Preface

Transportation is more than infrastructure and technologies for moving goods and people. It is about travel, a fundamental right in modern societies that is vital for people’s quality of life and cities’ economic development and prosperity. At its core, transportation is a complex of physical, social, economic, environmental, technical, political, and organizational systems. These systems have shaped transportation policies, programs, and history from colonial times through the last one hundred years of automobility—emblematic of U.S. modernization—and today’s emerging smart mobility solutions.

Over more than three decades, significant policy shifts—beginning with the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) and continuing through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)—have expanded the transportation policy agenda beyond congestion to address broader issues. These include the environmental and social equity challenges resulting from the heavy reliance on private cars, such as air pollution, climate change, and social and environmental justice, collectively considered in a sustainable transportation planning perspective.

The subject is vast, interdisciplinary, and constantly evolving. This book introduces key transportation policy and planning topics at a pivotal time marked by emerging and proposed paradigm shifts. These include performance-based planning, equity-focused approaches, multi- and intermodal planning, the transition from trip-based to activity-based modeling, the rise of autonomous vehicles and ride-hailing services, and the growing push to shift the transportation system’s focus from mobility to accessibility, in addition to efforts underway for enhancing active transportation and bold proposals for mitigating transportation’s contributions to climate change.

This open text is designed, organized, and written to serve as the open textbook for the core graduate course “Transportation Policies, Programs and History” of the Transportation Planning and Policy certificate offered by the Department of Public Affairs and Planning at UTA’s College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in urban and transportation planning. An initial draft was prepared by Dr. Roya Etminani-Ghasrodashti with the assistance of Ph.D. students Ladan Mozaffarian, Soheil Sharifi-asl, and Elmira Shirgir for a pilot version of the course in 2022. While the course and book titles and a minimal level of book structure remained the same, this is a new book featuring new content. It responds to feedback from the project’s industry advisory group, and input from students and faculty who have since taken and taught the course.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized in three parts and ten chapters, each corresponding to a course session.

Establishes a foundation for the understanding of transportation policies, programs, and history in the United States and basic transportation concepts. It aims to help the student learner integrate fundamental transportation knowledge with the specific transportation planning topics  presented in Parts II and III.

• Jenifer Reiner, Ivonne Audirac, Ph.D.

Part II builds on the foundational information in Part I and centers on the relationship between transportation and land use – where people live and work— including mobility modes, public transit, and transit-oriented development (TOD); transportation and land use interactions through accessibility, and the constant coevolution of transportation technology with the urban landscape.

Part III is forward-looking and situates American transportation policies and programs in the global context.  Transportation sustainability in the U.S. and Global South, though at opposite ends in per capita CO2 transportation-related contributions and urbanization rates, are globally connected in terms of climate change repercussions and policies to combat it.