Editorial on transportation economics

摘要

This special issue is an initiative of the recently established International Transportation Economics Association. ITEA seeks to promote the development and application of transportation economics by: encouraging scientific research, facilitating advanced education in transportation economics, and promoting interaction between transportation research and transportation-related policymaking. To fulfil these goals, ITEA is interested in reaching out to other disciplines involved with transportation research and practice including: civil and transportation engineering, operations research, computer science, geography, regional science, business and planning. Although transportation economics has existed as a field of economics for over 50 years, many researchers in other disciplines are not familiar with its scope. Transportation economics does not have distinct boundaries, but the nature of the subject and the range of topics and issues it addresses are described in various general references. As Small and Verhoef explain, transportation economics concerns itself with resource allocation and the behavior of agents (i.e., households, firms, transport service providers, and so on) that make transportation-related decisions. Transportation economists tend to use microeconomic utility-theoretic models that embody behavioral principles and describe how interactions among independent agents result in self-consistent or equilibrium outcomes. These models are well-suited to describe how transportation systems react to shocks or policy changes, and they are capable of measuring changes in the well-being of agents and assessing trade-offs between efficiency and equity.