Many of the serious issues in urban transportation planning today come down to arguments between idealists and pragmatists; between those that see transportation planning primarily as a tool to shape a better society and those who feel it must primarily respond to today's measurable needs with alternatives that have been shown quantitatively to work best. This debate may have had its origin some 2300 years ago in the conflicting philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

Both were trying to understand how to understand the world. Plato was the idealist. He taught that the observable world is in a constant state of flux; just when you might think you understand something, it will change, or a contradiction will pop up. You can't trust observation as a basis for knowledge. To Plato the only intellectual structures of permanence and value were fully self consistent thought structures, ("Platonic ideals"), like complex mathematical theorems derived from clearly stated premises, irrespective of whether such premises correspond in any way to the observable world. And so they built their complex thought structures and considered them to be the "true", understandable world.

Aristotle was the pragmatist. He said

Aristotle prevailed (at least for the time being). He may well be called the father of science and engineering and most of the material things we call standard of living today.

But Platonism is not dead. It lives on today in much of transportation planning, taught as a social, rather than engineering science. Its proponents are driven by their vision of a higher quality life, ideal urban forms, pristine countrysides, villages where everyone knows everyone else, clear streams, no pollution, and clean, silent, efficient mass transit, running at high speed to everywhere we may want to go. They see it as axiomatic that mass transit is the efficient way to move masses of people and reject experience and objective data arguing otherwise. This is their vision, their ultimate and overriding goal. 

This web site is dedicated to the contrary, Aristotelian, engineering view of urban transportation planning; that it is possible to measure and to know how well alternative systems work, and acting on historical experience, real data, and quantitative evaluation, to develop the best transportation system.

In the Aristotelian tradition, many wise scientists and managers have said,

The papers herein are devoted to how to measure urban transportation,  and the implications of those measures.