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Problems of the carless
438
Bibliographic Section
Hagerstrand T. (1974)The Impact of Transport on the Quality of Life. Topic 5 in Transport in the 1980-1990 Decade. European Conference of Ministers of Transport, 5th Symposium, Athens, Greece Hagerstrand T. (1975) Space, Time and the Human Condition , Dynamic Allocation of Urban Space (Editors A. Karlquist, L. Lundquist and F. Snickars). Lexington Books, Lexington, MA. Horowitz A. J. (1979)Maximum trip length and the disutility of travel time. Paper presented at the Joint NationaL Meeting of
the Operations Research Society of America and the Institute of Management Sciences, Milwaukee, WI, 15-17 Oct. Jones P. M. (1979)A Methodology for Assessina Transportation Policy Imp&ts.‘Paper Presented at 58th Annual Meetjng of the
Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, IS-19 Jan. Train K. and McFadden D. (1978)The goods/leisure tradeoff and disaggregate work trip mode choice models. Transpn. Res. 12, 349-353.
Problems of the Carless, Robert E. Paaswell and Wilfred W. Reeker, Praeger Publishers,
200 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A., 1978, pp. 190, $18.50. Reviewed by Gordon H. Pirie, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, U.S.A. In the authors’ own words, carlessness is a condition in which “people find that alternative means of getting to the activities they desire are difficult, costly, time-consuming, uncomfortable, unsafe, undesirable, inaccessible, or simply inconvenient”. This view of carlessness is considerably broader and more satisfactory than one produced by the more conventional definition of carlessness in terms of the relative infrequency of travel or in terms of household car ownership. Having access to a car, whether as driver or passenger, at the moment one wishes to travel and for the period one wishes to travel is clearly key to the identification of who is carless. It matters little whether one’s household owns a car or not. Similarly, car owners may voluntarily make fewer trips than carless individuals. What is more, the significance of being carless can only be judged in relation to the priorities individuals attach to the activities they adjust or forego because of their carlessness, in relation to their preferences for and attitudes to alternative methods of transport (including walking) for reaching those activities, and by considering also those individuals who do have access to a car and by establishing the latter’s satisfaction with the way their travel needs are being met. These are among the main points to be taken from the stimulating prelude to the empirical study reported by Paaswell and Reeker: a home-interview survey of 401 persons in Buffalo, New York State. Conducting a study which will satisfy the complexities of a sophisticated view of carlessness such as that just mentioned is very exacting. Reporting on the conceptual framework, on the trade-offs between precision and practicality and on the eventual methodology used is no easy task either. Regrettably, the authors fail badly here. Why was trip duration not considered in the measurement of car availability? What was the specific context in which respondents were expected to scale their preferences in the attitude survey? Were questions on desired changes in activities open-ended or not? Might not the racial dimensions of carlessness have been worth exploring, especially if discrimination in job and housing markets aggravate the consequences of carlessness? Why was it necessary that a car be considered in poor condition “if the respondent answered that the running condition of the major car (and what is that?) was either
‘fair’ or ‘poor”‘? Is there a way of measuring the number of cars left at home other than by “subtracting the number of household members who use the car to work from the number of cars in the household”? Quite why was it necessary to mix priority scaling and indirect priority inference? All the evidence suggests that at this stage in our comprehension of carlessness a great deal more space might usefully have been devoted to a crisp and lucid discussion of these and other methodological issues. Unfortunately the copious stylistic and syntactual problems which the book suffers considerably compound the difficulty of reading and appreciating the study. There is language which jars and is simply irritating, and there are sentences which take considerable unravelling. An example: “the carless being a dispersed minority, no singular plan can alleviate their travel needs as car availability fits all the needs of the more advantaged”. Abbreviations are introduced without being needed again. There are redundant words, non-sequiturs and curious descriptions (for example, “nonwhite”, “explanatory causal variables”, “locational activities”) What does it mean to say that “the rationale. . . is a brief synopsis” and that an individual may be unemployed by economic necessity? One series of maps (2.1 to 2.6) is particularly poor, displaying in some places incomplete legend, duplicate labelling and, in one case, contradictory labelling (map 2.4 is headed “one car not at home”, but elsewhere on the map appears the title “one car households, percent households one car left at home”!). All-inall the book would have benefitted considerably from an incisive editorial pen. Problems of the Curless is literally crammed with information, far too much to be digested happily. Apart from the 25 numbered tables, the 24 figures (many of which have two, three or more sections) and the 30 maps, there are some 27 unnumbered tables. The information in the latter is discussed rather well in the accompanying text. The same cannot be said of two major tables (3.1 and 3.2), eight figures (4.1 to 4.8) and twenty pages of maps (5.3 to 5.22) which the reader is left to decipher with the assistance of minimal commentary, if any. Overall the presentation is not unlike that of a giant catalogue, although the reader does not have the benefit
Bibliographic
of an index here, or that of an intuitively clear organization. Chapter 2 is entitled “Problems of Location”: it ineludes a section on the design of the household survey. Reading Chapter 3 is like walking through an unkempt maze littered with confusing and repetitive section headings of different orders. Chapter 4 goes by the name of “An Assessment of Travel Priorities and Attitudes” and has section headings relating only to priorities. And so on. Difficulties of presentation carry through to the coneluding sections of the book where the reader will search in vain for some overall summary finding. Instead the statements are piecemeal and detailed. One memorable conelusion is that the difference in the trip making pattern of the carless and the noncarless is not so much in the total
Section
439
number of trips made as in the activities for which trips are made and the places to which they are made. This discovery undermines the traditional definition of carlessness and has an interesting implication for transport policy. Since it is the more far flung and lower priority activities which the carless are kept from enjoying, their opportunities will not be expanded by the introduction of conventional mass transit focussed on serving commuter trips. It is regrettable to report having closed a book dissatisfied. As ever, there is at least one redeeming feature of a bad book though: in the course of wrestling with it the reader is prompted to think hard about other ways of completing a similar exercise. In this case one is stirred to contemplate afresh the measurement, extent and significance of the phenomenon of carlessness.
BRIEF NOTICES World Civil Aircraft Since 1945, Michael Hardy, Scrib-
ner, Shipping and Service Center, Vreeland Avenue, Totowa, NJ 07512, U.S.A., 1979, pp. 128, $10.45. Mail-order customers beware: this is another of those books with a misleading title. In this case the author decided to exclude aircraft introduced after l%9. This droll decision means that the reader will not encounter any information about the Airbus, the Lockheed 1011 Tristar, the DC IO or about smaller aircraft such as Learjets or Cessna Citations. In short, this supposed compendium has nothing on the majority of aircraft one is likely to see. Readers wanting full details on modern aircraft should consider ordering Civil Aircraft of the World, 1978, the companion volume. The book describes the origins, history, development and commercial use of II7 different types of aircraft in use between 1945 and l%9, including old-timers such as the Douglas DC 3, the Ford Tri-Motors and the Junkers JU 52. In this historical sense it is ,an excellent compilation, worthy of a place in every transportation and aviation library. Copious illustrations and concise technical descriptions accompany the text. The otherwise excellent presentation is marred however by the publishers extremely small type-far smaller than what is now before you.
The Airport-From
The strength and main interest of the work lies in its photographs; about half of these date from before 1940.I had never seen such a collection before. Readers should be aware however, that the illustrations are predominantly from the United States. It must be stressed that this text is indeed a “celebration”. It is neither comprehensive, critical nor accurate. Airport planners may appreciate it, as I do, as an amusing view of our efforts, which may help us keep from being too serious about our work.
Diamond Jubilee of Powered Flight: the Evolution of Aircraft Design, Jay D. Pinson (ed.), American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A., 1978, pp. 152, $20.00. A collection of sixteen papers being the proceedings of a conference to mark 75 years of powered flight. The presentation is divided into 25-year segments which highlight the advances in design of the more than 10,000 different concepts of aircraft built and flown since 1903. Contributors review, among others, the contributions of the Wright brothers, progress during World War I, aircraft company designs, the story of the business jet and the space shuttle.
Landing Field to Modern Terminal,
Martin Greif, Mayflower Books, 575 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022, U.S.A., 1979, pp. 192, $12.95. This book describes itself as “the first to celebrate in text and pictures the history of that place of endless fascination-the airport”. Exactly so. We have here an enthusiastic, highly personal account of airfields and terminals since the beginning, featuring close on 200 illustrations. It is rather like the picture album of a proud parent.
From the Captain to the Colonel: an Informal History of Eastern Airlines, Robert J. Sterling, Dial Press, I Dag
Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A., 1980, pp. 535, $12.95. This is most readable and entertaining case-study of airline operation and management told by an aviation writer and novelist. The study moves from the days of the first president, Captain Rickenbacker, to current chief and one-time astronaut, Colonel Borman. The tale
Bibliographic Section
Hagerstrand T. (1974)The Impact of Transport on the Quality of Life. Topic 5 in Transport in the 1980-1990 Decade. European Conference of Ministers of Transport, 5th Symposium, Athens, Greece Hagerstrand T. (1975) Space, Time and the Human Condition , Dynamic Allocation of Urban Space (Editors A. Karlquist, L. Lundquist and F. Snickars). Lexington Books, Lexington, MA. Horowitz A. J. (1979)Maximum trip length and the disutility of travel time. Paper presented at the Joint NationaL Meeting of
the Operations Research Society of America and the Institute of Management Sciences, Milwaukee, WI, 15-17 Oct. Jones P. M. (1979)A Methodology for Assessina Transportation Policy Imp&ts.‘Paper Presented at 58th Annual Meetjng of the
Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC, IS-19 Jan. Train K. and McFadden D. (1978)The goods/leisure tradeoff and disaggregate work trip mode choice models. Transpn. Res. 12, 349-353.
Problems of the Carless, Robert E. Paaswell and Wilfred W. Reeker, Praeger Publishers,
200 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A., 1978, pp. 190, $18.50. Reviewed by Gordon H. Pirie, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, U.S.A. In the authors’ own words, carlessness is a condition in which “people find that alternative means of getting to the activities they desire are difficult, costly, time-consuming, uncomfortable, unsafe, undesirable, inaccessible, or simply inconvenient”. This view of carlessness is considerably broader and more satisfactory than one produced by the more conventional definition of carlessness in terms of the relative infrequency of travel or in terms of household car ownership. Having access to a car, whether as driver or passenger, at the moment one wishes to travel and for the period one wishes to travel is clearly key to the identification of who is carless. It matters little whether one’s household owns a car or not. Similarly, car owners may voluntarily make fewer trips than carless individuals. What is more, the significance of being carless can only be judged in relation to the priorities individuals attach to the activities they adjust or forego because of their carlessness, in relation to their preferences for and attitudes to alternative methods of transport (including walking) for reaching those activities, and by considering also those individuals who do have access to a car and by establishing the latter’s satisfaction with the way their travel needs are being met. These are among the main points to be taken from the stimulating prelude to the empirical study reported by Paaswell and Reeker: a home-interview survey of 401 persons in Buffalo, New York State. Conducting a study which will satisfy the complexities of a sophisticated view of carlessness such as that just mentioned is very exacting. Reporting on the conceptual framework, on the trade-offs between precision and practicality and on the eventual methodology used is no easy task either. Regrettably, the authors fail badly here. Why was trip duration not considered in the measurement of car availability? What was the specific context in which respondents were expected to scale their preferences in the attitude survey? Were questions on desired changes in activities open-ended or not? Might not the racial dimensions of carlessness have been worth exploring, especially if discrimination in job and housing markets aggravate the consequences of carlessness? Why was it necessary that a car be considered in poor condition “if the respondent answered that the running condition of the major car (and what is that?) was either
‘fair’ or ‘poor”‘? Is there a way of measuring the number of cars left at home other than by “subtracting the number of household members who use the car to work from the number of cars in the household”? Quite why was it necessary to mix priority scaling and indirect priority inference? All the evidence suggests that at this stage in our comprehension of carlessness a great deal more space might usefully have been devoted to a crisp and lucid discussion of these and other methodological issues. Unfortunately the copious stylistic and syntactual problems which the book suffers considerably compound the difficulty of reading and appreciating the study. There is language which jars and is simply irritating, and there are sentences which take considerable unravelling. An example: “the carless being a dispersed minority, no singular plan can alleviate their travel needs as car availability fits all the needs of the more advantaged”. Abbreviations are introduced without being needed again. There are redundant words, non-sequiturs and curious descriptions (for example, “nonwhite”, “explanatory causal variables”, “locational activities”) What does it mean to say that “the rationale. . . is a brief synopsis” and that an individual may be unemployed by economic necessity? One series of maps (2.1 to 2.6) is particularly poor, displaying in some places incomplete legend, duplicate labelling and, in one case, contradictory labelling (map 2.4 is headed “one car not at home”, but elsewhere on the map appears the title “one car households, percent households one car left at home”!). All-inall the book would have benefitted considerably from an incisive editorial pen. Problems of the Curless is literally crammed with information, far too much to be digested happily. Apart from the 25 numbered tables, the 24 figures (many of which have two, three or more sections) and the 30 maps, there are some 27 unnumbered tables. The information in the latter is discussed rather well in the accompanying text. The same cannot be said of two major tables (3.1 and 3.2), eight figures (4.1 to 4.8) and twenty pages of maps (5.3 to 5.22) which the reader is left to decipher with the assistance of minimal commentary, if any. Overall the presentation is not unlike that of a giant catalogue, although the reader does not have the benefit
Bibliographic
of an index here, or that of an intuitively clear organization. Chapter 2 is entitled “Problems of Location”: it ineludes a section on the design of the household survey. Reading Chapter 3 is like walking through an unkempt maze littered with confusing and repetitive section headings of different orders. Chapter 4 goes by the name of “An Assessment of Travel Priorities and Attitudes” and has section headings relating only to priorities. And so on. Difficulties of presentation carry through to the coneluding sections of the book where the reader will search in vain for some overall summary finding. Instead the statements are piecemeal and detailed. One memorable conelusion is that the difference in the trip making pattern of the carless and the noncarless is not so much in the total
Section
439
number of trips made as in the activities for which trips are made and the places to which they are made. This discovery undermines the traditional definition of carlessness and has an interesting implication for transport policy. Since it is the more far flung and lower priority activities which the carless are kept from enjoying, their opportunities will not be expanded by the introduction of conventional mass transit focussed on serving commuter trips. It is regrettable to report having closed a book dissatisfied. As ever, there is at least one redeeming feature of a bad book though: in the course of wrestling with it the reader is prompted to think hard about other ways of completing a similar exercise. In this case one is stirred to contemplate afresh the measurement, extent and significance of the phenomenon of carlessness.
BRIEF NOTICES World Civil Aircraft Since 1945, Michael Hardy, Scrib-
ner, Shipping and Service Center, Vreeland Avenue, Totowa, NJ 07512, U.S.A., 1979, pp. 128, $10.45. Mail-order customers beware: this is another of those books with a misleading title. In this case the author decided to exclude aircraft introduced after l%9. This droll decision means that the reader will not encounter any information about the Airbus, the Lockheed 1011 Tristar, the DC IO or about smaller aircraft such as Learjets or Cessna Citations. In short, this supposed compendium has nothing on the majority of aircraft one is likely to see. Readers wanting full details on modern aircraft should consider ordering Civil Aircraft of the World, 1978, the companion volume. The book describes the origins, history, development and commercial use of II7 different types of aircraft in use between 1945 and l%9, including old-timers such as the Douglas DC 3, the Ford Tri-Motors and the Junkers JU 52. In this historical sense it is ,an excellent compilation, worthy of a place in every transportation and aviation library. Copious illustrations and concise technical descriptions accompany the text. The otherwise excellent presentation is marred however by the publishers extremely small type-far smaller than what is now before you.
The Airport-From
The strength and main interest of the work lies in its photographs; about half of these date from before 1940.I had never seen such a collection before. Readers should be aware however, that the illustrations are predominantly from the United States. It must be stressed that this text is indeed a “celebration”. It is neither comprehensive, critical nor accurate. Airport planners may appreciate it, as I do, as an amusing view of our efforts, which may help us keep from being too serious about our work.
Diamond Jubilee of Powered Flight: the Evolution of Aircraft Design, Jay D. Pinson (ed.), American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, U.S.A., 1978, pp. 152, $20.00. A collection of sixteen papers being the proceedings of a conference to mark 75 years of powered flight. The presentation is divided into 25-year segments which highlight the advances in design of the more than 10,000 different concepts of aircraft built and flown since 1903. Contributors review, among others, the contributions of the Wright brothers, progress during World War I, aircraft company designs, the story of the business jet and the space shuttle.
Landing Field to Modern Terminal,
Martin Greif, Mayflower Books, 575 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022, U.S.A., 1979, pp. 192, $12.95. This book describes itself as “the first to celebrate in text and pictures the history of that place of endless fascination-the airport”. Exactly so. We have here an enthusiastic, highly personal account of airfields and terminals since the beginning, featuring close on 200 illustrations. It is rather like the picture album of a proud parent.
From the Captain to the Colonel: an Informal History of Eastern Airlines, Robert J. Sterling, Dial Press, I Dag
Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, NY 10017, U.S.A., 1980, pp. 535, $12.95. This is most readable and entertaining case-study of airline operation and management told by an aviation writer and novelist. The study moves from the days of the first president, Captain Rickenbacker, to current chief and one-time astronaut, Colonel Borman. The tale