The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment

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.

Table of Contents:
I Wave One 1 Steamboat 2 Birth of the Railway 3 Turnpikes II Phase 1 of the Lifecycle 4 Inventing and Innovating III Wave Two 5 Maritime 6 Railroads Deployed 7 Good Roads 8 Transit 9 Telegraph IV Phase 2 of the Lifecycle 10 Magic Bullet V Wave Three: 11 American Shipping 12 Taking Flight 13 Railroads Regulated 14 Bustitution 15 Public Roads 16 Urban Planning: Who Controls The Turf? 17 Telephone VI Phase 3 of the Lifecycle 18 Aging VII Wave Four: 1939 19 Logistics 20 The Jet Age 21 Railroads Rationalized 22 Interstate 23 Recapitalization 24 Lord Kelvin's Curse VIII Lifecycle Dynamics 25 Lifecycle 26 Meta-cycles 27 Energy and Environment 28 Higher-speed rail 29 Internet 30 Technology: Hard and Soft X Beyond the Lifecycle 31 Policy 32 Speculations XI After words: Reections on Transportation Ex- periences 33 I-35 W 34 Design of a Life 35 Commencement XII End Matter 36 Institutions 37 Endnotes

About the Author :
William L. Garrison is Emeritus Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. David M. Levinson is Professor of Civil Engineering and RP Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation at the University of Minnesota.

Review :
"It's hard to imagine a more comprehensive survey of transportation history than The Transportation Experience. The book guides readers from the days of steam engines and turnpikes to those of high-speed trains and robot-driven cars-blending top academic insight with colorful biographical bites. Whether your interest is infrastructure, public policy, transport theory, or just travel in general, you'll grow wiser from the journey." -- Eric Jaffe, author of The King's Best Highway "Everything you wanted to know about transportation is in this book. It is not only a comprehensive look back at the transit methods that built the nation, but a look forward based on how the lessons from the past can be applied to the modern metropolitan economies. This book could not come at a better time." -- Robert Puentes, Director, Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative, Brookings Institution "The book by Garrison and Levinson can be warmly recommended as a mine of information on US and early UK transportation development in a broadly based historical framework." --Journal of Planning Education and Research