Courses are selected from one of the four areas listed below.

Substitutions and exceptions must be approved by the student's advisor and the Director of the Transportation Science program.

The normative time for completion of the Ph.D. is five years and the maximum time permitted is seven years. Core courses must be chosen from lists in each of the four program areas. Each student must choose at least two graduate courses from Area 1 (Transportation Systems Engineering), at least one graduate course from each of Area 2 Urban and Transportation Economics) and Area 3 (Transportation Planning, and at least four additional graduate courses from any of those areas, or the Area 4 (Computer Science). At least five of the eight core courses must be transportation courses (indicated by an asterisk).

Students must complete the following general theory core courses:

After approval from their advisor, students may petition the Director of the Transportation Science Program with requests for substitution of the required courses.

Students entering the program with an M.S. are encouraged to transform a course project or thesis from this program or an earlier one into a publishable paper. That paper could be sole-authored, or authored with a student's former or current faculty mentors. The dissertation supervisor and the Director of the Transportation Science Program must approve the replication project or paper prior to the date of the qualifying exam.

Prior to preparing a dissertation proposal, each student who has not completed a master’s thesis (or otherwise independently published) must replicate the empirical work of a published paper from a major transportation journal, chosen by the student and approved by the advisor. This replication may involve the collection of new data, the use of better statistical techniques, additional simulations, or the identification and correction of theoretical errors. Through the replication project, students gain direct experience in reducing a general problem to a manageable research project, in using data, and in carrying out a research project.

A replication project involves choosing an empirical paper, obtaining the data necessary to replicate the project and then replicating the project and describing the replication an any related extensions in a research paper. Such projects are most common in economics, but could also be done based on any of the four transportation science research areas.

Dissertation proposals differ across areas but a typical proposal would be 15-30 pages long and would include an introduction, a review of related literature, a plan for the dissertation research and an indication of the sorts of products that will emerge from the project (publishable papers, case studies, software, technologies, etc.). The proposal is not a binding contract, because research evolves, but it should provide the committee with sufficient information to judge the likelihood that the project will be sufficient to meet the requirements for a Ph.D.

The qualifying exam must include five faculty members of which at least three members must be selected from the Transportation Science core faculty, and at least one of whom must be outside of that group. The qualifying exam is primarily an oral presentation of the dissertation proposal but might also include a discussion of other major research efforts conducted by the candidate and can involve questions from courses taken at UCI, or general transportation related questions.

Upon completion of the coursework and the publication or replication paper requirement, each student must develop a dissertation proposal defining the research problem, related literature, research methods, and data resources. The Ph.D. qualifying examination consists of an oral defense of that proposal before a candidacy committee chosen according to normal campus regulations, upon the recommendation of the Graduate Director. Typically, this is a committee of at least three members of the Transportation Science faculty and at least one faculty member who is not associated with Transportation Science.