The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment

ISBN-13: 9780199862719 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 632 str.

Jr. William L. Garrison; David M. Levinson

Opis

The Transportation Experience explores the historical evolution of transportation modes and technologies. The book traces how systems are innovated, planned and adapted, deployed and expanded, and reach maturity, where they may either be maintained in a polished obsolesce often propped up by subsidies, be displaced by competitors, or be reorganized and renewed. An array of examples supports the idea that modern policies are built from past experiences.

William Garrison and David Levinson assert that the planning (and control) of nonlinear, unstable processes is today's central transportation problem, and that this is universal and true of all modes. Modes are similar, in that they all have a triad structure of network, vehicles, and operations; but this framework counters conventional wisdom. Most think of each mode as having a unique history and status, and each is regarded as the private playground of experts and agencies holding unique knowledge, operating in isolated silos. However, this book argues that while modes have an appearance of uniqueness, the same patterns repeat: systems policies, structures, and behaviors are a generic design on varying modal cloth. In the end, the illusion of uniqueness proves to be myopic.

While it is true that knowledge has accumulated from past experiences, the heavy hand of these experiences places boundaries on current knowledge; especially on the ways professionals define problems and think about processes. The Transportation Experience provides perspective for the collections of models and techniques that are the essence of transportation science, and also expands the boundaries of current knowledge of the field.

Recenzje

This book gives very thorough information on transportation history. Readers will find a bundle of detailed stories on the development of transportation systems in various (mostly US) cities, and on more general transport evolutions such as the decline in train ridership due to increasing car use in the middle of the 20th century, and peak car use in the present decade. To show how extensive this book is, it also has chapters on the rise and decline of telegraph and telephone use.

O autorze

William Garrison is Emeritus Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. David Levinson is Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota.