Does the following sound familiar? As an active person, you spend a lot of time on the go, which can be frustrating for various reasons. If you travel by car, you are either stuck in traffic jams or you encounter one construction site or road work after the other. Finally, when you finally arrive at your destination, it is a job in itself to find one of the rare and expensive parking spots. At the petrol station, as you fill up the tank, over the years, the meter runs up more money for the same amount of petrol, because the fuel taxes now exceed the price of petrol. Yet, although, there is allegedly no spare money to build new roads or maintain the old ones properly.
If you decide rather to travel by rail, you have to get through a jungle of various tariffs first. Furthermore, many trains are late and the service is often poor.
If you go by plane, either your takeoff is delayed or the captain announces that you are on inbound holding. Quite apart from that, you may wonder why the fares for national flights are higher than those for intercontinental ones.
If you plan to take the public bus during rush hour, you probably feel like a caged animal, while at other times of the day and on weekends, the busses are empty.

As a creature of habit and as is natural human behaviour, you probably accept many things the way they are – but are all these problems and frustrations really necessary? I suspect you already know the answer: no! And you may also have some ideas about how to improve things.
If you are thinking along these lines, you could be a transport economist, whose job it is to deal with these issues and find the right solutions. But as a scientist, one tries to ignore personal emotions and to work in a professional manner.
Suddenly the (little) upsets of daily life become interesting and challenging perspectives of a problem, which usually deals with the following questions:

• Why is transportation in its present state? Why does the situation not improve?
• How would perfect mobility look like - and how do we get there?

You probably have some good answers and your own methods. We too, are self-confident, but we believe we can offer two unique special features, which make our knowledge particularly important to you and others.
The first feature is our tool - the economic approach, and we believe this is very useful for explaining things. The approach is based on the assumption that each and every individual – including you – knows about his or her own preferences with respect to transport and mobility. For example, if you want to go from A to B, we think you are well aware of how comfortable, safe, expensive and fast each means of transportation should be. Accordingly, we try to develop simulations and models of the various services and policies provided by supplies and the government. At the end of the day, we infer your decision by combining what you would like to have with your possible alternatives. Based on your “mobility behaviour”, we are able to make recommendations for the right transport policies, assuming the democratic society wishes to improve things. Our second strength is the intensity and commitment with which we handle complex problems. While most people have better things to do than think about issues like efficient congestion management or the logic of the “Verkehrswegebeschleunigungsgesetz – Transport Acceleration Law” (this is its name indeed…!), we really enjoy doing so (but not really for that law). Potentially, everyone can benefit from the knowledge we obtain. However, the issues can indeed be complex. First of all, everyone has a different notion of perfect mobility. Furthermore, due to the division of labour, society is interdependent and must, therefore, make democratic decisions on the basic questions, i.e. whether the railways should be privately owned and organized or not, how much competition we need and so on.
Secondly, we must also take into consideration that our efforts to achieve mobility compete with other desired goods, services and resources of all kinds. Means of transport require scarce space, produce noise, cause accidents, release noxious emissions and so on. Once again, society has to establish rules about who is allowed to have their way and for what reason. We are able to handle such problems in a rational way.
This small sample of our daily activities should give you an impression and overview of the topics that the institute and its students have been dealing with since 1930. We also conduct a lot of basic research – which not only includes the neighbouring fields of mobility such as environmental economics, but also methodical tools that can be transferred to “non-transport” topics. Our second fundament is applied research for customers. Transport economics, which is a practically- oriented science, is intrinsically well suited for such assignment. If reading this has given you a taste for it and you would like to learn more about what we do, why not visit the “research” category on our website?
Students who have decided to join us will learn about the many issues and considerations described above. For undergraduates, we outline the fundamentals of economic policy, which are subsequently covered in greater depth for postgraduates. The latter can select our two majors "Transport Economics" and "Environmental Economics". Small working groups, individual supervision, and an open and personal atmosphere are scarce resources, but you can expect them from us! We would be delighted to welcome you one day to the corridors of our institute. For further information, we recommend the “studies” category on our website.
Joint, cooperative research makes things both easier and more productive, so the institute has set up a network. The most important support is contributed by the „Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Verkehrswissenschaft e.V.“ (Society for the Promotion of Transport Science). Apart from this, we have numerous contacts with scientific research institutes both at home and abroad, with companies in the transport industry, various associations, political bodies and administrators.
If you have any further questions, suggestions or even complaints (!), please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to meeting you.

Karl-Hans Hartwig and the team