Robin Lindsey

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.

The task addressed by this book is to put forward a convincing scientific description of objective reality. In so doing, it also aims to communicate a frame of mind, an attitude, a feeling of how reality is approached scientifically. It is written for a lay readership and should be comprehensible to anyone with a basic grasp of school science. Starting with some simple, almost trivial observations, the author explains how the basic concepts of science, concepts such as force and acceleration, and mass and energy arise. He then goes on to show that these concepts are equally applicable whatever one is seeking to describe: whether it be the very smallest scales accessible to physics (chapter 3), the universe at large (chapter 4), biological entities (chapter 5), or the human brain (chapter 6). It becomes clear from science's success with these disparate forms of matter that scientific concepts are a valid tool for comprehending not only simple objects like electrons and galaxies but also ferociously complex objects like brains. But isn't there more to reality than it being merely a collection of purely material objects obeying the laws that science has revealed? What about consciousness? What about the beliefs we amass as our lives pass, and which guide our behaviour? What about right and wrong? These topics are discussed -- to a degree speculatively -- in scientific terms in chapters 7, 8 and 9. Finally, in the concluding chapter two ever present components of the human experience are investigated;namely, the inexorable passing of time, and our eternal pondering about the existence of God. Anyone interested in the various sciences -- physical, biological etc. -- used by us to investigate not only the phenomena we see around us, but also our very selves, will find this book engaging, and possibly challenging. It presents a coherent picture of reality and what this picture implies about the universe and our place in it.

Too Long In Paradise is a novel set in a future time when people have created a paradise on Earth. It is both an adventure story and science fiction -- the kind of science fiction which is based firmly on 21st Century science fact. Five emissaries from one of Earth's interstellar daughter colonies travel to Earth on a fact finding mission and are treated with cold indifference by Earth's ruler. One of their number, convinced something is being kept hidden, defies the ruler and makes contact with an apparently insane rebel. The result of this disobedience is that the five emissaries are ordered to return immediately to their home planet. However, before their expulsion can take effect, three of them are 'rescued' in an act of horrifying violence by the rebel and some accomplices. The three, now on the run, are at first appalled by the destruction which freed them, but gradually they come to identify with the rebels, as they learn ever more about the boredom and passivity that go with life in paradise. After one of their number is killed in an ambush, the two survivors realize that the facts they have uncovered hold the key to the future survival of all the interstellar daughter colonies. Unfortunately, Earth's ruler refuses to let them return home, demanding instead that they must first answer for the crimes they have been involved with. They conclude their only hope of getting a message to the daughter colonies is to steal a spaceship. The escape attempt, in which they are nearly killed, does not go according to plan. Ironically, what subsequently happens to them provides them with one final stark revelation about the reality of living in a paradise. If you've ever wondered what the ultimate goal of human endeavour is, or wondered, should we succeed in our efforts to build a paradise on Earth, whether you'd truly be happy to live in it, this novel of prediction will provide plenty of food for thought.

Too Long In Paradise is a novel set in a future time when people have created a paradise on Earth. It is both an adventure story and science fiction -- the kind of science fiction which is based firmly on 21st Century science fact. Five emissaries from one of Earth's interstellar daughter colonies travel to Earth on a fact finding mission and are treated with cold indifference by Earth's ruler. One of their number, convinced something is being kept hidden, defies the ruler and makes contact with an apparently insane rebel. The result of this disobedience is that the five emissaries are ordered to return immediately to their home planet. However, before their expulsion can take effect, three of them are 'rescued' in an act of horrifying violence by the rebel and some accomplices. The three, now on the run, are at first appalled by the destruction which freed them, but gradually they come to identify with the rebels, as they learn ever more about the boredom and passivity that go with life in paradise. After one of their number is killed in an ambush, the two survivors realize that the facts they have uncovered hold the key to the future survival of all the interstellar daughter colonies. Unfortunately, Earth's ruler refuses to let them return home, demanding instead that they must first answer for the crimes they have been involved with. They conclude their only hope of getting a message to the daughter colonies is to steal a spaceship. The escape attempt, in which they are nearly killed, does not go according to plan. Ironically, what subsequently happens to them provides them with one final stark revelation about the reality of living in a paradise. If you've ever wondered what the ultimate goal of human endeavour is, or wondered, should we succeed in our efforts to build a paradise on Earth, whether you'd truly be happy to live in it, this novel of prediction will provide plenty of food for thought.