This book is aimed at undergraduate civil engineering students, though the material may provide a useful review for practitioners and graduate students in transportation. Typically, this would be for an "Introduction to Transportation" course, which might be taken by most students in their sophomore or junior year. Often this is the first engineering course students take, which requires a switch in thinking from simply solving given problems to formulating the problem mathematically before solving it, i.e. from straight-forward calculation often found in undergraduate Calculus to vaguer word problems more reflective of the real world.

Transportation Economics is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate civil engineering, planning, business, and economics students, though the material may provide a useful review for practitioners. While incorporating theory, there is a very applied bent to the course, as all the ideas covered are intended to help inform the real decisions that are made (or should be made) in practice.

This book uses two core ideas:

1. Individuals (firms, agencies, agents, actors) behave according to incentives provided by their environment.

2. The environment is shaped by the collective behavior of individuals.

The material of each page can be covered in a ninety-minute lecture.