The Transportationists: Garrison and Levinson

ITS Berkeley Emeritus Professor William Garrison and Alumnus and U. of Minnesota Professor David Levinson Explore the Heart of Transportation in Their New Book

William Garrison and David Levinson start their new book, The Transportation Experience (Oxford University Press, 2006), with poet Robert Frost’s advice to college professors: ask students to think, which means to start up a ladder that "sticks through the sky." Unfortunately, they observe, those who think about transportation often never climb beyond the clouds of the past, which leads them to tinker with old solutions rather than imagining new forms of transport.

There are many excuses for this failure, write the authors, among them the long lifespan of transportation systems, which makes them hard to fully grasp, and their disjointedness, which creates "highway experts, vehicle experts, traffic experts, transit experts, airport experts, logistics experts, and others, but few transportation experts." As an alternative, they invite readers to become "transportationists," a term they say is justified because the study of transportation is sufficiently complex to warrant being designated a discipline of its own.

Garrison, who retired several years ago and is now an Emeritus professor, and who has advised federal transportation policy in nearly every administration since President Truman’s and in almost every area, notes that the book has its origins in notes for classes he taught in past years at Berkeley, where he also served as Director of ITS. Co-author Levinson took one of those classes while a Ph.D. student at Berkeley in the late 1990s and thought the notes deserved a wider audience and more permanent and accessible format. "He brought the notes to life by sorting, adding and mixing and matching," Garrison said. Now on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, Levinson teaches urban planning and transportation planning and is director of the Networks, Economics, and Urban Systems (NEXUS) research group.

Major themes of the book include the pervasiveness of conventional wisdom, its often unfortunate role in shaping policy, and the need to resist it. Another theme is historic path dependence, in which initial decisions when a technology is young lock systems into development paths out of inertia (as in the case, say, of railway gauges), so that they become historic artifacts rather than dynamic transport systems. The authors also address the maturity of our transportation system (and its possible senescence). That creates the danger that new ideas will be suffocated or starved, especially given the present preoccupation with polishing and fine-tuning obsolete systems, or tinkering around the edges, refining and optimizing in small increments what is already deployed.

Despite this undercurrent of dismay, the authors claim to be writing out of a sense of optimism. "We need to think harder. We need to do better," they write, with the implication that that is possible.