Transportation Systems

Although transportation systems are pervasive to modern society, people tend to take them for granted until something goes wrong. Airlines are known to fail as economic enterprises, public systems encounter deficits, excessive crashes occur on highways, and spacecraft are sometimes lost. Understanding transportation systems in terms of their technological and economic complexity, and their important impacts on society, is a large and fascinating field of study. This article, and the individual articles that it summarizes, seek to capture the excitement of these systems at an introductory level, and encourage further reading and study.