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Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners
Nothing in cities makes sense except in the light of accessibility.
Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.
Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.
340 pages, Paperback
Published December 31, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 16, 2019
Transportation engineering is one of the more esoteric subfields of city planning, with its own complicated mathematical procedures that make it inaccessible to most practitioners. This book succeeds in explaining "transport engineering for planners" through using comprehensible examples, and also in explaining "transport planning for engineers," by laying out how city forms affect transportation.
At the beginning of the book, the authors state, "nothing in cities makes sense without accessibility." In other words, cities only exist because accessibility to jobs and attractions is important, and thus accessibility is by far the most essential element in planning. They describe a "cumulative opportunities measure" to show how many jobs, says, can be reached in a 30 minute threshold, dependent on mode choice and job density. The authors also explain how experts working from Douglass Carroll's 1950s Detroit and Chicago work (and Nobel-winning economist Daniel McFadden's San Francisco work) model people's travel based on "stages" (say, from your home to your bus stop), "trips" (the entire trip from home to destination), and "tours" (round trips from home and back again), including special "sub-tours" (say, from work to a lunch diner and back to work). Each mode choice has a personal "utility" to it relative to others, and each mode choice in one stage influences subsequent choices.
The book goes into even more granular detail on some subjects, and, for the purposes of the review, so will I. The book explains how "stochastic queues," in other words, random traffic jams, arise due to cars approaching the lane capacity of 2000 cars per lane per mile (they what is known as the "fundamental diagram of traffic, which compares traffic "flow," or "volume" cars per hour, to traffic density, vehicles per mile, which can get up to 45 or so in fast flowing traffic, and which resembles a triangle of increasing and then decreasing flow). They describe the "price of anarchy," or the difference between user optimal travel time and the system optimal travel time if everyone was appropriately rearranged (on real networks its pretty small, about 2%). They go into the reliability ratio (the value of reliability, in terms of standard deviation of travel time, to loss of time for travlers, which is about 1 for most people). They also spend some time on topology, and issues such as "clustering coefficients," the number of node links to potential node links, and the hierarchy of roads relation to reliability (more hierarchal networks fail less often, but the failures tend to be more "catastrophic').
I wish the authors had explained more of the long-run transport model methods, such as describing "trip production" (homes that people leave from) and "trip attractions" (usually numbers of acres of particular uses that attract so many people a day) as subsets of "trip generation," but in a short book they do a great job describing a range of subjects. Its is a solid introduction to a complicated field.
At the beginning of the book, the authors state, "nothing in cities makes sense without accessibility." In other words, cities only exist because accessibility to jobs and attractions is important, and thus accessibility is by far the most essential element in planning. They describe a "cumulative opportunities measure" to show how many jobs, says, can be reached in a 30 minute threshold, dependent on mode choice and job density. The authors also explain how experts working from Douglass Carroll's 1950s Detroit and Chicago work (and Nobel-winning economist Daniel McFadden's San Francisco work) model people's travel based on "stages" (say, from your home to your bus stop), "trips" (the entire trip from home to destination), and "tours" (round trips from home and back again), including special "sub-tours" (say, from work to a lunch diner and back to work). Each mode choice has a personal "utility" to it relative to others, and each mode choice in one stage influences subsequent choices.
The book goes into even more granular detail on some subjects, and, for the purposes of the review, so will I. The book explains how "stochastic queues," in other words, random traffic jams, arise due to cars approaching the lane capacity of 2000 cars per lane per mile (they what is known as the "fundamental diagram of traffic, which compares traffic "flow," or "volume" cars per hour, to traffic density, vehicles per mile, which can get up to 45 or so in fast flowing traffic, and which resembles a triangle of increasing and then decreasing flow). They describe the "price of anarchy," or the difference between user optimal travel time and the system optimal travel time if everyone was appropriately rearranged (on real networks its pretty small, about 2%). They go into the reliability ratio (the value of reliability, in terms of standard deviation of travel time, to loss of time for travlers, which is about 1 for most people). They also spend some time on topology, and issues such as "clustering coefficients," the number of node links to potential node links, and the hierarchy of roads relation to reliability (more hierarchal networks fail less often, but the failures tend to be more "catastrophic').
I wish the authors had explained more of the long-run transport model methods, such as describing "trip production" (homes that people leave from) and "trip attractions" (usually numbers of acres of particular uses that attract so many people a day) as subsets of "trip generation," but in a short book they do a great job describing a range of subjects. Its is a solid introduction to a complicated field.
January 30, 2021
A fair gentle introduction to transportation and land use planning issues from the perspective of accessibility. If you are a specialist in either of those, you won't gain anything from the book. Recommended to non-specialists.
December 14, 2023
pretty funny for a transit planning textbook.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews