An effective transport infrastructure—and its associated services—are widely regarded as key components of an efficient, equitable, and sustainable society. But the link between transport provision (especially car ownership) and growing global levels of, for example, social exclusion, congestion, pollution, and road deaths is also increasingly recognized. The need to understand how to satisfy a seemingly insatiable appetite for mobility while minimizing its harmful impacts grows ever more crucial.

The subdiscipline of transport economics has made a substantial contribution towards a more sophisticated understanding of such dilemmas, and how detailed strategy and policy might be better developed and implemented. Indeed, especially in the last thirty years or so, there has been a veritable explosion in research output, and this new four-volume collection from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Economics series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to help make sense of a rapidly expanding and ever more complex corpus of scholarly and practical literature.

Volume I includes an overview of the subdiscipline, and then focuses on choice and demand; and transport networks. Volume II, meanwhile, is organized around the themes of willingness to pay and the valuation of: travel time; reliability and trip-time variability; crowding; life and injury; noise; and emissions. Volume III emphasizes institutional reform, costs, and performance. The final volume in the collection includes the best and most influential work on: infrastructure; pricing, subsidy, and funding; congestion charging; subsidies; case studies in passenger transport economics, and analyses of freight and logistics economics.

With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Transport Economics is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. For researchers, students, practitioners, and policy-makers, it is as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.