Editorial

Abstract

After the much too premature loss, earlier this year, of our greatly loved and admired colleague and co-editor of this journal, Prof. Ryuichi Kitamura, it was clear for the two of us that we would help to realize this tribute chosen by the editors—chosen to celebrate and honor his life and contribution to his field of study, but also and in particular his work for this journal. Ryuichi had been editor of Transportation since 1990, after earlier guestediting a special issue on ‘‘Activity-based Travel Analysis: a Retrospective Evaluation and Some Recent Contributions’’ with the late Eric Pas and Frank Koppelman. Since then he assisted and supported a large number of authors in publishing their papers to the standards of the journal, and with this helped to define the style of Transportation and to build its reputation. While his some 280 publications have appeared in many journals, it could be said that Transportation was his ‘‘home journal’’. It is therefore entirely fitting that this special issue will be devoted to reprising work from Ryuichi’s own hand—excellent research that originally appeared in reports or in conference proceedings, and thus may not have achieved the visibility it deserves. Because of our criteria that the work (1) should not have been published in the readily accessible peer-reviewed literature and (2) should not have been largely superseded by later developments, these selections do not pretend to constitute a fully representative cross-section of Ryuichi’s contributions. Nevertheless, they do offer a broad view of the variety of topics he addressed and the methodological approaches he brought to his research. They were chosen in part because we believe them still to be of current interest. Specifically, the six papers we selected address most of the key themes which engaged Ryuichi’s scientific curiosity and scholarship: the need for a dynamic, activity-based approach to analyzing travel behavior, the importance of values/attitudes, humans’ need to travel for its own sake (including seeing the automobile as an end in itself, as well as a