Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking About Transportation

If you’re a transportation planner, this is the book to hand to anyone who asks you what you do and why it matters. Handy’s aim in this book is to “take a critical look at the ideas that have shaped … the transportation system” (p. 24). She does this by guiding us through the nine interlocking concepts she sees as critical in creating today’s system of roads and travel options. She starts with freedom and moves on to speed, mobility, vehicles, capacity, hierarchy, separation, control, and technology. Within this structure, Handy explains how the United States ended up with a transportation system in which most people rely on autos to get where they need to go and with streets that can be unsafe and unfriendly for people who are not traveling in vehicles.

My favorite parts of the book are the personal stories Handy shares. The book opens with her reflections on how the expansion of the interstate system changed her childhood journey to her grandparents’ house. We follow her on trips in the family station wagon to Southern California and Yosemite. In later chapters she shares how she biked to school with her kids in Davis (CA), and how she came to think differently about slow travel by taking trips to her mother’s house on Amtrak. Many of us wonder exactly how we got to where we are in our professions, and I enjoyed reading Handy’s reflections on how her experiences with the transport system shaped her career choices and ultimately her choice of research questions.

Handy has read widely and pulls heavily from work in psychology, engineering, and urban planning. The chapter on speed is a good illustration of her approach. She examines how people react to speed, from the physiological adrenaline rush to the psychological understanding of the sensation-seeking personality. The chapter also addresses the natural-sounding connection between speed and efficiency. Handy asks the reader to move past time-is-money thinking and consider how people use the extra time generated by traveling faster (perhaps by working less), and she raises the question of whether people care more about traveling as fast as possible or knowing with certainty when they are going to get to their destination. There is a wealth of academic literature on all these points, and although Handy provides references, her focus is on the ideas. She has a refreshing writing style. The book is not a literature review; nor does it get bogged down in jargon.

Handy’s approach is structured around the traditional ideas responsible for much of the existing transport system. But each chapter also introduces the new ideas that Handy sees as the start of a paradigm shift in the transport field. For example, traditionally, the goal of decreasing congestion has dominated decisions about roadway investments. Handy examines a new set of ideas that aim to make congestion less relevant to people’s lives by changing urban travel options. In the chapter on freedom, Handy shows that new conversations are questioning the idea that cars equal freedom. Instead, she introduces justice as the foundation of the transport system—specifically, mobility justice, which sees movement as a fundamental right. She demonstrates how this framework provides a way to identify and address a lack of access to the transportation system, as well as how some groups have been excluded from mobility.

Handy takes this approach in all the chapters. The speed chapter lays out how the profession has generally worked to promote faster (less congested) travel. But at the end of the chapter she introduces the idea that slow travel can be good, that designing roads for slower speeds can reduce injury severity in crashes and that shifting to walking, bicycles, and mass transit provides environmental and physical activity benefits. The chapter on separation describes the traditional goal of separating modes of transportation so that each type of vehicle—cars, buses, bikes, and even people—can travel faster. This separation is useful and even essential in many situations, such as bus-only lanes and sidewalks. While recognizing the speed and safety benefits that separation often confers, Handy introduces the idea that integrating modes can be the best approach. She explains that some cities in the United States and elsewhere in the world have turned neighborhood streets into places where everyone, including children playing, has a right to be and everyone, especially drivers, needs to navigate slowly through the area. She also describes the idea of complete streets, which requires roadway designers to think about how all travelers, no matter their mode of transportation, can safely use the street.

In the last chapter, Handy looks to the future. Her argument is that citizens and transportation practitioners need to recognize that their decisions will determine the future. We can all choose where we are going in a series of small ways. Handy suggests that rethinking freedom as freedom of choice is a major step in changing the way we design and use our streets. She would like to see a future where the focus is not on solving congestion but on making congestion matter less in all our lives. This will require professionals to move away from decisions based on standards and rely on their own professional judgment. It will also require better negotiation of the contradictions between increased public input and increased reliance on expertise. Handy’s book will encourage more people to think about what happens on our roads and whether they want to see new options and approaches. It will also buttress the substantial work that is already in progress to change practices and outcomes.

I should note that I am a colleague and friend of Handy’s, and I was appreciative of her mention of me in the acknowledgments. This book only solidified and strengthened my great respect for her as one of our leading transport thinkers.

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Notes on contributors

Noreen McDonald

NOREEN MCDONALD is a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and currently serves as the senior associate dean for social sciences and global programs in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on health impacts of the transportation system.