Robert was selected by the Board of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc. as the 1997 William Barclay Parsons Fellow to research and advance the state of the art in park-and-ride planning and design.  In 2000, Robert published Monograph 11 in the Parsons Brinckerhoff series, culminating his research project.

In 2004, as part of a National Cooperative Highway Research Program, TRB published the NCHRP Guide for Park-and-Ride Facilities 2004, incorporating in total Robert’s Monograph 11.  Although nearly two decades old, this document serves as the latest recommendations on planning, designing and operating these transit facilities.

Both Robert’s Monograph 11 and the NCHRP guidance were developed and published in a pre-COVID pandemic environment when park-and-rides were important elements of modern transit systems.  In today’s post-pandemic era, park-and-ride facilities have become a challenge for many transit agencies, underutilized and often becoming economic drains on transit agencies struggling to regain ridership.  Too often, critics of park-and-ride facilities and transit in general point to these facilities as either the wrong approach to generating transit ridership, or worse to evidence that transit does not work in modern US cities.

Robert advocates for a reexamination of the traditional park-and-ride model.  He believes that a new approach to these “land banked” opportunities could open access to new transit riders.  He believes approaches such as joint development, privatization, parking management and similar techniques can transform these facilities into revenue generators for their owners.