Controversy persists over how many people would ride the "maglev." This magnetic-levitation rail line has been proposed to connect Baltimore and Washington. If the maglev ran mostly empty, then it would not be worth constructing. To evaluate the maglev's ridership potential, the present document contains a wealth of information for concerned citizens, elected officials, and transportation planners. This information goes far beyond the six-page discussion of maglev ridership in the DEIS, the project's draft environmental impact statement. For unknown reasons, the DEIS uncritically copies its ridership information from a contractor's report that the public is not allowed to read. In contrast, both facts and controversy are laid bare in the document that you are now holding.

Provides a working definition of sprawl and its associated costs, then provides historical discussion, dating back to the early 1920s when zoning acts were initially developed, and to the 1950s when the term sprawl entered the planning literature. It also systematically presents the literature on sprawl in chapters that focus on the following major areas of impact: public/private capital and operating costs; transportation and travel costs; land/natural habitat preservation; quality of life; and social issues. Finally, the report presents annotations of studies, organized in chapters that focus on the same five major impact areas as Section II.

The 17 chapters in this book, which evolved from a conference on measuring the contributions of ITS sponsored by the California Department of Transportation in February 2002, examine the costs and benefits of ITS in an economic and business policy context. Section 1 examines the broad theme of how and what ITS contributes to the economy and how one makes a business case for ITS. Section 2 includes three chapters on ITS applications in mass transit. Section 3 explores ITS applications in the automobile/highway system. Section 4 considers integrative issues including how ITS is perceived and how it can be positioned to improve surface transportation. This volume will be especially useful to researchers and policy makers working in transportation, transportation engineering, and the economic analysis of transportation systems.

The study of complex systems and their related phenomena has become a major research venue in the recent years and it is commonly regarded as an important part of the scientific revolution developing through the 21st century. The science of complexity is concerned with the laws of operation and evolution of systems formed by many locally interacting elements that produce collective order at spatiotemporal scales larger than that of the single constitutive elements. This new thinking, that explores formally the emergence of spontaneous higher order and feedback hierarchies, has been particularly successful in the biological sciences. One particular life-threatening disease in humans, overwhelmingly common in the modern world is cancer. It is regarded as a collection of phenomena involving anomalous cell growth caused by an underlying genetic instability with the potential to spread to other parts of the human body. In the present book, a group of well recognised specialists discuss new ideas about the disease. These authors coming from solid backgrounds in physics, mathematics, medicine, molecular and cell biology, genetics and anthropology have dedicated their time to write an authoritative free-available text published under the open access philosophy that hopefully would be in the front-line struggle against cancer, a complex disease.