Review of Transportation Engineering FE2+: Introduction of Transportation to Civil Engineering Students by Ruey Long Cheu

This book’s stated primary audience is “instructors and students of the first Transportation Engineering course.” That said, Transportation Engineering FE2+ contains a wealth of information pertaining to the planning, design, and operation of transportation infrastructure and also may serve as a useful reference for the practicing transportation professional and a study resource for engineers preparing to take the Professional Engineer Exam. The book is organized into 31 chapters averaging about 10 pages each. This fact illustrates the extensive breadth of topics covered, which should provide more than enough material for an instructor to select for inclusion in the typical introductory transportation engineering course as part of an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum. Each chapter begins with an objective and desired learning outcome. The first chapter explains the background and motivation for development of the book, provides an overview of its contents and potential uses, and describes its relationship to important items outside the course, such as the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam and ABET accreditation criteria. This chapter notes that every transportation engineering topic included in the FE exam specifications, other than pavement design, is addressed in the book.

The greatest strength of the book—from a subject matter perspective—is in areas of traditional traffic engineering; topics in this branch of transportation comprise about half of the book’s content. The breadth and depth of coverage is more than enough for the traffic portion of a first course in transportation engineering. The basics of traffic flow modeling and queuing theory are well covered. Basic highway capacity and level-of-service concepts, followed by an explanation of the basic freeway segment analysis method and calculations, are included. It can be argued that basic freeway segment capacity analysis is among the simplest procedures from the Highway Capacity Manual to perform by hand, and therefore is likely a common component of the traffic portion of the first course. The key concepts of traffic signal systems are addressed in similar detail. For other major subsets of transportation, such as roadway geometric design and transportation planning, a solid high-level overview of concepts and key calculations is provided, although the extent of depth is not the same as with traffic engineering. For example, the disproportionate increase in pedestrian fatalities (when compared with other modes of travel) during the last decade or so has led to a sharpened focus on pedestrian safety countermeasures and design treatments. However, little discussion on modern pedestrian facility design (including ensuring that accessibility for mobility-impaired pedestrians is provided) takes place.

Another strength of the book is the comprehensive view of transportation systems presented. In addition to covering the traffic engineering and roadway geometric design topics typically included in the first course, chapters on a range of other topics include parking, public transportation, intelligent transportation systems, air transportation, and rail transportation. Discussions of connected automated vehicles, transportation equity, micromobility, and mobility on demand—rare in earlier textbooks—are included in more than adequate detail for a junior-level introductory course. Yet, notable exceptions exist. The chapter on traffic safety does not mention the Highway Safety Manual or modern methods of safety analysis such as predictive approaches and the empirical Bayes method. However, it can easily be argued that these topics might not be presented to students until follow-up courses beyond the first course. The range of topics covered is indeed very broad, such that any reader could obtain a thorough high-level overview of almost any mode of transportation from freight to air travel.

Overall, Transportation Engineering FE2+ is very current, to the point where the Vision Zero concept is presented in the chapter on traffic safety, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) is discussed in the first chapter. Regarding resources for instructors and students, the book contains many examples within the text, as well as numerous homework problems of both work-through and multiple-choice type. For instructors who prefer to touch on a relatively large number of topics in the first course, this book is a viable option. However, for instructors who choose to concentrate on a fairly small number of topics and achieve substantial depth within them, the book may not fully meet those needs. This book should serve almost any instructor of the first course well and create a solid foundation for deeper dives on specific topics in subsequent coursework. Finally, this book can also serve as a handy reference on the bookshelf of the transportation engineer.