About Eric A. Morris (Edit profile)

Eric A. Morris is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at Clemson University.

Is Travel Really That Bad?

Eric A. Morris

Okay, the title of this article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but travel does involve considerable costs. The average household spends about $8,500 per year on transportation, making it one of our biggest expenditures. Time is another cost of travel, because the roughly hour and ten minutes American adults spend traveling each day might be better spent on things like work, family, and even sleep. Travel can also be tiring, stressful, dangerous, and more.

THE ACCESS ALMANAC: Life in the Fast Lane

Eric A. Morris

According to Lee Friedman, Donald Hedeker, and Elihu Richter, repealing the federal 55 mph speed limit in 1995 resulted in 12,545 deaths between 1995 and 2005. That's about 45 percent more American fatalities than we have suffered in 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. And all those human tragedies are due not to weighty national security imperatives but to the fact that we all want to drive a little bit faster.

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2017-05-26T23:30:43+00:00Categories: ACCESS 38, Spring 2011|Tags: |

Paved with Good Intentions: Fiscal Politics, Freeways and the 20th Century American City

Jeffrey R. Brown, Eric A. Morris, and Brian D. Taylor

Stuck in traffic in Washington, DC in 1959, President Eisenhower was shocked to learn that the delay was being caused by Interstate Highway construction. Surely the Interstates were being built between cities, not in them. The President demanded to know who was responsible for this state of affairs, only to be told that he was; it was the result of legislation he had signed three years earlier. Aghast, Eisenhower attempted to get the federal government out of the urban freeway business. But it was too late: the program had built up momentum that not even he could halt.

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How Privatization Became a Train Wreck

Eric A. Morris

September 15, 1830 saw the grand opening of the world's first steam intercity passenger railway. It also saw the first railway death, when William Huskisson, prominent Tory MP and railway supporter, misjudged the speed of an approaching locomotive and was run over. He was not to be the last British politician to wish he’d never had anything to do with the railways. From 1994 to 1997, John Major’s government conducted an audacious privatization of British Rail. The system was broken up into almost a hundred pieces and sold. Ten years later, disgust with the privatization and its aftermath cuts across British society. There are few stakeholders, from riders to drivers to railway executives to shareholders to regulators to politicians, who do not consider the experiment a dismal failure.

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