In Memoriam: Jon D. Fricker

Jon D. Fricker, a longtime ASCE volunteer, passed away on July 15, 2022. He was a faculty member in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University for 42 years. Jon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 5, 1947. After finishing high school in West Allis, Wisconsin, he went to MIT for his undergraduate education in civil engineering. After completing his B.S. at MIT (1970) and M.S. at Carnegie Mellon (1972), he spent 4 years with the US Army 54th Combat Engineer Battalion in Wildflecken, Germany, attaining the rank of captain. He returned to Carnegie Mellon for his Ph.D. in transportation systems, which he completed in December 1979. He joined Purdue as an assistant professor on January 7, 1980, and retired as a professor on May 15, 2022.

Jon was a life member of ASCE and was involved in numerous ASCE activities. In the early 1980s, he served as the Urban Transportation Division news correspondent for ASCE News; and his outstanding contributions were recognized in 1984 and 1985. He authored many publications for ASCE’s Journal of Transportation Engineering and several other ASCE journals over the years. He was also an active reviewer for the Journal of Transportation Engineering and the Journal of Infrastructure Systems. He served on the Planning and Economics Committee of the Urban Transportation Division and then on the Economics and Finance Committee of the Transportation and Development Institute (T&DI). He was also active on the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE).

Jon was highly respected as an educator, and the primary focus of his career was teaching and mentoring. He taught introductory transportation engineering, transportation planning, urban planning and analysis, and public transportation. He put enormous efforts into experimenting with different ways the students could learn, continually updating his courses with new ideas learned at teaching workshops and incorporating real-world examples. He was involved with ASCE’s Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) Effective Teaching Workshop as a participant and as a mentor. He coauthored a textbook, Introduction to Transportation Engineering, with his colleague Robert Whitford. The book was adopted widely around the world. He mentored numerous undergraduate students and about 50 M.S. and Ph.D. students. He received the Harold Munson Teaching Excellence Award of the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue.

Jon established a reputation for solid, credible, and practical research. His research primarily involved the use of systems analysis and provided insight into travel demand modeling and network analysis. He assisted in the solution of transportation-related problems at the local, state, and national level. He published over 100 archival journal articles. He received ASCE’s Harland Bartholomew Award for his contributions to urban planning and TRB’s D. Grant Mickle Award for the best paper in transportation maintenance, safety, and operations. Several of his students also received best paper awards from various organizations.

Jon Fricker served his community and the state with great distinction. For more than three decades he was on the board of the Greater Lafayette Public Transportation Corporation (aka Lafayette CityBus) and for several years served as its chair. During these years, CityBus went through a period of growth, negotiating a contract with Purdue University to provide free transportation to its students, faculty, and staff. This arrangement has reduced the need for additional parking spaces on campus and at the same time has reduced congestion and associated environmental problems. During Professor Fricker’s years on the CityBus board, the agency replaced one-third of its diesel buses with hybrid, diesel-electric models. While teaching his course on public mass transportation, he brought real-life examples to his class and encouraged students to consider public transit as a career. In one case, a student intern at CityBus was the principal writer of a grant application to the Federal Transit Administration to install wind turbines at the transit headquarters. The student’s $2 million proposal was funded, and the turbines have been in service for over a decade, reducing the use of fossil fuels and associated air quality problems.

Jon was an avid athlete, completing 13 marathons and eight triathlons. He met his future wife, Karen Springer, at the 1980 Indiana Carroll County Hog Jog running race. He actively took part in coaching local children, including his son (Douglas) and daughter (Laurel), in soccer, baseball, softball, and basketball.

Jon Fricker will be remembered by his colleagues and friends in the transportation community as a dedicated professional and an energetic scholar whose passion was teaching and nurturing students. His most important legacy, however, will be to serve as an example of a decent, ethical colleague and a kind human being.