Kenneth A. Small

This new edition of the seminal textbook The Economics of Urban Transportation incorporates the latest research affecting the design, implementation, pricing, and control of transport systems in towns and cities. The book offers an economic framework for understanding the societal impacts and policy implications of many factors including congestion, traffic safety, climate change, air quality, COVID-19, and newly important developments such as ride-hailing services, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, the third edition features a new chapter on the special challenges of managing the energy that powers transportation systems. It provides fully updated coverage of well-known topics and a rigorous treatment of new ones. All of the basic topics needed to apply economics to urban transportation are included:Forecasting demand for transportation services under various conditionsMeasuring costs, including those incurred by users and incorporating two new tools to describe congestion in dense urban areasSetting prices under practical constraintsEvaluating infrastructure investmentsUnderstanding how private and public sectors interact to provide servicesWritten by three of the field’s leading researchers, The Economics of Urban Transportation is essential reading for students, researchers, and practicing professionals in transportation economics, planning, engineering, or related disciplines. With a focus on workable models that can be adapted to future needs, it provides tools for a rapidly changing world.

This new edition of the seminal textbook The Economics of Urban Transportation incorporates the latest research affecting the design, implementation, pricing, and control of transport systems in towns and cities. The book offers an economic framework for understanding the societal impacts and policy implications of many factors including congestion, traffic safety, climate change, air quality, COVID-19, and newly important developments such as ride-hailing services, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, the third edition features a new chapter on the special challenges of managing the energy that powers transportation systems. It provides fully updated coverage of well-known topics and a rigorous treatment of new ones. All of the basic topics needed to apply economics to urban transportation are included:Forecasting demand for transportation services under various conditionsMeasuring costs, including those incurred by users and incorporating two new tools to describe congestion in dense urban areasSetting prices under practical constraintsEvaluating infrastructure investmentsUnderstanding how private and public sectors interact to provide servicesWritten by three of the field’s leading researchers, The Economics of Urban Transportation is essential reading for students, researchers, and practicing professionals in transportation economics, planning, engineering, or related disciplines. With a focus on workable models that can be adapted to future needs, it provides tools for a rapidly changing world.

This timely new edition of Kenneth A. Small’s seminal textbook Urban Transportation Economics, co-authored with Erik T. Verhoef, has been fully updated, covering new areas such as parking policies, reliability of travel times, and the privatization of transportation services, as well as updated treatments of congestion modelling, environmental costs, and transit subsidies. Rigorous in approach and making use of real-world data and econometric techniques, it contains case studies from a range of countries including congestion charging in Norway, Singapore and the UK, light rail in the Netherlands and freeway tolls in the US. Small and Verhoef cover all basic topics needed for any application of economics to transportation: forecasting the demand for transportation services under alternative policies measuring all the costs including those incurred by users setting prices under practical constraints choosing and evaluating investments in basic facilities designing ways in which the private and public sectors interact to provide services. This book will be of great interest to students with basic calculus and some knowledge of economic theory who are engaged with transportation economics, planning and, or engineering, travel demand analysis, and many related fields. It will also be essential reading for researchers in any aspect of urban transportation.

"America's interstate highway system is deteriorating, and traffic congestion in most urban centers is worsening. Because of the many strong and conflicting interests, policy discussions about the road system are also in gridlock. The only consensus that seems to have emerged is that public spending must be increased. Improving our highway system and its financing will not be easy. Road Work proposes a comprehensive highway pricing and investment policy to meet the goals of efficiency, equity, and financial stability. In this study, Kenneth A. Small, Clifford Winston, and Carol A. Evans base their policy on two economic principles: efficient pricing to regulate demand for highway services and efficient investment to minimize the total public and private costs of providing them. Policy recommendations include a set of pavement-wear taxes for heavy trucks, a set of congestion taxes for all vehicles, and a program of optimal investments in road durability. Their proposals should be especially attractive to policymakers because they can be implemented with current technology, offer little threat to the major interest group, and in the long run will reduce the strain on state and local governments' highway budgets."

During the past two decades, most large American cities have lost population, yet some have continued to grow. Does this trend foreshadow the “death” of our largest cities? Or is urban decline a temporary phenomenon likely to be reversed by high energy costs? This ambitious book tackles these questions by analyzing the nature and extent of urban decline and growth of large U. S. cities. It includes and integrates five substudies. The first examines urban decline and some of its long-run causes, and whether cities that are losing population are performing their economic and social functions less effectively. The second substudy is a multivariate analysis of factors associated with the growth and decline of 121 large U. S. cities and their metropolitan areas. Although its causes vary, urban decline appears closely related to processes that have both upgraded individual households and generated serious problems for city governments and poor neighborhoods. A third substudy shows that neighborhood decline is part of a systematic process related to the influx of poor households into metropolitan areas. Another substudy simulates five antidecline strategies in a single metropolitan area, that of Cleveland, Ohio, and finds that severe decline (occurring in about one-fourth of large U. S. cities) could be slowed, though not stopped by vigorous policies. From the last substudy it emerges that, even if gasoline prices rose to over $2 a gallon, resulting adjustments by commuters and firms would produce little net centralization of future urban development—though many older neighborhoods would probably be rehabilitated. The book concludes that further losses of population and jobs in most severely declining cities are unavoidable in the near future. Even Southern and Western cities, now growing fast, will find their rate of growth slowing as further annexation of surrounding territory is limited. The book ends with two chapters discussing policies designed both to help declining population and job losses and to minimize such loses in other cities.