Why are the core principals of U.S. transit planning rarely questioned, and why is transportation in this country so dang inefficient? On September 20, University of California–Davis’s Susan Handy will examine those questions in front of a roomful of Cornellians in Sibley 101 at 4:30 p.m..
An abstract of her talk, officially “Roundabout of a Figurative Kind: The Ebb and Flow of Ideas about Transportation and What This Means for Our Communities,” is reprinted below:
Transportation planning in the U.S. has, for more than a century, been guided by several core principles: speed, mobility, vehicle throughput, capacity expansion, traffic control, mode separation. These principles are hugely influential, yet they are largely implicit and rarely questioned, at least not officially, despite their general failure to produce an efficient transportation system. But each of these principles has an equal and opposite principle that, if adopted, would lead to a very different approach to providing for society’s transportation needs. In this talk, Handy examines the ebb and flow of these ideas and their implications for our communities.
More information on this and other Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) lectures can be found here.