ACCESS 13, Fall 1998
Melvin M. Webber
Transportation research used to be focused on conventional civil engineering topics. But growing cadres of researchers have been coming to transportation from fields as diverse as psychology, law, city planning, sociology, and mathematics. Having joined the inquiry, they’ve widened it to nonconventional topics and nonconventional approaches.
Donald Shoup
Chances are you drive to work alone and park free when you get there. Ninety-one percent of commuters in the United States travel to work by automobile, 92 percent of commuters’ automobiles have only one occupant, and 94 percent of automobile commuters park free at work. Employers provide 85 million free parking spaces for commuters. The resulting tax-exempt parking subsidies are worth $31.5 billion a year.
Wilfred Owen
The coming millennium will be a time to look back and to look ahead. But we should also look around. We share a planet whose societies have become closely interdependent but grossly unequal. A small minority are mobile and affluent while the majority are immobile and destitute.
There are forty-nine countries classified by the World Bank as low income. These are home to more than three billion people, over half of earth’s population. Their income per capita averages about a dollar a day. Americans have average incomes eighty times higher. The poor countries suffer an enormous backlog of needs—from food and shelter to health care, schools, and all conceivable goods and services. In a global economy there is growing pressure to alleviate these conditions, in part for humanitarian reasons and in part because continuing global prosperity is contingent on the very large volume of trade with developing countries and on the foreign investment opportunities they provide.
David Levinson
Will toll roads ever become the norm, leaving “free” roads a distant memory? Now that new electronic toll-collection systems can collect fees from vehicles traveling at full speed, we must ask whether they inevitably will. People who believe technological developments compel institutional changes expect tolls will replace taxes in transportation finance. Those who believe institutional arrangements are independent of technological changes are dubious.
Wenyu Jia and
Martin Wachs
Housing affordability and parking availability are two of the most vexing problems in the nation’s largest cities. In San Francisco, internationally known for its ambience, most working people find it almost impossible to find a house, condo, or apartment at an affordable price. Finding a parking space is nearly as difficult. Many houses are situated on very narrow lots, and frequent curb cuts for driveways reduce on-street parking.
Brian D. Taylor and
William S. McCullough
During the early years of the Great Depression, public transit ridership plummeted by one-third, marking the 20th century trend toward private automobile travel. Sixty years later, transit riding again dropped during the economic recession between 1989 and 1993 , particularly on the nation’s largest transit systems. Although the economy recovered during the mid-1990s and transit patronage stabilized nationally, ridership has not returned to pre-recession levels.