Alan Voorhees

He was chairman of the board of Autometric Corp., an aerospace company based in Northern Virginia. Autometric was later sold to Boeing. He was an angel investor of Lizardtech, the software of which was excellent for digital mapping and GIS purposes. Voorhees was an early investor in MICROS Systems, which sold to Oracle Corporation in 2014 for $5.3 billion.

Voorhees received the first Harland Bartholomew Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers as the engineer who has contributed most to urban planning, and was honored with the establishment of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University in 1998, and helped found the Voorhees Computing Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In the late 1990s, Voorhees started a project to automate county government services in Richmond County, Virginia. The system he supported involved scanning thousands of land records in the county clerk's office and connecting these with data from the county planning office (topo maps, sewer and water overlays, satellite views, etc.) and tax office. The land records were then sent via the Internet to be archived at the Library of Virginia. He spent over $600,000 on this project.

In 1979, following airline deregulation, Voorhees helped found Atlantic Southeast Airlines, which was later bought by Delta Air Lines.

Voorhees sold his firm in 1967 and became the dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Urban Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle in 1971. The firm went on to be project manager of the Boston Transportation Planning Review. Voorhees invested in Micros Corporation and its electronic cash register in the late 1960s.

In 1961, he began his own engineering firm (Alan M. Voorhees & Associates) which eventually grew to have branches in ten U.S. cities. He was involved in the design of many subway systems including those in São Paulo, Hong Kong, Caracas, and Washington, D.C. Voorhees is credited with the concept for the Canberra 'Y Plan', linking Australia's capital city with new townships of roads and public transport. Research on this proposal began in 1966 and the final report was presented in 1969.

In 1952, Voorhees came to Washington, D.C. to work for the nonprofit Automobile Safety Foundation. While studying traffic in Baltimore, Voorhees developed a mathematical formula to predict traffic patterns based on land use. This formula has been instrumental in the design of numerous transportation and public works projects around the world. He wrote "A General Theory of Traffic Movement" (1956), which applied the gravity model to trip distribution, which translates trips generated in an area to a matrix that identifies the number of trips from each origin to each destination, which can then be loaded onto the network.

After the war, Voorhees continued his education, graduating from RPI in 1947 and then earning his master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949.

Alan Manners Voorhees (December 17, 1922 – December 18, 2005) was an American transportation engineer and urban planner who designed many large public works in the United States. Voorhees was born in Highland Park, New Jersey.