Transportation research has traditionally been dominated by engineering and logistics research approaches. This book integrates social, economic, and behavioral sciences into the transportation field. As its title indicates, emphasis is on socioeconomic changes, which increasingly govern the development of the transportation sector.
The papers presented here originated at a conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport held at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1999, under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines, including geography and regional science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, come from twelve different countries. Their subjects cover the consequences of environmentally sustainable transportation vs. the "business-as-usual" status quo, the new phenomenon of "edge cities," automobile dependence as a social problem, the influence of leisure or discretionary travel and of company cars, the problems of freight transport, the future of railroads in Europe, the imposition of electronic road tolls, potential transport benefits of e-commerce, and the electric car.
About the Author: William Black is Professor of Geography and Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. He directed rail planning for the State of Indiana during the rail restructuring in the Midwest and Northeast in the 1970s. He then served as a member of the Philadelphia-based task force that created Conrail. Returning to Indiana in 1980, he served as the first Director of the Indiana Department of Transportation. He has been a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Council for more than 30 years, and currently chairs the Committee on Social and Economic Factors in Transportation.
Peter Nijkamp has been professor of regional and urban economics and of economic geography at the Free University in Amsterdam. He has published extensively in public policy, services planning, infrastructure management, and environmental protection. He has been an advisor to several Dutch ministries, regional and local policy councils, employers' organizations, private institutions, the EU, OECD, ECMT, ADB, European Roundtable of Industrialists, ICOMOS, the World Bank, and many other institutions. He is the 1996 recipient of the Spinoza Award.
