Dr. Shiftan had a significant professional contribution both in the US and Israel. In the US he has been a consultant and managed major projects in the area of transport policy, travel demand, and environmental impact statements as a senior associate of Cambridge Systematics Inc., in Cambridge, MA and as independent consultants to the Federal Highway Administration as well as to various states’ department of transportation. These contributions includes among other various travel demand model development (Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Indiana state wide model and many other); travel demand analysis for major investments projects (Second Ave. subway in New York, the Central Artery in Boston, and others), toll diversion studies (Moscoso Bridge, San Juan, Puerto Rico, E-470, Denver, Colorado, and the SR 520 Bridge in Seattle), and transit market research analysis (Water Transit Authority in San Francisco, and Utah Transit authority).
In Israel, Dr. Shiftan has been a consultant on these areas to the Ministry of Transport and Road Safety, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Environmental Protection. He serves as an expert on developing transportation systems analysis tools for the government, including leading the development of the new activity-based model for Tel Aviv (described above) and Israel’s guidelines for transport project appraisal (Nohal Perat). He was the lead researcher on major transportation investments for the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Finance, including the design and analysis of the national rail system and various metropolitan mass transit systems. His research has helped convince the Ministry of Finance of the need to enlarge investments in public transport (an investment that has increased enormously in the last few years). He also led the research on reforming the public transportation fares in Israel, which caused the Ministry of Transport to transform an old, complicated fare system into an integrated zone-based system, and has helped make public transportation more attractive. Yoram was also the president of the Israel Association for Transportation Research and chaired two of their annual conferences at the Technion.