This book deals with the topic of mass transit in high-traffic-density urban areas, taking as its aim to define and describe a rubber-tired surface transport system (called the Unilinea system) that would be of the greatest advantage and use not just to those who habitually take the city bus, but to the whole urban community.

Over the past few years scientific conferences and bulletins for the specialist have been reporting on the results of experiments carried out in the field of urban transport, on methodological approaches to solving its problems, and on design proposals for innovatory systems that in fact solve these ' problems, but to date these have been for the specialist in the field only. Now, in this book, the reader will find a systematic, more easily read, treatment of the topic, one that will surely find greater dissemination where these problems are concretely dealt with, and not least in the public transport company officies themselves.

In order to best point up the unitary manner with which the problem was analysed, the individual chapters dealing with the system's three fundamental elements he vehicle, the lines and the infrastructures) are preceded by a chapter assessing scientific and technological trends in society and their rates of development, and assessing the problems existing in the most-congested areas. Dealt with as well is' how the informing principle on which the Unilinea system is based will hold up as these trends are pursued to their logical conclusions; the profitability constraints holding good for all the system elements are considered at length too.

The book's concluding section, dealing with an application of the Unilinea system to the Rome urban area, checks out and confirms the intuitions, the analyses and the design assumptions that were made or brought out in the earlier part of the work.