This book presents in a self-contained and rigorous way for those basic concepts in the transportation and traffic operation field that should be well understood by every transportation professional. This includes graduate students planning to pursue more advanced studies, as well as newcomers to the field who may be readying themselves for an in depth review of the literature. Academics will find much of this book to be a valuable resource for teaching. The book has chapters on tools and others on applications as well as very brief introductions to graphical methods, optimization, probability, stochastic processes, statistics and simulation are provided as part of the "tool" chapters. Application topics, which include "traffic flow theory", "control", "observation" and "scheduled modes", are covered with a building block approach. Basic ideas involving simple systems (eg, the timing of a simple traffic signal, the estimation of a bottleneck's "capacity", and the evaluation of passenger delay at a bus stop) are presented in detail and more complicated ones (eg, networks, estimation of an origin-destination table, and coordintion of transit schedules) more qualitatively.
"Traffic flow theory" is covered in more depth than other topics in order to fill gaps in the existing literature. The book deemphasizes the description of facts (which change as technology changes) in favour of logic.