The Urban Transportation Problem

"Today we think about the extension of economics into other fields in the context of psychology and economics, or law and economics. Transportation economics was an early attempt to merge wisdom from multiple fields. This book marries economics with engineering. It’s a great example of how two fields can be brought together to add tremendous insight to an enormously important issue, which is how to provide transportation in a dense urban core. The most striking conclusions were that unless drivers pay the full cost of driving, urban roads will always be congested and that at all but the most extreme densities buses, with dedicated lanes, are better than trains. There is an old saw that 40 years of transportation research at Harvard can be summarised by four words: bus good, train bad. Cars do create the biggest environmental challenges, but they are particularly well suited for low-density living. Meyer, Kain and Wohl were focused on higher density areas, which are rarely ideal for private automobiles. But the book is so much more than a discourse on cars, buses and trains. It’s a central book in the history of transportation economics and it’s a central book in the history of cities. And its central contention is that the transportation technology, which is dominant when a city is built, shapes the city itself. For instance, the older parts of New York are filled with narrow streets that date to an era of pedestrianism. And the newer areas have wider streets that were built when wheeled transportation, such as streetcars and overhead railroads, became dominant. So cities are always structured around the transportation technology that exists in the era in which they are built. It’s a brilliant examination of the changes that were happening in the American city as the car replaced public transportation. And it’s filled with information about how transportation shapes city life. For instance, John Kain, one of the co-authors, made the case that African-Americans were suffering because of the distance they lived from their jobs. The book demonstrated that transportation is integral to thinking about cities."