Customer Reviews

Transportation GIS: Includes 12 Case Studies

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This book showcases many examples of how GIS can be applied in the field of transportation using ArcView GIS, but it doesn't come with any theory. As such, it is more like an overpriced sales brochure and not a textbook. Nevertheless, the examples are really neat and should inspire any practitioner in the field.

This book looks at GIS-based applications implemented for various transportation agencies around the US, and one in Korea. It is published by ESRI press, so every example uses ArcGIS & friends. Each chapter begins with a paragraph or two about the agency and the problems it's trying to solve using GIS. Each page has a screenshot with accompanying text that merely describes the screenshot in a fairly superficial way. The kind of generic commentary is typified here: "Using ESRI's ArcView application, the transportation manager can click on icons and review the date of reported accidents."

That really just describes to me how someone uses the software, where I had been hoping for a more high-level, deeper analysis with specific examples. From a production standpoint, this book is fairly poor. Some of the screenshots are of poor quality (e.g., they didn't even bother setting the character encoding properly for the Korean shots, so some of the characters show up as garbled). There's a lot of wasted whitespace, and the pages started to fall out as I reached the end of the book (brittle binding, I guess).

This book will be useful for managers wondering if GIS could help them, who are looking for situations where others have found this to be the case. I don't think it will necessarily give them much understanding of exactly HOW useful it might be or why. Certainly, this will not be of much use to GIS users, in my opinion, since it relatively thin on specifics.

Don't buy this book unless you want to be overwhelmed by pr for ESRI about projects they have done. Its a snooze.