Tribute to Ryuichi Kitamura: a reflection

Abstract

Ryuichi Kitamura was a remarkable scholar, colleague and friend. I met him at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1977, when he was a Ph.D. student and I was a brand new assistant professor in transportation in the Civil Engineering department. I fondly remember those times; Ryuichi’s doodles of heroic samurai warriors on horseback, and Ryuichi walking down the halls of East Engineering building with his young son Taki, who kept insisting that it was time for junk food. There were stimulating discussions about research philosophy, experimental design, measurement, data, and statistical methods with Professor Donald Cleveland, the senior professor of transportation, who always grounded these discussions with applications to the ‘‘real world’’. We talked about exciting new ideas in travel behavior research that were being developed, about ways of analyzing patterns of household time–space paths, and identifying their ultimate relationships with activities. Often Ryuichi would come back after one of these sessions with four or five pages of derivations, and another set of questions. Ryuichi also had a wry sense of humor. He referred to my absent-minded storage of the computer data tape on a radiator in my office as the cooking of the data, which, he went on to explain, would account for any strange anomalies that anyone might ever discover in an example in his dissertation that was based on these data. In 1978 Ryuichi completed his Ph.D., and joined the faculty at the University of California at Davis. Our collaboration continued for a many years afterwards, and the friendship that we struck up in Michigan continued until his death. Ryuichi’s contributions to the activity-based paradigm of travel behavior are well known. His focus was always on the human in the equation, and he emphasized the relationship between human activity and travel behavior together with the time–space constraints and interactions. The level of motorization in a society and its effect on travel behavior and the quality of life was another topic that always intrigued Ryuichi. After joining the faculty of Kyoto University in 1993 and moving back to Japan, Ryuichi became very aware of the rapid motorization in Asia. Not content to simply study this