plished in the fields of medicine, atomic energy, and aerospace technology.
The study brought some of the finest research skills avail- able in government, industry, universities, research centers, and the foundations- together with experts possessing years of experience in dealing with urban transportation problems.
Thus, traditional approaches were combined with new methods of research and systems analysis used successfully in the aero- space and defense industries. Working together, this unique team was able to explore urban transportation possibilities as never before, and to winnow fact from popular fiction. The improvements and new systems presented in this report also show the great potential benefits possible through combining technical advances with social service.
To help future urban transportation systems play a more active part in changing the city and the quality of urban life, eight general problems endemic to cities today were identified, against which total benefits anticipated from new transporta- tion systems and subsystems could be measured as a guide to recommending an optimal research and development program, These eight problem areas are:
Equality of Access to Urban Opportunity: Present urban transportation tends to immobilize and isolate nondrivers: The poor, secondary workers in onc-car families, the young, the old, and the handicapped.
Quality of Service: Public transit service too often is char- acterized by excessive walking distances to and from stations, poor connections and transfers, infrequent service, unreliabil ity, slow speed and delays, crowding, noise, lack of comfort, and a lack of information for the rider's use. Moreover, passengers too often are exposed to dangers to personal safety while await- ing service. These deficiencies lead to a loss of patronage and a further decline in service for the remaining passengers.
Congestion: Congestion results in daily loss of time to the traveler. Too often "solutions" are expensive in dollars and landtaking, destroying the urban environment in the process.
Efficient Use of Equipment and Facilities: Increased effi- ciency and greater economy through better management and organizational techniques-including cost control, scheduling and routing, experimentation in marketing and new routes-is necessary to satisfy urban transportation requirements at mini- mum cost.
Efficient Use of Land: Transportation functions and rights- of-way require extensive amounts of urban land, and compete with other important uses of the urban land resource. More ra- tional urban land use made possible by new forms of transpor- tation might help reduce travel demands, aid in substituting communications for urban transportation, and achieve greater total transportation services for the amounts of land required.6
