accordingly, TRB has historically funded work identified as needed by the broader research community and has been a home for the free and open exchange of ideas at its conferences, meetings, and events. We argue that TRB's recent actions suggest that it is no longer able to act with scientific integrity. In this commentary, we provide a brief history of TRB and its objectives, discuss its recent actions, and propose paths forward for researchers and practitioners interested in pursuing equity, justice, and climate change-oriented work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dana Rowangould

  University of Vermont

  20 shared

• Deb Niemeier

  University of Maryland, College Park

  18 shared

• Jonathan London

  University of California, Davis

  12 shared

• Aaron Golub

  Portland State University

  9 shared

• Douglas S. Eisinger

  Sonoma Technology (United States)

  8 shared

• Kaylyn Levine

  East Carolina University

  7 shared

• Steven Farber

  7 shared

• Louis Alcorn

  6 shared

Labs

• Build LabPI

Education

• PhD, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

  University of California, Davis

  2013

• BASc, Civil engineering

  University of Toronto

  2006