Shifting Gears: Towards a New Way of Thinking About Transportation

For more than fifty years, U.S. transportation planners and engineers have focused their energies and our investments on building a transportation system that moves private cars as quickly and efficiently as possible. This worked to make it easy for many people to get around - up to a point. Increasingly, however, a pileup of factors is making it harder and harder to rationalize the practices, funding mechanisms, and even philosophies that made the 20th century the embodiment of personal freedom via driving a car.

Those practices were adopted as solutions to real problems, writes Dr. Susan Handy, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Policy and Director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California at Davis, in Shifting Gears: Towards a New Way of Thinking About Transportation, from MIT Press. But they stem from a set of core values that remain largely unquestioned. Handy quotes Charles Marohn, who says these values "are so deep, so core to the profession that practitioners do not consider them values... They are merely self-evident truths."

Handy's book takes a deep look at those core notions, and an equally critical look at some of the new ideas that are trying to shift transportation planning towards building a safer, more equitable, more environmentally sustainable system. Read more...