Contracting out for services is a controversial issue in public transit. Proponents argue that contracting always saves money in comparison with public operation, while critics respond that cost savings through contracting are overstated and come almost exclusively at the expense of labor. In...

American attitudes toward transportation planning have recently undergone significant change. For three decades after the end of World War II, public policy emphasized the construction of new highway and transit facilities in order to remove the backlog of needs which resulted from the combined...

Winston Churchill once wrote an insightful analysis of architecture (1). According to Churchill, we first designed buildings to accommodate our behavior and our social and cultural patterns as we understood them. But our understanding of these things was imperfect, and different architects...

American attitudes toward transportation planning have recently undergone significant change. For three decades after the end of World War II, public policy emphasized the construction of new highway and transit facilities in order to remove the backlog of needs which resulted from the combined...

Commuting patterns between home and work were studied among 30,000 employees of Kaiser Permanente, a major health care provider in Southern California. The study tracked the differences between home and work location among employees over six years by analyzing employee records and responses to a...

As the director of a major university transportation research center, I am honored and pleased to have been included in this program in which we are exploring the contributions that research can make to the refocusing of transportation knowledge and planning practice. It is actually quite rare...

Transportation and air quality are areas of public policy in which there is a tradition of thinking, planning, and acting regionally, and we may well ask whether this tradition offers any lessons for public policy makers that go beyond the realms of transportation and air quality. While it is...

North America is the most motorized or automobile-oriented part of the world. This is shown in Table 1 using data for vehicle registrations in several parts of the world. While Africa has a population of 46 people per registered vehicle (including trucks and buses) or 70 persons per passenger...

Winston Churchill once wrote an insightful analysis of architecture (1). According to Churchill, we first designed buildings to accommodate our behavior and our social and cultural patterns as we understood them. But our understanding of these things was imperfect, and different architects...

With this first issue of Access, we at the University of California Transportation Center seek to introduce our research to a diverse community of readers. By presenting our findings in a nontechnical format, we hope to make them accessible to professionals in various fields and to citizens who...