Most of my master’s education in planning has been funded through the generous auspices of an Advanced Institute for Transportation Education scholarship. Part of the scholarship is that recipients are supposed to complete a research project of some sort throughout their graduate education.
After going through various permutations, my project has emerged with a specific focus on regional rail systems–that is, how suburban rail systems work in various places. In particular, I’m interested in why American suburban railroads–what we call commuter rail–work so differently from what is seen in Western Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. Much of my graduate school work has focused around this topic, including the papers published as subpages of this page.
My master’s paper focuses on the question of why American commuter railroads provide much less frequent and useful service than most of their international counterparts. In the spirit of sharing, the online transit community having been a huge help during this process, I’ve uploaded the results here. Check it out!
(Updated 5/2/2016)
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Hello! I find your research paper topic interesting! I did some research on public takeovers of private transit systems, so I dug through many of the same authors that you are digging through. Two books popped into my mind when you talked about elites: J. Whitt’s Urban Elites and Mass Transportation and Glenn Yago’s Decline of Transit.
I’ll be interested in what you find out!
Thanks! I actually have the Yago book on order (my doorbell just rang, maybe it got delivered!), and I’m excited to read it. Thanks for the tip on the Whitt book; I hadn’t heard of it. And I’ll definitely post the paper here when it’s finished!
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