Transportation and Town Planning

This book is a provocative statement of the transportation engineer's approach to town planning. "Town building," the author writes, "calls for the combined efforts of people in different professions...Members of each profession can only perform their task correctly if they see it as part of a comprehensive commission and are prepared to work together. No profession is entitled to claim that it should be in overall charge of town building, or should carry more weight than the others...I must warn with the utmost emphasis against exaggerations and fashionable follies. We condemn the town planning mistakes of 1880, 1900, or 1920, but we are perhaps making bigger ones. The 'town completely adapted to traffic' and the 'town entirely free of traffic' are both impossibilities. On this basic question the golden mean is not advocated as a means of evading decisions, but on the basis of a recognition that only a sensible balance between traffic and development can offer a total solution...Transportation tests must be suitably apportioned between the various means of transport. Each must be so used that it meets the special requirements of the town."While the second part of the book may be considered a textbook of traffic engineering, the opening section contains a thought-provoking discussion of the relationship between transportation and urban development, based on the author's wide experience as a transportation planner and on his remarkable knowledge of the history of urbanization--Part B is a fascinating outline history of the development of transportation by water, land, and air.