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Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation
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.
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.
- GenresUrbanism
312 pages, Paperback
Published October 31, 2023
8 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 26, 2024
Susan Handy's book is a no-nonsense analysis of the car-centric transportation policies in America today, how they became this way, and what possible changes might be on the horizon. Of course, as Handy points out, she has spent almost her entire career assuming that such changes were right around the corner because they make so much logical sense, appealing across party lines, only to be bewildered at how little progress has been made. Inertia counts for something. Still, she sees a growing awareness from some policy-makers, engineers, and politicians that previously sacred goals like "reducing congestion" are not actually sensible aims, and that at least from a philosophical standpoint, the tide is starting to turn. Chief among this is an acceptance that transportation systems should be designed to move people, not vehicles (duh) and that accessibility of goods and services is more important than mobility (mobility doesn't matter as much if the things we want to travel to are easily accessible). It's sad that it's taken over a hundred years for more obvious approaches to emerge, but here we are at last.
Shifting Gears is eminently readable, but is unlikely to be read outside of the community of transportation wonks (hello) that find this stuff already fascinating. While one wishes it had the animating power of something like Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, this is unlikely to happen. At best, it's a good jumping off point for aspiring civil servants to formulate transportation policy going forward, and to rein in well-intentioned but myopic transportation engineers.
Shifting Gears is eminently readable, but is unlikely to be read outside of the community of transportation wonks (hello) that find this stuff already fascinating. While one wishes it had the animating power of something like Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, this is unlikely to happen. At best, it's a good jumping off point for aspiring civil servants to formulate transportation policy going forward, and to rein in well-intentioned but myopic transportation engineers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review