Explore the vast range of titles available.

Since the early 1990s, federal transportation laws have slowly started to level the playing field between highway and alternative transportation strategies, as well as between older and newer communities. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century made substantial changes in transportation practices. These laws devolved greater responsibility for planning and implementation to urban development organizations and introduced more flexibility in the spending of federal highway and transit funds. They also created a series of special programs to carry out important national objectives, and they tightened the linkages between transportation spending and issues such as metropolitan air quality. Taking the High Road examines the most pressing transportation challenges facing American cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. The authors focus on the central issues in the ongoing debate and deliberations about the nation's transportation policy. They go beyond the federal debate, however, to lay out an agenda for reform that responds directly to those responsible for putting these policies into practice -leaders at the state, metropolitan, and local levels. This book presents public officials with options for reform. Hoping to build upon the progress and momentum of earlier transportation laws, it ensures a better understanding of the problems and provides policymakers, journalists, and the public with a comprehensive guide to the numerous issues that must be addressed. Topics include • A wide-ranging policy framework that addresses the reauthorization debate • An examination of transportation finance and how it affects cities and suburbs • An analysis of metropolitan decisionmaking in transportation • The challenges of transportation access for working families and the elderly • The problems of increasing traffic congestion and the lack of adequate alternatives Contributors include Scott Bernstein (Center for Neighborhood Technology), Edward Biemborn (University of Wisconsin), Evelyn Blumenberg (UCLA), John Brennan (Cleveland State University), Anthony Downs (Brookings), Billie K. Geyer (Cleveland State), Edward W. Hill (Cleveland State), Arnold Howitt (Harvard University), Kevin E. O'Brien (Cleveland State), Ryan Prince (Brookings), Claudette Robey (Cleveland State), Sandra Rosenbloom (University of Arizona), Thomas Sanchez (Virginia Tech), Martin Wachs (University of California, Berkeley), and Margy Waller (Brookings).

\" Better Buses, Better Cities  is likely the best book ever written on improving bus service in the United States.\" -- Randy Shaw,  Beyond Chron \"The ultimate roadmap for how to make the bus great again in your city.\" -- Spacing \"The definitive volume on how to make bus frequent, fast, reliable, welcoming, and respected...\" -- Streetsblog Imagine.

\"Examines the challenges facing U.S. cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas in light of the national debate on transportation policy--including finance, decisionmaking, access for the elderly and working poor, and congestion--and provides reform options that speak to leaders at the state, metropolitan, and local levels\"--Provided by publisher

One third of people living in the United States do not have a driver license.Because the majority of involuntary nondrivers are disabled, lower income, unhoused, formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, and the elderly, they are largely invisible.

For most people in the United States, going almost anywhere begins with reaching for the car keys. This is true, Christopher Wells argues, because the United States is Car Country a nation dominated by landscapes that are difficult, inconvenient, and often unsafe to navigate by those who are not sitting behind the wheel of a car. The prevalence of car-dependent landscapes seems perfectly natural to us today, but it is, in fact, a relatively new historical development. In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes readers on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing readers to see the everyday world in a completely new way. The result is a history that is essential for understanding American transportation and land-use issues today. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48LTKOxxrXQ

This research measures the influence of transit-oriented development (TOD) on the San Diego, CA, condominium market. Many view TOD as a key element in creating a less auto dependent and more sustainable transport system. Price premiums indicate a potential for a market-driven expansion of TOD inventory. A hedonic price model is estimated to isolate statistically the effect of TOD. This includes interaction terms between station distance and various measures of pedestrian orientation. The resulting model shows that station proximity has a significantly stronger impact when coupled with a pedestrian-oriented environment. Conversely, station area condominiums in more auto-oriented environments may sell at a discount. This indicates that TOD has a synergistic value greater than the sum of its parts. It also implies a healthy demand for more TOD housing in San Diego.

Since World War II, Houston has become a burgeoning, internationally connected metropolis—and a sprawling, car-dependent city. In 1950, it possessed only one highway, the Gulf Freeway, which ran between Houston and Galveston. Today, Houston and Harris County have more than 1,200 miles of highways, and a third major loop is under construction nearly thirty miles out from the historic core. Highways have driven every aspect of Houston’s postwar development, from the physical layout of the city to the political process that has transformed both the transportation network and the balance of power between governing elites and ordinary citizens. Power Moves examines debates around the planning, construction, and use of highway and public transportation systems in Houston. Kyle Shelton shows how Houstonians helped shape the city’s growth by attending city council meetings, writing letters to the highway commission, and protesting the destruction of homes to make way for freeways, which happened in both affluent and low-income neighborhoods. He demonstrates that these assertions of what he terms “infrastructural citizenship\" opened up the transportation decision-making process to meaningful input from the public and gave many previously marginalized citizens a more powerful voice in civic affairs. Power Moves also reveals the long-lasting results of choosing highway and auto-based infrastructure over other transit options and the resulting challenges that Houstonians currently face as they grapple with how best to move forward from the consequences and opportunities created by past choices.

Transportation planners, engineers, and policymakers in the US face the monumental task of righting the wrongs of their predecessors while charting the course for the next generation.This task requires empathy while pushing against forces in the industry that are resistant to change.

Seattle was recently named the best bike city in the United States by Bicycling magazine. How did this notoriously hilly and rainy city become so inviting to bicyclists? And what challenges lie ahead for Puget Sound bike advocates? Tom Fucoloro, a leading voice on bike issues in the region, blends his longtime reporting with new interviews and archival research to tell the story of how a flourishing bike culture emerged despite the obstacles of climate, topography, and-most importantly-an entrenched, car-centric urban landscape and culture. From the arrival of the first bicycles in the late nineteenth century to the bike-share entrepreneurs of the present day, the result is a unique perspective on Seattle's history and its future. Advocates, policy makers, city planners, and bike enthusiasts around the world can learn plenty from the successes and failures of this city's past 130 years. More than just a mode of transportation, the bicycle has been used by generations of Seattleites as a tool for social change. Biking Uphill in the Rain documents the people and projects that made a difference and reveals just how deeply intertwined transportation is with politics, public health, climate change, and racial justice.