Speaker

Amanda Eaken is Director of Transportation and Climate in the Urban Solutions Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where her work focuses on decarbonizing transportation in the United States. She is currently leading a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental impacts of the Transportation Network Companies Lyft and Uber, to help understand whether these shared mobility providers compete with transit, creating new emissions and congestion, or represent part of an evolution in sustainable mobility.  She is also spearheading creation of a Climate and Equity Framework for Shared Mobility in Los Angeles, creating recommendations for policies and programs to leverage private sector mobility innovation to achieve LA’s sustainability goals. In collaboration with the Southern California Association of Governments, she is part of a team examining the technical and political feasibility of launching the nation’s first cordon pricing pilot program in Los Angeles. In 2015 she conceptualized and launched the Live.Ride.Share conference to examine the new mobility movement transforming the national conversation on transportation. Previously, she led the campaign to pass California’s landmark Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act (SB 375), the nation’s first law to link greenhouse gas emissions with transportation and land use planning.

She has been named one of San Francisco Business Times’ top 40 under 40 Emerging Leaders, and was honored with the inaugural President’s Award for Sustainability Leadership by the Southern California Association of Governments for her work creating a Sustainable Communities Strategy for the Southern California region. She shared her vision for mobility as a featured speaker at the TEDx World Cities Day in Santa Monica in 2013. She is a founding member and Steering Committee member of ClimatePlan, a statewide coalition of environmental, social equity, and health groups. She holds a Master’s Degree in City Planning from U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and a B.A. in Ecology from Dartmouth College.