Rail & Public Transit Council

Meet the chair

Murthy Bondada, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE

Dr. Bondada has been living in the US for the last 46 years. He has over 40 years of full-time urban transportation engineering and planning consulting experience in the US in addition to teaching for eight years at Government College of Engineering (now Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University JNTU College of Engineering) at Anantapur in 1960s. He served as an adjunct professor at Pennsylvania State, West Virginia, and Florida Metropolitan Universities in the USA.  His over 40-years of consulting experience in the United States encompass Transportation Planning, Traffic Engineering, Public Transportation, and Advanced Transit Technologies.

He was involved in developing comprehensive multi-modal long-range transportation plans for several cities in the US including Detroit, Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville and updating them at 5-year intervals. He was involved in over 50 feasibility studies for Automated People Movers, Inter-city high speed and maglev systems, and major highway and transit improvements. He was involved in the three downtown people movers (Detroit, Miami, and Jacksonville) and several commuter rail and rapid rail systems that are presently operating in the US. He authored and/or co-authored over 100 project reports. He published about 50 technical papers. Since 2000, he has been involved in the research on urban transportation in developing countries including Indian Cities.

Dr. Bondada has been actively involved with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for the last 40 years. He served as chair for the national committees on 1) automated people movers (APM) during 1981-85; 2) urban transportation division during 1985-1989; 3) high speed ground transportation systems during 1989-1993; and 4) urban transport during 1993-1999. He organized several international conferences for the ASCE and was editor or co-editor for six conference proceedings.

He initiated ASCE’s international conference series on automated people movers by organizing and chairing the first conference in 1985. In 2015, ASCE is organizing 14th conference of the series. The papers, published in conference proceedings of this conference series on APMs initiated by Dr. Bondada, are major bibliography for the most valuable document, “Guidebook for Planning and Implementing Automated People Mover Systems at Airports” published in 2010 by the Transportation Research Board under Airport Cooperative Research Program, which was sponsored by the US Federal Aviation Administration. The ASCE awarded him the National Frank Master Transportation Engineering Award in Transportation for his innovative research, planning and design of automated people movers.