The Metropolis Freight Plan


Book Description

Analysis and recommendations for the future development of freight in Chicago, Illinois. The accompanying CD-ROM includes the plan, technical report, and about the organization.




The Future of Cities and Regions


Book Description

This guide for tomorrow’s urban practitioner systematically explains fifteen best practices across three continents; it explores questions of broad interest for designing and planning the future of cities and regions. Key questions addressed are: Is simulation useful to explore the effects of different design, policy and planning strategies? Which approach will help manage the uncertainties of metropolitan areas both today and tomorrow ? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different simulation practices for city leadership, public and private partnership, and citizen involvement? The book reviews computer models and media, socio-political initiatives, professional practices which help communicating the future effects of different design, political and planning strategies with a wide range of aims: from information, through consultation, towards active participation. These world best practices are considered according to four leading issues for urban and regional development, respectively Simulation, Scenario and Visioning, Government and Governance, and Scale. The book examines the approaches adopted technically and procedurally. The selected knowledge and the innovative tools used in each case study are among the most advanced and up-to-date in the professional and research fields. This volume successfully illustrates these innovative practices and methodologies in a straightforward and accessible way.




Synthesis of Freight Research in Urban Transportation Planning


Book Description

"TRB's National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Report 23: Synthesis of Freight Research in Urban Transportation Planning explores policies and practices for managing freight activity in metropolitan areas. The primary focus of the report is on "last-mile/first-mile" strategies, but it also addresses strategies affecting environmental issues and trading hubs or nodes. The research used to develop the report looked beyond the United States--mostly, but not exclusively' in Europe and the European BESTUFS (Best Urban Freight Solutions) program--for potentially relevant policies and practices that could be used in the United States"--Publication info.




Planning the Mobile Metropolis


Book Description

Our economic welfare and social well-being depend on our mobility. But our means of travel threaten the planet's sustainability. In this innovative text, Luca Bertolini shows how mobility planning - which takes seriously the demands of both urban and transport planning - offers solutions to transport challenges in the 21st Century.




Cities, Regions and Flows


Book Description

Cities, Regions and Flows presents a theoretical framework for understanding the changing relationship between places and physical movement, and thoughtfully prepared case studies from five continents on how cities relate to value chains, and how they ensure accessibility and urban liveability in an increasingly contested policy environment. Moreover, the book discusses how urban policies attempt to solve related conflicts in terms of infrastructure provision, land use, local labour markets and environmental sustainability. The two subsystems that are of major interest here - urban regions on the one hand, and logistics management and physical distribution on the other - develop in quite distinct, and often contradictory, ways. Whereas urban regions face disintegration due to the expansion of the built environment and the spatio-temporal fragmentation of life-worlds and regional systems, the logistics system itself demands integration in order to keep flows moving and to reduce costs. Physical flows, networks and chains thus have a fundamental impact on urban restructuring.




The Transit Metropolis


Book Description

The author has spent more than three years studying cities around the world, and he makes a compelling case that metropolitan areas of any size and with any growth pattern - from highly compact to widely dispersed - can develop successful mass transit systems."--BOOK JACKET.







The Globalization of American Infrastructure


Book Description

This book gives an account of how the U.S. freight transportation system has been impacted and “globalized,” since the 1950s, by the presence of the shipping container. A globally standardized object, the container carries cargo moving in international trade, and it utilizes and fits within the existing transportation infrastructures of shipping, trucking and railroads. In this way it binds them together into a nearly seamless worldwide logistics network. This process occurs not only in ocean shipping and at ports, but also deep within national territories. In its dependence on existing infrastructural systems, though, the network of container movement as it pervades domestic space is shaped by the history and geography of the nation-state. This global network is not invariably imposed in a top-down manner—to a large degree, it is cobbled together out of national, regional and local systems. Heins describes this in the American context, examining the freight transportation infrastructures of railroads, trucking and inland waterways, and also the terminals where containers are transferred between train and truck. The book provides a detailed historical narrative, and is also theoretically informed by the contemporary literature on infrastructure and globalization.




Urban Freight, land use planning and public administration strategies


Book Description

Cities are the engines of an innovation-based economy where research and new ideas are the core input of production. Urbanisation is becoming synonymous of economic growth. People flock into cities, both in the developed and developing world, since here is where wealth is, where high quality services are available and life standards are comparatively higher with respect to other places. However, one has to acknowledge that growth also produces undesired negative effects. In fact, cities are net importers. They need to acquire consumption/intermediate goods, export production and get rid of waste. In other words, the existence of a city relies on a transportation system providing the necessary services for its functioning. The typical urban transportation system heavily depends on passenger and freight movements by road. While this dependency is, in some cases, less relevant for passenger transport, most of freight moved in, out, within and through a city relies on motorized road transportation. Trucks and vans are responsible for congestion, polluting emissions, accidents, noise, visual intrusion and stench. All these negative effects are concentrated where many citizens live and, consequently, produce relevant economic (e.g. time lost), environmental (e.g. air quality), and social (e.g. segregation) impacts. Cities to be attractive, sustainable and thriving need an efficient freight transportation system. Fast changing consumption patterns with the rise of e-commerce and home deliveries also point out to another dimension of cities: their need to adapt quickly to economic trends.




Transforming Urban Transport


Book Description

Transforming Urban Transport confronts head-on the dilemma faced by a world wedded to mobility: the danger of continuing along the fossil-fuelled path and the real paucity of viable technological alternatives which can be deployed in time. To respond to the dilemma, the ideal of urban transport must be changed from auto-based mobility to systems of sustainable transport in which public transport, and non-motorised transport work together to reduce climate change pressures, enhance urban quality and preserve life and health. The book challenges the commonly held view that a combination of urbanity and higher residential density expressed in compact cities (expected to have greater public transport use) will resolve urban transport/environment problems, instead showing that transport systems can be changed to meet the environmental imperatives without the massive spatial change implied. But the problem of change of urban transport is profoundly institutional and cultural. Changes in urban mobility and transport require local institutional policy action. To support such action, the book explores new methods of governance of transport in dispersed and concentrated cities, new techniques for assessing transport need, ways of improving childhood mobility, guidelines for political mobilization, and norms of knowledge sharing. Drawing together leading scholars from different disciplines in Australia, Japan and China, this book provides a unique fusion of Asian and Australasian perspectives and engages with the coming needs of transport planning practitioners in both high density and dispersed cities.