Shifting gears: Toward a new way of thinking about transportation

Shifting gears: Towards a new way of thinking about transportation by Susan Handy (Handy, 2023) is a must-read for young and seasoned transport professionals as well as policymakers. The book concentrates on rules and practices in the current transport system tracking their origins and challenging their applicability and validity in our current world. The book was written in the post-pandemic times making it timely since the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the transport systems in various ways, which the author discusses in detail. As a transport scholar who read several of Susan’s papers and reports over the past twenty-plus years, I cannot hide being a fan of her scholarship, so the technical aspect of the book was not new for me. Yet her engaging and easy-to-follow writing, will for sure make you eager to finish the book and appreciate her writing style, which made me copy a paragraph and distribute it to the master’s and PhD research seminar students at the School of Urban Planning, McGill University so they can learn how to write a literature review paragraph, be engaging, and give their own opinion an elegant way. Each chapter starts with a personal story and then moves to discuss one of the many transport concepts cities in the United States and around the world have to deal with regularly such as congestion, accessibility, parking, equity, sharing street space, adapting to technology, travel behaviour, and vehicle ownership. As a reader, I was not surprised that many of the issues discussed for example the approach to solving congestion through street widening stem from decisions made a long time ago and the way those who shaped our cities were trained and how their opinions were formed to concentrate on speed and traffic flow. Being a civil engineer by training who converted to urban planning, Susan Handy is one of the best authors who can bridge the ideas between these two disciplines smoothly as she has a solid background in both fields, making the book appealing to all transport professionals. The book monitors the shift that has been noticed in transport in the United States from mobility and speed towards accessibility and slow movement. This shift is well documented in the book regarding the funding and how policies are developed at the various governmental levels. It also acknowledges that despite this shift many policies are still oriented around speed and congestion. The facts in the book were always referenced to their origin with the author always giving her opinion on the discussed subject, which made it a good read and increased the trust in the discussed subjects.

A weakness in the book is the absence of maps for the non-American reader. In many instances, the author describes freeways in Texas or California and how they are linked to connect different areas. I felt I wanted to see where exactly these freeways are, this was the case especially in the early chapters, yet later in the book the author uses some maps to contextualise the examples like when discussing a city in the Netherlands. Despite being focused on the United States I found the ideas discussed to be more global. This reminded me of a discussion I had with an academic in the Netherlands who told me they are a car-oriented country, but they are trying to shift the thinking towards other modes, which is exactly what Susan Handy is trying to do in this book.

I would advise young professionals who opted not to take a transport course for some reason or another during their university training and entering the field of transport planning to read this book, as it will introduce them to many of the basics that are discussed in transport planning courses around the world. For seasoned professionals, decision-makers, or a student who took advanced transport courses, this book will be of value as it will make the reader question the way they were trained and the way they are making decisions or thinking about transport. Linking back transport practice to its origin always makes you question if such practice is currently relevant, and this book will help experts in the field to step back and think about their practice and decisions involving transport planning and engineering, for example, do we need to prioritise car traffic along a street or its better to keep the congestion. For me, as a transport scholar and academic I felt this book was a good compass. I have been teaching transport planning for a while and always questioned if what I am teaching is still relevant and important; this book has given me the answer I wanted to hear. For sure I will be requiring this book for my PhD students as it has all the components they need to be excellent transport scholars who can help in shifting the gears towards a new way of thinking about transportation.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Prof. Adam Millard-Ball from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for his feedback on the early version of the review.