Richard Allsop

It is with great sadness that Professor Richard Allsop passed away last week.  Richard was a key member of TRI’s Advisory Board and presented at TRI’s 25th anniversary ‘Timeline’ event in 2021.

Richard Allsop was Emeritus Professor of Transport Studies at University College London (UCL), having been Professor since 1976 and Director between then and 1997 of what is now the Centre for Transport Studies.   After graduating in Mathematics from Queens’ College Cambridge he joined the then Road Research Laboratory, the predecessor of TRL Ltd.   Soon after the Research Group in Traffic Studies was formed at UCL by Professor Reuben Smeed, he became a Research Fellow there in 1967 and Lecturer in 1970.   Under Smeed’s supervision he completed a PhD on mathematical optimisation in traffic signal control.   From 1973 to 1976 he was the first Director of the Transport Operations Research Group at Newcastle University.   Appointed Smeed’s successor at UCL in 1976, he contributed widely to research, training and advisory work on many aspects of transport.   From 1981 to 1996 he convened the International Advisory Committee of the Symposium series ISTTT, to which his continuing contribution was recognised by a Japanese award in 2018.  Since the early 1980s he was active in what is now the CIHT and worked on academic aspects of development of the TPP qualification until 2015.   He was a long-serving member of TRI’s Advisory Board.   After becoming Emeritus in 2005 he remained a Director of PACTS until 2015 and a special advisor since then.   He is an observer to the Board of ETSC on which he represented PACTS from 2005 until 2020, and advises its European road safety benchmarking programme PIN, which he led for its first nine years from 2006.   He was awarded the DSc degree in 1995 and made an OBE in 1997 for services to traffic management and road safety, and was a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

See also Benjamin Heydecker’s tribute to Richard here.