front cover of Autonomous Vehicle Technology
Autonomous Vehicle Technology
A Guide for Policymakers
James M. Anderson
RAND Corporation, 2014
The automotive industry appears close to substantial change engendered by “self-driving” technologies. This technology offers the possibility of significant benefits to social welfare—saving lives; reducing crashes, congestion, fuel consumption, and pollution; increasing mobility for the disabled; and ultimately improving land use. This report is intended as a guide for state and federal policymakers on the many issues that this technology raises.
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front cover of Creating Green Roadways
Creating Green Roadways
Integrating Cultural, Natural, and Visual Resources into Transportation
James L. Sipes and Matthew L. Sipes
Island Press, 2012
Roads and parking lots in the United States cover more ground than the entire state of Georgia. And while proponents of sustainable transit often focus on getting people off the roads, they will remain at the heart of our transportation systems for the foreseeable future. In Creating Green Roadways, James and Matthew Sipes demonstrate that roads don’t have to be the enemy of sustainability: they can be designed to minimally impact the environment while improving quality of life.
 
The authors examine traditional, utilitarian methods of transportation planning that have resulted in a host of negative impacts: from urban sprawl and congestion to loss of community identity and excess air and water pollution. They offer a better approach—one that blends form and function. Creating Green Roadways covers topics including transportation policy, the basics of green road design, including an examination of complete streets, public involvement, road ecology, and the economics of sustainable roads. Case studies from metropolitan, suburban, and rural transportation projects around the country, along with numerous photographs, illustrate what makes a project successful.
 
The need for this information has never been greater, as more than thirty percent of America’s major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, more than a quarter of the nation’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and congestion in communities of all sizes has never been worse. Creating Green Roadways offers a practical strategy for rethinking how we design, plan, and maintain our transportation infrastructure.
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front cover of The Enemy of Good
The Enemy of Good
Estimating the Cost of Waiting for Nearly Perfect Automated Vehicles
Nidhi Kalra
RAND Corporation, 2017
How safe should highly automated vehicles (HAVs) be before they are allowed on the roads for consumer use? In this report, RAND researchers use the RAND Model of Automated Vehicle Safety to compare road fatalities over time under a policy that allows HAVs to be deployed when their safety performance is just moderately better than human drivers and a policy that waits to deploy HAVs only once their performance is nearly perfect.
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front cover of Forensic Media
Forensic Media
Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity
Greg Siegel
Duke University Press, 2014
In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel considers how photographic, electronic, and digital media have been used to record and reconstruct accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Focusing in turn on the birth of the field of forensic engineering, Charles Babbage's invention of a "self-registering apparatus" for railroad trains, flight-data and cockpit voice recorders ("black boxes"), the science of automobile crash-testing, and various accident-reconstruction techniques and technologies, Siegel shows how "forensic media" work to transmute disruptive chance occurrences into reassuring narratives of causal succession. Through historical and philosophical analyses, he demonstrates that forensic media are as much technologies of cultural imagination as they are instruments of scientific inscription, as imbued with ideological fantasies as they are compelled by institutional rationales. By rethinking the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, Siegel sheds new light on the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.
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front cover of Getting Out of the Mud
Getting Out of the Mud
The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928
Martin T. Olliff, Foreword by David O. Whitten
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles

Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.
 
With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.
 
Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.
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front cover of License Plate Readers for Law Enforcement
License Plate Readers for Law Enforcement
Opportunities and Obstacles
Keith Gierlack
RAND Corporation, 2014
Because license plate reader (LPR) technology is relatively new in the United States, opportunities and obstacles in its use in law enforcement are still under exploration. To examine issues about this technology, RAND conducted interviews with law enforcement personnel, police officers, and others responsible for procuring, maintaining, and operating the systems.
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front cover of Politics Across the Hudson
Politics Across the Hudson
The Tappan Zee Megaproject
Philip Mark Plotch
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Winner of the 2015 American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter Journalism Award

The State of New York built one of the world’s longest, widest, and most expensive bridges—the new Tappan Zee Bridge—stretching more than three miles across the Hudson River, approximately thirteen miles north of New York City. In Politics Across the Hudson, urban planner Philip Plotch offers a behind-the-scenes look at three decades of contentious planning and politics centered around this bridge, recently renamed for Governor Mario M. Cuomo, the state's governor from 1983 to 1994. He reveals valuable lessons for those trying to tackle complex public policies while also confirming our worst fears about government dysfunction.
 
Drawing on his extensive experience planning megaprojects, interviews with more than a hundred key figures—including governors, agency heads, engineers, civic advocates, and business leaders—and extraordinary access to internal government records, Plotch tells a compelling story of high-stakes battles between powerful players in the public, private, and civic sectors. He reveals how state officials abandoned viable options, squandered hundreds of millions of dollars, forfeited more than three billion dollars in federal funds, and missed out on important opportunities. Faced with the public’s unrealistic expectations, no one could identify a practical solution to a vexing problem, a dilemma that led three governors to study various alternatives rather than disappoint key constituencies. 
 
This revised and updated edition includes a new epilogue and more photographs, and continues where Robert Caro’s The Power Broker left off and illuminates the power struggles involved in building New York’s first major new bridge since the Robert Moses era. Plotch describes how one governor, Andrew Cuomo, shrewdly overcame the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of onerous environmental regulations, vehement community opposition, insufficient funding, interagency battles, and overly optimistic expectations...
 
 
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front cover of Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition
Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition
National Association of City Transportation Officials, NACTO
Island Press, 2024
Over a decade ago, the first edition of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sparked a design revolution in cities. City streets are now understood as key elements in confronting the intertwined safety, equity, and climate crises in North America.

The completely revised and updated third edition of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a new standard for street design in North America. Developed for cities, by cities, the new guide is more than a permission slip for better street design--it's a prescription for safe, connected, equitable bike networks. It captures lessons learned and emerging practices to set a new bar for the design of city streets.

The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, Third Edition, will help city leaders and street designers meet the needs of our time. New topics address critical gaps in existing guidance for planning and project development. Contextual guidance for bikeway design encompasses the needs of a wider swath of potential riders, across genders, ages, races, ethnicities, incomes, and abilities. The guide offers substantive guidance for safe intersection design, with a focus on conflict reduction. It is a blueprint for implementing safe, connected, and equitable bike networks. Every transportation professional, from design to maintenance and from field staff to executives, needs a copy for their daily work.

Praise for the second edition
 
“NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide gives American planners and designers the tools they need to make cycling accessible to more people.”
—Janette Sadik-Khan, former New York City Transportation Commissioner
 
“This is an extraordinary piece of work that's long overdue.”
—Ray LaHood, former United States Secretary of Transportation
 
“The guide will serve as an essential blueprint for safe, active, multi-modal streets.”
—Gabe Klein, former Chicago Transportation Commissioner
 
“A Must-read… Landscape architects, planners, and city officials should find this guide invaluable. Anyone who advocates for increasing bicycle infrastructure in our cities will find many useful tools for implementing best practice infrastructure.”
―ASLA's The Dirt
 
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