The Urban Transportation System: Politics and Policy Innovation (Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies Series)

Despite commuter complaints and some genuine hardship for those without ready access to automobiles, the American system of urban transportation is a resounding success from the standpoint of the vast majority of urban residents. Nor are any developments on the horizon, such as oil shortages, likely to threaten the pattern of auto-dominance. There has been rapidly growing concern in recent years, however, about specific problems associated with the system—most notably, its high energy requirements, its air pollution effects, its high fatality rates, and its equity consequences. There is also wide disillusion with the main traditional instruments of urban transportation policy, expensive highway and mass transit investments. Thus public officials find themselves under intense pressure to ameliorate the "problems" of urban transportation, but simultaneously constrained to do so in ways that are unobtrusive from the standpoint of the average traveler, that avoid community disruption, and that entail minimal new budgetary requirements.  These are a few of the conclusions reached by Alan Altshuler in The Urban Transportation System, a comprehensive and original examination of the factors that have shaped the U.S. urban transportation system and of innovative options available to today's policy makers. Because it offers both a systematic, multidisciplinary analysis of the problems and available alternatives in urban transportation, and a political analysis of the ways in which policy makers actually choose among options, the book will interest students of American politics, policy and analysis, and the interplay of technology and policy, as well as researchers and policy makers whose concerns center on the urban transportation system itself.  Part I reviews the postwar history of urban transportation policy and advances a set of propositions about how to rank potential innovations with reference to political feasibility.  Part II examines the criteria by which both critics and defenders of the urban transportation system seem to evaluate it. It then devotes separate chapters to the six main "problems" on which critics of the system focus: energy, air pollution, safety, equity, congestion, and urban sprawl. Each of these chapters examines the nature of the problem and of public controversy about it, and appraises the likely cost-effectiveness of the most plausible strategies for dealing with it.  Part III focuses on eight broad policy categories, asking which appear to combine in high degree both political feasibility and cost-effectiveness re the main problems of urban transportation. The options examined include highway capacity expansion, fixed route transit service expansion, demand responsive transit, private ride-sharing, traffic management techniques giving preference to high occupancy vehicles, performance standard regulation of the auto manufacturers, direct consumer regulation, and price disincentives intended to curtail auto travel and/or gasoline consumption.  Reporting in the Wall Street Journal on this new study, Alan L. Otten describes it as a "fact-jammed, tightly argued" analysis whose conclusions "fly in the face of conventional wisdom." Similarly Edwin Diamond, writing in Esquire, has noted that "Altshuler upsets most conventional wisdom. His practical experience enables him to look at the road ahead without undue romanticism about a landscape long-since passed.  The Urban Transportation System is included in the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies Series and in the MIT Press Transportation Studies Series.  This paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Politics & Social Sciences

James P. Womack

Alan A. Altshuler

John P. Pucher

Social Sciences

The MIT Press

Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century. Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century that supersedes the mass production system of Ford, the financial control system of Sloan, and the strategic system of Welch and GE. It is based on the Toyota (lean) model, which combines operational excellence with value-based strategies to produce steady growth through a wide range of economic conditions. In contrast with the crash-and-burn performance of companies trumpeted by business gurus in the 1990s, the firms profiled in Lean Thinking -- from tiny Lantech to midsized Wiremold to niche producer Porsche to gigantic Pratt &amp; Whitney -- have kept on keeping on, largely unnoticed, along a steady upward path through the market turbulence and crushed dreams of the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the leader in lean thinking -- Toyota -- has set its sights on leadership of the global motor vehicle industry in this decade. Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value. (It's often not at all what existing organizations and assets would suggest.) The next step is to line up value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream while eliminating activities (usually the majority) that don't add value. Then the lean thinker creates a flow condition in which the design and the product advance smoothly and rapidly at the pull of the customer (rather than the push of the producer). Finally, as flow and pull are implemented, the lean thinker speeds up the cycle of improvement in pursuit of perfection. The first part of this book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples. Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates that these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry in any country. But most managers need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of more than fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world. Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating an extended lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links value-creating activities from raw materials to customer. In Part IV, an epilogue to the original edition, the story of lean thinking is brought up-to-date with an enhanced action plan based on the experiences of a range of lean firms since the original publication of Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking does not provide a new management "program" for the one-minute manager. Instead, it offers a new method of thinking, of being, and, above all, of doing for the serious long-term manager -- a method that is changing the world.

Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated

Business & Money

Daniel T. Jones

Economics

Free Press

When James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos wrote THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD in 1990, Japanese automakers, and Toyota in particular, were making a strong showing by applying the principles of lean production. However, the full power of lean principles was unproven, and they had not been applied outside of the auto industry. Today, the power of lean production has been conclusively proved by Toyota's unparalleled success, and the concepts have been widely applied in many industries. Based on MIT's pioneering global study of industrial competition, THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD offers a groundbreaking analysis of the entire lean business system, including product development, supplier management, sales, service, and production - an analysis even more relevant today as GM and Ford struggle to survive and a wide range of British abd American companies embrace lean production. A new Foreword by the authors brings the story up to date and details how their predictions were right. As a result, this reissue of a classic is as insightful and instructive today as when it was first published.

Machine That Changed The World

Daniel Roos

Simon & Schuster, Limited

Auf dem Weg zum perfekten Unternehmen: (Lean Thinking)

Lean Thinking

Campus Verlag GmbH

A Máquina que Mudou o Mundo (Em Portuguese do Brasil)

CAMPUS - GRUPO ELSEVIER

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Books by James P. Womack