Transportist: May 2020

Welcome to the latest issue of The Transportist, especially to our new readers. As always you can follow along at the transportist.org or on Twitter Covid-19 retains its top spot in the armageddon-of-the-month rankings for three months running, after surpassing fires, and overtaking Middle East war.

Open Access Access Redux

We are pleased to announce that you can now download a PDF version of A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions from the University of Sydney eScholarship Repository. (Free)

A Political Economy of Access: Infrastructure, Networks, Cities, and Institutions

Why should you read another book about transport and land use? This book differs in that we won’t focus on empirical arguments – we present political arguments. We argue the political aspects of transport policy shouldn’t be assumed away or treated as a nuisance. Political choices are the core reasons our cities look and function the way they do. There is no original sin that we can undo that will lead to utopian visions of urban life. The book begins by introducing and expanding on the idea of Accessibility. Then we proceed through several major parts: Infrastructure Preservation, Network Expansion, Cities, and Institutions. Infrastructure preservation concerns the relatively short-run issues of how to maintain and operate the existing surface transport system (roads and transit). Network expansion in contrast is a long-run problem, how to enlarge the network, or rather, why enlarging the network is now so difficult. Cities examines how we organize, regulate, and expand our cities to address the failures of transport policy, and falls into the time-frame of the very long-run, as property rights and land uses are often stickier than the concrete of the network is durable. In the part on Institutions we consider things that might at first blush appear to be short-run and malleable, are in fact very long-run. Institutions seem to outlast the infrastructure they manage. Many of the transport and land use problems we want to solve already have technical solutions. What these problems don’t have, and what we hope to contribute, are political solutions. We expect the audience for this book to be practitioners, planners, engineers, advocates, urbanists, students of transport, and fellow academics.

URI

https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21629

[That’s right, we made A Political Economy of Access a free download. Get your copy now. Read it. Make your students and friends and colleagues read it. No excuses. You have the time.]

Conferences

Bridging Transport Research – will be (and always has been) run entirely online. While original aimed at researchers from countries who could not travel for economic or political reasons to the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, that is now a much broader category of people, and will be held in August 2020. Papers are due May 15.

In happier matters, I am thinking about a Reviewers Guild to help break academics from their subservience to the for-profit journal publishing hegemony. An editable Google Doc is available to read at the link. Let me know if you are interested in participating.