The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment

While much of the transportation systems in Europe and the United States are mature (if not senescent), the rest of the world is still planning, developing, and deploying new systems. The accomplishments and mistakes of places like the United Kingdom and the United States, then, can teach us lessons that may be applied to places where transportation remains nascent or adolescent. The Transportation Experience seeks to understand the genesis of transportation policy in America and the UK, along with the roles that this policy plays as systems are innovated, deployed, and reach maturity, and how policies might be improved. The work presents case studies of particular transport experiences in rail, road, water and air (with a special emphasis on railroads), and then finds commonalities in all of these experiences with thematic analyses that are often bold and unconventional. The book is predicated on the idea that the story of transportation policy can tell us what transportation, is, does, and might do in the future, and at an even broader level, how society has learned to create, deliver, and operate large, complicated systems. It should appeal to students and researchers in a broad array of fields, including geography, civil and environmental engineering, and public policy.