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Fundamentals of Transportation

  • Page ID
    47312
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    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.

    One way to use this text 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.

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