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Wendell Cox

Wendell Cox, Principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy

Mr. Cox is principal of Wendell Cox Consultancy, an international public policy firm. He has consulted for government and private organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and for scores of public policy organizations. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university located in central Paris and has delivered guest lectures such as at Tongji University, (Shanghai), Cairo University, the University of Toronto, the University of Paris, the University of Sydney.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC), serving from 1977 to 1985. LACTC was the top public policy authority on public transport and highways in the nation’s largest county. Out of 11 LACTC members, Mr. Cox was the only non-elected official. While at LACTC he authored the tax amendment that provided the initial funding for building light rail (“Blue” Line) and the subway (“Red” Line). He was elected chairman of the American Public Transit Association Planning and Policy Committee (comprised of transit planning department officials) and the American Public Transit Association Governing Boards Committee (comprise of transit board members).

He was chair of the Service Coordination Committee from 1977 to 1985. In this position, he was instrumental in the development of the state mandated Transit Service and Coordination Program for Los Angeles County, which led to the withdrawal from the regional transit agency (the Southern California Rapid Transit District) of the Foothill Transit District (San Gabriel Valley) and the express bus services within the city of Los Angeles. These transit systems, which rely on competitive contracting (competitive tendering) provide service less expensively. He also presided over two quasi-judicial dispute resolution processes between the regional transit operator and municipal operators.

In 1999, he was appointed to the Amtrak Reform Council by the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to fill the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman.

He is co-author of the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which rates the cost of housing relative to incomes in approximately 300 metropolitan areas in eight nations. He is also author of Demographia World Urban Areas, the only regularly published compendium of population, land area and density data for all identified built-up urban areas with at least 500,000 residents. Both publications were in their 15^th annual editions in 2019. He is a senior fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston, the senior fellow for housing affordability and municipal policy at the Frontier Center for Public Policy in Winnipeg and on the Board of Advisors for the Chapman University Center for Demographics and Policy.

He has also created the City Sector Model, which provides demographic analysis of US major metropolitan areas at a small area level, based on a typology that captures land use differences between urban development before and after World War II.

Mr. Cox is a prolific writer and popular public speaker. He is the author of scores of monographs and book chapters addressing urban sprawl and smart growth, transportation, mass transit, congestion, and demographic trends. He has addressed hundreds of audiences at major industry and academic conferences, international symposia, and government-sponsored seminars. He always receives high marks for his enthusiastic and challenging presentations.