Alumni Profile: Peter Kersten
Since its inception, the Urban Transportation Center has provided hands-on research opportunities for graduate and Ph.D. level students within the College of Urban Planning & Public Affairs and others at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Strategic Planner, Regional Transportation Authority Heading link
Peter Kersten earned his Master’s in Urban Planning and Policy from UIC and was a research assistant at UTC.
Responsibilities: I am currently serving as a Strategic Planner within the Planning and Market Development group. My work covers a number of areas including: mobility issues, performance metrics and reporting, policy analysis, and as project manager on the recently commenced RTA/Pace ADA Paratransit Innovation study.
How UTC Prepared Me for a Career in Transportation: Working as an RA at UTC provided me with foundational regional knowledge covering service history, service structure and design, shortcomings of our network, and funding and other operational constraints as it relates specifically to the RTA region and the state as a whole. The project I worked on at UTC was specifically related to the “last mile” problem which has informed much of my work on mobility pilots with the RTA and also was a good introduction to working with large data sets and origin-destination data.