Liisa Ecola

Liisa Ecola is a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. She is a transportation planner with 20+ years of experience and broad interests in transportation funding, traffic safety, environmental and land use impacts, and long-term mobility trends. She recently led RAND's work on the “Road to Zero,” a long-term vision of eliminating deaths from traffic crashes by 2050. For the CDC, she helped develop and later update a tool to determine the costs and benefits of policies to reduce vehicle crash deaths and injuries. She led RAND's transportation work on the long-term hurricane recovery plan for Puerto Rico, and analyzed the impacts of climate change on transportation for DHS. She is the lead author of two reports about long-term mobility—one on the future of driving in developing countries, and the other on future mobility in China—and coauthor of a third on the potential impacts of technology on transportation demand in the United Kingdom. Other work has included developing a potential trial of mileage fees, analyzing funding and finance issues for airports, and identifying quality-of-life indicators for land use/transportation for Guangdong Province. She has conducted extensive work in smart growth, managing the National Award for Smart Growth Achievement for EPA for five years. Before joining RAND, Ecola worked in transportation, land use, and policy consulting; she also served as a Foreign Service officer for six years, stationed in Warsaw and Taipei. Ecola received her Master of City Planning degree from the University of California, Berkeley.