The story
The company was founded on September 27, 1972, by four Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors and a colleague who were leaders in systems analysis and disaggregate models for transportation. The company was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts under the charter of “the application of systematic analysis to problems of transportation, the environment, urban development, and regional planning.”
The founding President, William Jessiman, had developed travel demand models and previously led the Boston office of Peat Marwick. The founding Vice President, Wayne Pecknold had been on the faculty of MIT, along with co-founders Marvin Manheim, Paul Roberts, and A. Sheffer Lang. Manheim had directed the Transportation & Community Values project at MIT, and later founded WCTRS - the World Conference on Transport Research Society. Roberts was founding director of the MIT Center for Transportation Studies. They were joined in 1973 by Moshe Ben-Akiva of MIT, who pioneered disaggregate travel demand methods, in 1976 by Daniel McFadden who started the California office and was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on discrete choice modeling, and in 1977 by Andrew Daly, who started the Netherlands office where he pioneered disaggregate tour-based travel demand models – an early form of activity-based models. Cambridge Systematics was widely recognized for developing the first application of disaggregate travel demand modeling for a metropolitan area: Metropolitan Transportation Commission (San Francisco Bay Area) in 1978.
The Europe office was subsequently spun off, and in 1994 the California office moved from Berkeley, California to its current location in Oakland, California. Since then, the company has relocated its corporate headquarters to Medford, Massachusetts and opened additional offices in Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Tallahassee, Florida; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; New York City; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Denver; Los Angeles; and Raleigh, North Carolina. Cambridge Systematics staff members also provide onsite client support at the offices of the Federal Highway Administration and the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cambridge Systematics, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4