Transportation Strategy Development Under Economic Uncertainty

The interests of the researchers here were to understand various modes for developing long term – that is strategic – plans with particular concern for the economic uncertainties one invariably faces in such a planning environment. Often resources cannot be confidently projected many years into the future and yet when one talks about transportation systems one is talking about large scale infrastructure that is very long lived. So how does one “do strategy”? There are two schools of thought on the general question of how strategies are developed. One mode of thought championed by Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School is deliberative strategy where one maps out a long-term strategic direction for, in our case, the transportation network and then makes individual decisions within the framework of that strategy statement. The other major school of thought, championed by Professor Henry Mintzburg at McGill University, is called emergent strategy. In essence, that approach argues that in many cases we “discover” our strategy after the fact--by looking at decisions we actually made and backtracking to a statement of “what our strategy must have been.” Of course, in practice, strategy development in most fields is a hybrid of these two approaches and this is certainly true in the transportation area. The author studied this phenomenon of deliberative and emergent strategy using the transportation highway network in Portugal as his case study.

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• Record URL:
  • https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/26593
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
• Corporate Authors:

  New England University Transportation Center

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 40-279
  Cambridge, MA  United States  01239

  Research and Innovative Technology Administration

  University Transportation Centers Program
  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Sussman, Joseph
• Publication Date: 2013

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 3p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Economic factors; Strategic planning; Transportation planning
• Geographic Terms: Portugal
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01501351
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: MITR22-8
• Files: UTC, NTL, TRIS, RITA, ATRI, USDOT
• Created Date: Dec 16 2013 2:07PM