The Transportation Research Board, 1920â¬"2020

The Transportation Research Board, 1920â¬
Author: Sarah Jo Peterson
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 563
Release: 2019-12-30
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 0309493749

In 1920, state highway engineers, federal officials, and experts from academia were among a small group convened by the National Academy of Sciences to confront the problems of the highway. The public was entrusting them with billions of dollars for good roads, and World War I had proved the feasibility of moving freight long distances by truck. But even new highways were crumbling. They turned to research for solutions. The founders of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the generations that followed took on problems such as safety, social equity, and environmental issues. They embraced "total transportation," adapting their highway research model to urban transportation and then applying it to rail, marine, and aviation modes. Today TRB convenes thousands of researchers, practitioners, and administrators every year to advise the government, solve practical problems, foster innovation, and stimulate new research. In The Transportation Research Board, 1920â€"2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited, Sarah Jo Peterson tells the story of how people and institutions created and have continued to shape TRB. In a compelling narrative accompanied by more than 150 images exploring the history of transportation and research, she argues that TRB can be best understood as an infrastructureâ€"one that people purposely designed and devotedly maintained. Despite TRB's institutional complexity, its unique mission, the vast collection of acronyms in its orbit, and the significant changes to the organization in its first 100 years, Dr. Peterson provides a view from 30,000 feet, deftly describing the social, political, and economic context in which transportation (and TRB) functioned. At the same time, she attends to details of the key events, individuals, and human motivations that shaped TRB's evolution. The author's skills as a historian, her experience in the transportation field, and her manifest ability to tell a good story have produced a book that transportation professionals of all stripesâ€"and, for that matter, anyone interested in the history of transportation in the United Statesâ€"should find both engaging and informative and an essential addition to their library.

Forecasting Travel in Urban America

Forecasting Travel in Urban America
Author: Konstantinos Chatzis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 026237451X

A history of urban travel demand modeling (UTDM) and its enormous influence on American life from the 1920s to the present. For better and worse, the automobile has been an integral part of the American way of life for decades. Its ascendance would have been far less spectacular, however, had engineers and planners not devised urban travel demand modeling (UTDM). This book tells the story of this irreplaceable engineering tool that has helped cities accommodate continuous rise in traffic from the 1950s on. Beginning with UTDM’s origins as a method to help plan new infrastructure, Konstantinos Chatzis follows its trajectory through new generations of models that helped make optimal use of existing capacity and examines related policy instruments, including the recent use of intelligent transportation systems. Chatzis investigates these models as evolving entities involving humans and nonhumans that were shaped through a specific production process. In surveying the various generations of UTDM, he delves into various means of production (from tabulating machines to software packages) and travel survey methods (from personal interviews to GPS tracking devices and smartphones) used to obtain critical information. He also looks at the individuals who have collectively built a distinct UTDM social world by displaying specialized knowledge, developing specific skills, and performing various tasks and functions, and by communicating, interacting, and even competing with one another. Original and refreshingly accessible, Forecasting Travel in Urban America offers the first detailed history behind the thinkers and processes that impact the lives of millions of city dwellers every day.

Justice and the Interstates

Justice and the Interstates
Author: Ryan Reft
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1642832618

Justice and the Interstates, edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff, examines the toll that the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System has taken on vulnerable communities over the past seven decades, details efforts to restore the same, often segregated communities, and makes recommendations for moving forward. Justice and the Interstates provides community advocates, transportation planners, engineers, historians, and policymakers with a concise but in-depth examination of the damages wrought by highway construction on the nation's communities of color--from West Baltimore to Birmingham to the San Gabriel Valley. The authors provide a way forward to both address this history and reconcile it with current practices.

Shifting Gears

Shifting Gears
Author: Susan Handy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Transportation
ISBN: 0262376962

An expertly woven history and critique of the ideas shaping transportation in the United States. Excruciating traffic jams. Struggling transit agencies. An epidemic of pedestrian fatalities. It is clear that transportation is not working in the United States and that we need to rethink our approach. In Shifting Gears, Susan Handy provides an in-depth history of the ideas embedded in American transportation policy and the emergence of new ways of thinking that could give us better transportation options. Weaving in bits of her own personal narrative, Handy gives readers a deeper and clearer understanding of our transportation system and the roots of its successes and failures. Handy covers the myriad costs of car ownership, the futility of expanding highways, and the misplaced faith in technological innovation. She offers new ideas and strategies that can improve the health of our car-centric transportation system—most crucially, the idea that communities across the country must create an array of choices for daily travel. Shifting Gears asserts that a diverse transportation ecosystem is essential for creating more just, sustainable communities, but getting there will take a dramatic shift in how we think about transportation.

Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation

Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation
Author: Division on Earth and Life Studies
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2008-07-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309185408

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the Division on Earth and Life Studies (DELS) have released the pre-publication version of TRB Special Report 290, The Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation, which explores the consequences of climate change for U.S. transportation infrastructure and operations. The report provides an overview of the scientific consensus on the current and future climate changes of particular relevance to U.S. transportation, including the limits of present scientific understanding as to their precise timing, magnitude, and geographic location; identifies potential impacts on U.S. transportation and adaptation options; and offers recommendations for both research and actions that can be taken to prepare for climate change. The book also summarizes previous work on strategies for reducing transportation-related emissions of carbon dioxide--the primary greenhouse gas--that contribute to climate change. Five commissioned papers used by the committee to help develop the report, a summary of the report, and a National Academies press release associated with the report are available online. DELS, like TRB, is a division of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council.

The Economics of Urban Transportation

The Economics of Urban Transportation
Author: Kenneth A. Small
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2024-06-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 135165344X

This new edition of the seminal textbook The Economics of Urban Transportation incorporates the latest research affecting the design, implementation, pricing, and control of transport systems in towns and cities. The book offers an economic framework for understanding the societal impacts and policy implications of many factors including congestion, traffic safety, climate change, air quality, COVID-19, and newly important developments such as ride-hailing services, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, the third edition features a new chapter on the special challenges of managing the energy that powers transportation systems. It provides fully updated coverage of well-known topics and a rigorous treatment of new ones. All of the basic topics needed to apply economics to urban transportation are included: Forecasting demand for transportation services under various conditions Measuring costs, including those incurred by users and incorporating two new tools to describe congestion in dense urban areas Setting prices under practical constraints Evaluating infrastructure investments Understanding how private and public sectors interact to provide services Written by three of the field’s leading researchers, The Economics of Urban Transportation is essential reading for students, researchers, and practicing professionals in transportation economics, planning, engineering, or related disciplines. With a focus on workable models that can be adapted to future needs, it provides tools for a rapidly changing world.

Urban High-Resolution Remote Sensing

Urban High-Resolution Remote Sensing
Author: Guoqing Zhou
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1000287718

With urbanization as a global phenomenon, there is a need for data and information about these terrains. Urban remote sensing techniques provide critical physical input and intelligence for preparing base maps, formulating planning proposals, and monitoring implementations. Likewise these methodologies help with understanding the biophysical properties, patterns, and process of urban landscapes, as well as mapping and monitoring urban land cover and spatial extent. Advanced sensor technologies and image processing methodologies such as deep learning, data mining, etc., facilitate the wide applications of remote sensing technology in urban areas. This book presents advanced image processing methods and algorithms focused on three very important roots of urban remote sensing: 3D urban modelling using different remotely sensed data, urban orthophotomap generation, and urban feature extraction, which are also today’s real challenges in high resolution remote sensing. Data generated by remote sensing, with its repetitive and synoptic viewing and multispectral capabilities, constitutes a powerful tool for mapping and monitoring emerging changes in the city's urban core, as well as in peripheral areas. Features: Provides advances in emerging methods and algorithms in image processing and technology Uses algorithms and methodologies for handling high-resolution imagery from a ground sampling distance (GSD) less than 1.0 meter Focuses on 3D urban modelling, orthorectification methodologies, and urban feature extraction algorithms from high-resolution remotely sensed imagery Demonstrates how to apply up-to-date techniques to the problems identified and how to analyze research results Presents methods and algorithms for monitoring, analyzing, and modeling urban growth, urban planning, and socio-economic developments In this book, readers are provided with valuable research studies and applications-oriented chapters in areas such as urban trees, soil moisture mapping, city transportation, urban remote sensing big data, etc.

International Encyclopedia of Transportation

International Encyclopedia of Transportation
Author:
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 4418
Release: 2021-05-13
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0081026722

In an increasingly globalised world, despite reductions in costs and time, transportation has become even more important as a facilitator of economic and human interaction; this is reflected in technical advances in transportation systems, increasing interest in how transportation interacts with society and the need to provide novel approaches to understanding its impacts. This has become particularly acute with the impact that Covid-19 has had on transportation across the world, at local, national and international levels. Encyclopedia of Transportation, Seven Volume Set - containing almost 600 articles - brings a cross-cutting and integrated approach to all aspects of transportation from a variety of interdisciplinary fields including engineering, operations research, economics, geography and sociology in order to understand the changes taking place. Emphasising the interaction between these different aspects of research, it offers new solutions to modern-day problems related to transportation. Each of its nine sections is based around familiar themes, but brings together the views of experts from different disciplinary perspectives. Each section is edited by a subject expert who has commissioned articles from a range of authors representing different disciplines, different parts of the world and different social perspectives. The nine sections are structured around the following themes: Transport Modes; Freight Transport and Logistics; Transport Safety and Security; Transport Economics; Traffic Management; Transport Modelling and Data Management; Transport Policy and Planning; Transport Psychology; Sustainability and Health Issues in Transportation. Some articles provide a technical introduction to a topic whilst others provide a bridge between topics or a more future-oriented view of new research areas or challenges. The end result is a reference work that offers researchers and practitioners new approaches, new ways of thinking and novel solutions to problems. All-encompassing and expertly authored, this outstanding reference work will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in transportation and its global impact in what is a very uncertain world. Provides a forward looking and integrated approach to transportation Updated with future technological impacts, such as self-driving vehicles, cyber-physical systems and big data analytics Includes comprehensive coverage Presents a worldwide approach, including sets of comparative studies and applications