Customer Reviews

Public Transportation: On the Move 1

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First.. this book is wrongly credited to Roger Yee. The actual editor is Marc Wortman, PhD.

Are you in the market for a commuter bus?
Do you design, buy or influence decisions for municipal transit systems for a living?
Are you a transit equipment geek?

If so, you might like this coffee table book of U.S. light rail trains, busses & transit facility projects. It is organized alphabetically by vendor (e.g., Sasaki & Associates, Inc., Siemens Transportation Systems, Inc.,.. etc.,) and is filled with examples of mid late '90's/early 2000's transit stuff... but only in the United States (with only one exception that I saw, a train in the U.K.)

If you're looking for a more global assessment on transit or a book of urban transit theory or of contemporary transit case studies, you might look elsewhere, like Robert Cervero's The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry or Hank Dittmar's The New Transit Town: Best Practices In Transit-Oriented Development. That is not to say the book does not have its place. It just was not exactly what I expected when ordering it.

"On the Move" is more like a big sales brochure for the companies included in the book, which makes sense since editor Marc Wortman is described on the dust jacket as marketing and communications consultant "for several leading architecture and planning firms."

Here's the breakdown of what's included::
-Early 21st century U.S. (not North American, just United States) transit equipment & vendors. Is this a full list? I don't know.
-Good general but brief descriptions of the features of the products/designs included.
-Fairly good color pictures throughout.. some obviously slick professional marketing shots (even one including John Madden in front of his MCI bus).. a few are grainy or amateurish and should have been replaced with better shots.
-There are some conceptual drawings, renderings and plan drawings from the design firms, but not a lot.
-A couple of odd additions are a description of a highway bridge and interior design of shops in a train station.

This is a book to be flipped through to see some interesting U.S. transit equipment and projects and read a bit about them, but because it is organized alphabetically by vendor, and not by topic, you jump from busses to light rail engineering firms to transit system designers, back to busses, etc.
It would have been better to organize by topic.