What is Transport Science?

Engineering Roots

In Europe, transport research has strong roots in engineering. This is largely because transport systems depend on physical infrastructure such as roads, railways, bridges and tunnels, which are typically designed by civil engineers. As a result, transport research institutions are often housed within civil engineering faculties.

Another key area is vehicle design, which falls under mechanical engineering. In addition, transport systems rely on energy, control and communication technologies, requiring expertise in electrical engineering and computer science. With the growing importance of electric, connected and autonomous vehicles, the role of information technology in transport continues to expand.

In some regions, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, these disciplines are combined into a hybrid field known as transport engineering. This is the case in Hungary, where the Hungarian Academy of Sciences recognises transport engineering as a distinct field. Some HI institutions such as the Technical University of Budapest (BME), my undergraduate alma mater, have a dedicaded department or faculty of transport engineering. Similar academic arrangements were common in other Eastern European countries during the communist era.

Transport engineers are expected to understand the fundamentals of mechanical, civil and electrical engineering, as well as how these fields interact within transport systems. However, from a research perspective, this level of integration is not reflected in most academic journals or conferences. In my view, this calls into question the legitimacy of transport engineering as a standalone discipline. I am also not aware of countries with a strong tradition in transport engineering performing better in transport science. That said, this gap could also be seen as a space of untapped potential.

Urban and Spatial Planning

The relationship between transport and urban planning has grown considerably in recent decades, particularly in Europe. This shift is driven by the increasing recognition that the quality of public space is a key factor in urban liveability, and that motorised transport can consume land to an extent that makes it a scarce and contested resource.

The mutual dependence between urban planning and transport policy has become a growing topic of interest among transport professionals in Central and Eastern Europe as well. Since the mid-2000s, I have noticed more and more practitioners adopting terms such as urban fabric, spatial structure and streetscape, gradually incorporating the language of urban planning. In my view, this is a welcome development. Today’s urban transport discussions are far more human-centred than the car-focused approaches that dominated the mid-20th century (or in Eastern Europe, the late 20th century).

However, it is worth noting that the methods used in urban planning are largely descriptive. Policy recommendations are often based on aesthetic or ergonomic considerations, rather than on the rigorous evaluation of trade-offs. What is frequently missing is the capacity for quantitative analysis. This is where urban economics becomes important, and it will play a key role in my own thinking.

Spatial planning can be seen as a broader counterpart to urban studies, dealing with larger geographic areas and seeking to inform planning interventions. It is closely linked to regional science and geography, and it is currently undergoing rapid development due to the increasing availability of large-scale spatial data.

The visualisation, descriptive analysis and statistical modelling of spatial data are attracting growing attention in the literature. Since the transport sector produces some of the most useful and engaging datasets, geographers with expertise in geocomputation often make significant contributions to transport research. Journals such as The Journal of Transport Geography, along with general-interest science publications, provide a platform for a dynamic research community that often has at least some grounding in geography.

Behavioural Science and Psychology

Behavioural aspects are central to transport research because drivers, passengers and policy-makers are all human. Understanding the motivations behind human decisions is essential for accurately modelling the transport system. Even the most basic traffic models incorporate aggregate behavioural mechanisms to represent choices of mode and route within large networks.

As in many other areas, the growing availability of data has been a major driver of the rise in behavioural research within transport. Notably, the work of Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden in discrete choice modelling has laid a strong foundation for quantitative approaches in this field. Researchers in choice modelling now form a well-established community, supported by dedicated journals, scientific associations, conferences, textbooks and handbooks.

Economics

In my view, economics is the essential cornerstone that creates a quantifiable interface between the social and engineering perspectives discussed in the previous disciplines. Transport economics has its roots in spatial and urban economics, an applied branch of microeconomics that examines the spatial distribution of economic activity within and between cities. Transport costs, or the impedance to movement between different locations, play a key role in determining the location choices of firms and households, and therefore influence the overall form of urban areas.

Economics provides a common framework for linking the costs of infrastructure and vehicle use with the benefits people gain from moving through geographical space. For this reason, I have dedicated a separate page to a more detailed discussion of transport economics.

Cross-cutting Methodological Disciplines

The state of the art in the disciplines reviewed above relies heavily on advanced methodologies, particularly in modelling and quantitative analysis. Mathematical, model-based representations of reality are common across transport research. Statistics and data science have also become essential tools for transport scientists today.

Beyond forecasting the outcomes of policy interventions, causal statistical methods can help identify cause-and-effect relationships in data. These methods allow researchers to isolate the impacts of past policies from noise and confounding factors. Optimisation is another frequent empirical task in transport research. This includes both analytical optimisation methods used in mathematical derivations and numerical approaches that can handle thousands of decision variables simultaneously.

Quantitative transport research is typically carried out using open-source or commercial coding environments such as Python, R, Matlab and other specialised software.

Impactful research methods in transport are not exclusively quantitative. Qualitative research also demands rigorous methodological thinking. For this reason, I believe that the social sciences and humanities will play an increasingly important role in transport research in the years ahead.