Customer Reviews

Transportation Economics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for students, researchers, and professionals such as analysts and consultants!! If you are a student with Eco 101 background, this book can guide you through learning the theory and applying the theory to analyze issues in transportation decision-making. If you need to write a course paper for your class, you can simply read one of the Case Studies in the book, and then conduct your own research from there. It will save you a lot of time! If you are a researcher or in research business, you will find that the theory and cases in the book cover most of the important issues in transportation economics. The Case Study is more than a literature review, because it not only presents the conclusions as most literature reviews would do, it actually lists the models and equations and explains how the models are specified. It is really a great book to have handy.

If Professor McCarthy decides to release a new edition sometime down the road, I would wish that he expand the investment chapters and add a new chapter on transportation financing.

This is a good text for transport analysts even with limited economics background. I have no regrets for having purchased this text, it's value for the money spent on it.

Unless you have a thorough background in statistics and economic theory you will get lost with this book. If a lot of formulas, demand curves, models, and stuff like "Empirical Implementation of Optimality Rules" and "Testing the Equilibrium Location Conditions" are your thing, go right ahead and dive in. You'd probably give the book 5 stars. If not, get a different book.

This was a "suggested" purchase for a grad class. The text is overly complex, the subject matter extremely difficult to understand. While I was able to use it for my class, it required multiple readings in order to obtain a primitive understanding of the topics. Not presented well and ill suited for a non-mathematics or statistics class. Perhaps mismatched for the course I was taking, but again, a book like this should not be this difficult. I do not recommend it.

This book is a must for transportation analysis. Too often, the link between economic efficiency and engineering is ignored, leading to inefficient investments in public infrastructure. McCarthy provides insights which planners, engineers and policy makers with only a minimal understanding of economics can use to better serve the public and the taxpayers.