David Boyce and Huw Williams are both esteemed transportation scholars, each with their distinct areas of expertise. With their long and distinguished careers closely intertwined with the development of travel forecasting as an intellectual discipline, it is only fitting that they have chosen to write a book about its past, present and future.

I know Professor Boyce well. My master’s advisor, Professor Der-Horng Lee at the National University of Singapore, studied under Boyce while pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Lee’s own master’s advisor, Huey-Kuo Chen from Taiwan’s Central University, was also one of Boyce’s doctoral students during his tenure at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This means I am either Boyce’s academic grandchild, or great grandchild, depending on how you count. Thanks to Lee I was well aware of this academic lineage even before I came to the U.S. in the early 2000s. When I joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 2006, Boyce was serving his alma mater by teaching transportation system courses as an adjunct professor. It took me a while to process the surreal news that I would now be a colleague of my academic forebear.

During my first meeting with Boyce in Evanston, IL, I learned about his joint book project with Williams, which had already been in progress for several years. The book was an ambitious and intriguing endeavor aimed at reflecting on the achievements, missteps, and challenges in our field. It was finally published in 2015, nearly 12 years after they began the project. Shortly afterward, I was asked to oversee the translation of the book into Chinese, a project that would take another five years. Through this process, I had to read the book cover to cover — and between the lines — several times, ensuring I understood every word and phrase. It was a time-consuming and occasionally frustrating task, to be sure, but a rewarding learning experience nonetheless. Ultimately, it is this rare opportunity that inspired me to share in this essay what I learned from the book and the insights it brought to light.

You may find a preprint of the paper at ssrn. Also check the following podcast automatically generated by Notebook LM  based on a PDF of the paper I fed to it.