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Todd Litman
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1250 Rudlin Street Victoria, BC, V8V 3R7, Canada Phone & Fax (250) 360-1560 Email: litman@islandnet.com |
Todd Litman is director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to developing innovative tools for transportation decision making. Much of his work involves incorporating economic, social and environmental impacts that tend to be overlooked into transportation planning. He has worked on many studies which examine the full costs and benefits of various transportation policies and investments. He has also developed transportation demand management and parking management strategies and programs. His research has been used worldwide for transportation planning and policy analysis.
He is an Affiliate of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and has been appointed to three Transportation Research Board committees: Economics (A1C01) and Social and Economic Factors in Transportation (A1C06), and the new subcommittee on Sustainable Transportation.
Todd has written numerous papers, articles and reports concerning transportation cost and benefit analysis. In addition to technical writing, Todd has co-authored two travel books (Washington; Off the Beaten Path and Best Bike Rides in the Pacific Northwest) and a weekly bicycling column in the Times Colonist with his wife, Suzanne Kort. They reside in Victoria, British Columbia.
Todd has been extremely generous in freely sharing his expertise, print materials and good judgement on matters of transportation and sustainable development with any and all over the Net, through the Web site of the Institute and other electronic fora.To put his approach to the sustainability/transport nexus into perspective, here is a quote from a recent critical review that he has posted of a widely discussed book, Roads in a Market Economy:
Anybody interested in full cost accounting and optimal pricing of roadway transportation will find much to like in Gabriel Roth's book The book identifies distortions in current transportation investment and pricing decisions, and nicely summarizes the arguments for more efficient roadway investment and pricing. The writing style is entertaining, which allows these ideas to be presented to a wider audience than would be possible with a more academic document. The book describes in detail many market distortions that underprice driving, including failure to charge motorists full cost recovery of roadway expenditures, roadway land, parking facilities, accidents and pollution. It also discusses political and institutional incentives that encourage inefficient transportation investments. It provides good arguments as to why purely marginal cost pricing of roads can be inequitable and inefficient in competitive markets that require cost recovery for most other goods.
However, Roads in a Market Economy has a narrow ideological perspective that is often off-putting, and which distorts and weakens many of its arguments. In particular, the author appears to consider privatization as an end in itself. All the book's arguments and evidence are presented to support this conclusion. Potential problems are not fully explored. The tone is arrogant. It is particularly insulting to environmentalists, transit professionals, and anybody who has the slightest doubts about the superiority of modern capitalist markets.
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Updated 8 September 1999