Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation

Authors

Susan Handy, University of California, Davis

Files

Streaming Media

Date

4-26-2024

Description

The transportation system in the U.S. has been shaped by a core set of ideas that are embedded in professional practice. These ideas – freedom, speed, mobility, vehicles, capacity, hierarchy, separation, control, and technology – have produced a system in which most people are dependent on driving, with all the negative consequences that entails. Shifting to a system that offers people choices about their daily travel requires a shift in thinking on the part of the transportation profession. In this talk, I take a critical look at the way of thinking that, for the last century, has shaped our transportation system and consider the ways in which that thinking is – and is not – shifting.

Biographical Information

Susan Handy is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California at Davis, where she is also the Director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, part of the federal university transportation centers program. Her research focuses on strategies for reducing automobile dependence, including bicycling as a mode of transportation. She is the author of Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation, published in 2023 by MIT Press.

Disciplines

Transportation | Urban Studies | Urban Studies and Planning

Recommended Citation

Handy, Susan, "Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation" (2024). PSU Transportation Seminars. 248.