Required readings in addition to the textbook. These readings are generally pretty short.
For Whom the Road Tolls by Elizabeth MacDonald in ACCESS, No. 28 (Spring 2006).
MacDonald talks about how the City of San Francisco went through the process of removing a stretch of urban elevated freeway that was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and replacing it with a mulitway boulevard surface street in September 2005. She discusses the design issues and compromises reached.
Must a Bridge be Beautiful Too? by Matthew Dresden in ACCESS, No. 28 (Spring 2006).
Dresden compares the Golden Gate and Bay bridges in terms of their design decisions and resulting beauty vs. function. He highlights the political struggle behind the "signature span" and its cost - an erie parallel to the current debate in Seattle over the Alaskan Way Viaduct. In the end, he argues, efficiency and minimalism can lead to beauty or ugliness.
Reconsider the Gas Tax: Paying for What You Get by Jeffery Brown in ACCESS, No. 19 (Fall 2001). The link is to the whole magazine, the article is on page 10.
Brown examines the history behind the gas tax and uses it to describe why he believes it is still a good system. A good short history of the gas tax.
Environmental Justice & Transportation: A Citizen's Handbook, by Cairns, Greig, and Wachs.
The concept of environmental justice is an increasingly important component of transportation policy and planning. It is fundamentally about fairness in transportation decision making and in allocating scarce transportation resources.
In order to help people better understand the basic components of environmental justice and how it can affect transportation policy, Institute of Transportation Studies researchers Shannon Cairns, Jessica Greig, and Martin Wachs wrote Environmental Justice & Transportation: A Citizen's Handbook, which the Institute published in January, 2003.
The Road to Hell is Unpaved. Unattributed article in The Economist , Vol. 365, Iss. 8304, p. 75, 21 December 2002.
The author chronicles common issues resulting from an undeveloped transporation infrastructure by taking a 4-day ride with a Guiness beer delivery truck through the countryside in Camaroon.
Dispatch from London, by John D. Landis in ACCESS, No. 29 (Fall 2006).
Landis describes his observations and experience in London with respect to transportation. He discusses the impetus and effects of such things as the CCZ, paying for public transit, greenbelts, and even the advent of low cost airlines.
Rethinking Traffic Congestion, by Brian Taylor in ACCESS, No. 21 (Fall 2002).
Typically, traffic congestion is viewed as having a large negative impact in urban areas and, as a result, has frequently been the object of criticism. Taylor asks, "Is traffic congestion a sign of failure?" He thinks we should recognize that traffic congestion is an inevitable by-product of vibrant, successful cities, and view the “congestion problem” in a different light.
WSDOT Congestion Measurement, a summary from a TRB Paper by Daniela Bremmer, Keith Cotton, Dan Cotey, Charles Prestrud and Gary Westby.
The authors describe how WSDOT alleviates congestion on freeways and highways and the methods used to measure such congestion. How does the WSDOT traffic map work? Where does it get its data? What improvements are planned in the future. For a more in-depth treatment of the subject, read the TRB Paper.
The Path to Discreet-Choice Models by Daniel L. McFadden in ACCESS, No. 20 (Spring 2002). The link is to the whole magazine, the article is on page 2.
Dan McFadden, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, describes his ideas for the original discreet-choice research and how it was used to forecast BART riders in the early 1970s.
The Physical Internet: A survey of logistics in The Economist, June 17, 2006.
This article summarizes the state of the art in global logistics practices, making an analogy to the distribution of packets of information on the internet.