Fundamentals of Transportation/About

This book is aimed at undergraduate civil engineering students, though the material may provide a useful review for practitioners and graduate students in transportation. Typically, this would be for an Introduction to Transportation course, which might be taken by most students in their sophomore or junior year. Often this is the first engineering course students take, which requires a switch in thinking from simply solving given problems to formulating the problem mathematically before solving it, i.e. from straight-forward calculation often found in undergraduate Calculus to vaguer word problems more reflective of the real world.

How an idea becomes a road

One way to use this wikibook is through the lens of explaining "How an idea becomes a road." It begins with how ideas for roads are generated. This is followed by the analysis of ideas, first determining the origin and destination of a transportation facility (usually a road), then the width required to accommodate demand, and finally the design of the road, with a focus on curvature. The book is divided into three main parts: planning, operations, and design. These correspond to the three main types of practitioners in the transportation engineering community: transportation planners, traffic engineers, and highway engineers.

There are other topics provided as well, including Transit Planning and Operations.

Each page corresponds to the notes from one fifty-minute lecture.

Authors

Authors of this book include David Levinson, Henry Liu of the University of Michigan, William Garrison,Mark Hickman, Adam Danczyk, Michael Corbett, Brendan Nee. Karen Dixon at Oregon State University contributed Flash animations developed by herself and her students linked to in this book.