About Panos Prevedouros

Panos Prevedouros, Ph.D.
Civil Engineer
University of Hawai`i Professor

The first thing you want to know about someone who is running for Mayor of your city is whether he is qualified. Panos is qualified.

Education
Like most of us, Panos went to public school all his life. He studied at the engineering college at Aristotle University, and came to the United States where he received both his Masters and Doctorate degrees in transportation engineering at Northwestern University. Northwestern, by the way, is one of the top ten engineering schools in the world. Panos joined the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Hawaii in 1990. He is a tenured professor. He has been the Chair of UH’s civil engineering Graduate Program since 2003. He developed UH’s Traffic and Transportation Lab in the late 1990s.

Who listens to Panos?
Panos is considered to be one of the preeminent authorities in his field. Over the past ten years, he has been invited to give his professional opinion in ten countries and 33 large cities worldwide, including Beijing, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, London, Munich, New York, Paris, San Diego, Tokyo, Venice, Vienna and Washington, D.C.

Panos is an engineer who has lived in Hawaii for nineteen years. Like you and me, he has watched the roads deteriorate. He has watched taxes go up. He has watched the traffic build. He has driven into more than his share of potholes. He has watched bridges collapse, streams overflow, untreated sewage flow into our beautiful oceans. He has sat at one unsynchronized traffic light after another. He has waited for recycling to become a reality. He has watched the trash build up. And he is sick of it. He knows how much things cost. He knows whether we need them. He knows whether we can afford them. He knows whether we can maintain them. He’s done it before.

Since its opening before the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, Panos has been assisting the Attica Toll way Operations Authority with freeway operations analysis to optimize its traffic flow. Attica Toll way was built between 1998 and 2004 in the dense periphery of Athens, Greece. Athens is a metropolitan area of five million people. Attica Toll way’s length is longer than the H-1, H-2 and H-3 combined. It was built as a public private partnership with Greek, French and American partners with co-financing by the European Union.

In 2006 it received the International Road Federation award as one of the safest freeways in the world. It was forecasted that in 2008 Attica Toll way will have about 250,000 daily entries, but the most recent count is 330,000 entries. A wide corridor in Athens has been decongested and motorists have the option to pay a 2.7 euro flat toll and drive 15 miles in 15 minutes, or they can use parallel free arterials and make the same trip in 40 to 50 minutes.

Now that you know he can do it, here’s some background on Panos: Like most of us, he was not born in Hawaii. Like many of our parents, he is a first generation American. He is a naturalized U.S. Citizen. (He was born in Patras, Greece, in 1961).  Like at least 50% of us, Panos is divorced from his first wife. That happened in 2005, after 13 years of marriage with a local Japanese-American. They are still friends. Like many of us, Panos fell in love again, and he and his fiancée Katie – a Kahuku born Radford grad – are expecting a baby boy in September.

Engineering is in his blood
Unlike most of us, Panos’ family is crazy about engineering. His family includes computer engineers, electrical engineers, architects, civil engineers and a mechanical engineer. Can you imagine being really interested in how roads are built, how traffic flows, how to synchronize traffic lights, how to build sewers and dumps that work? Of course not. But luckily for us, Panos is really interested in all that stuff.