James H. Banks:

Introduction to Transportation Engineering, 2^nd Ed, by James H. Banks, is published by WBC/McGraw-Hill. It is intended as a text for a one-semester junior- or senior-level introductory course in transportation engineering.

The book emphasizes the social, economic, and political context of transportation; places major emphasis on important practical topics such as geometric design, Highway Capacity Manual methods, and signal timing; and also emphasizes important theoretical topics such as the fundamental techniques of traffic analysis and the economic theory underlying transportation demand analysis. It also provides overviews of several more specialized topics. These include environmental mitigation design f or transportation projects, pavement and track design, capacity analysis and traffic control for rail and air transportation, mass transit planning and operations, and specific demand analysis techniques.

The basic approach of the book is intermodal. One of its underlying concepts is that the basic principles and techniques of transportation engineering are of wide application, particularly across modal lines. For practical reasons, the emphasis i s often on highways, but care is taken to show how basic concepts and techniques apply to different modes.

Because experience shows that many students learn best by example, efforts have been made to provide numerous example problems and student exercises. Student exercises include written exercises, homework problems, and computer exercises. Written exercises include both short-answer questions and suggested term paper topics. Computer exercises include both programming exercises and spread sheet exercises. A solutions manual is available; this contains solutions to the homework problems, answers f or short-answer written exercises, and FORTRAN code and Excel spread sheets for the computer exercises.