Most historians would agree in affirming the importance of transportation in facilitating urban decentralization. However, less is known about the important role of transportation experts in constructing and managing each city's transportation network. This paper explores the role of engineering experts in guiding development of 3 forms of urban transportation facilities and networks: streetcars, highways, and airports. The evolution of the statistical approach to transport decisionmaking, the types of biases that those statistics concealed, and the varying degrees of success achieved by engineers as proponents of a statistical approach are discussed.
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Barrett et al. (1999) studied this question.
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