Brookings Mountain West presents “America Moves: Transportation and Public Policy in the United States” a talk by Adie Tomer, senior research associate and associate fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program.  The United States is in a perpetual state of motion. Every day, Americans drive over 8 billion miles, board over 20,000 flights, and ship over 45 million tons of freight. But what drives all of this physical movement? And what is the relationship to public policy? This presentation will begin to answer those questions, utilizing a combination of quantitative metrics and policy analysis to explain how, where, and why Americans move. It will outline driving habits, and the disruptive moment every metropolitan area and state faces due to federal gridlock. It will map aviation patterns, and the emerging presence of global connections in our congested skies. It will expose the oft-hidden transportation category—freight—and how it is the secret ingredient to make modern life possible. Using the major Mountain West metropolitan areas as examples, the presentation aims to give attendees a new understanding and appreciation for America’s enormous transportation network and its inseparable connection to public policy.    View Lecture: http://www.unlv.edu/videos/video-player/vXi8bHZnDOQ/640/390 Powerpoint: http://www.unlv.edu/sites/default/files/assets/brookingsmtnwest/lectures-events/2014-02-26-adie-tomer.pdf Adie Tomer is a Senior Research Associate and Associate Fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and a member of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative. The Initiative was established to address the pressing transportation and infrastructure challenges facing cities and suburbs in the United States and abroad. Adie’s work primarily focuses on metropolitan transportation usage patterns, including personal and freight modes, and the intersections between transportation and technological development. He is a noted expert on driving trends, metropolitan aviation patterns, and transit connectivity. Adie managed and co-produced multiple groundbreaking studies to better understand the relationship between personal travel trends, spatial form, and transportation technology. He was the chief architect of a national study to measure access to jobs via transit, which required a combination of transit coding, transportation modeling, and demographic analytical techniques. Through this project, Adie worked alongside Microsoft executives and Danish transportation modelers to explore the relationships between urban development patterns, transit agency technologies, and service levels.