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DOT Warns of Dystopian Future For Transportation
An anonymous reader writes The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued a 300-page PDF outlining the grim future of transportation infrastructure in North America over the next thirty years, and inviting debate on the issue. The report presents a vision of 2045 with LA-style traffic jams in Nebraska, trains too full to pick up any more passengers and airports underwater due to climate change — all in a climate of chronic under-investment, even at levels needed to maintain existing transport infrastructure. Among possible solutions outlined are self-driving cars using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2I) crash-avoidance technologies, such as those currently in development by Google — and in fact transportation secretary Anthony Foxx was joined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the launch of DOT's "Beyond Traffic" initiative.
Use the money you earn through infrastructure and transportation taxes to actually pay for maintaining the infrastructure.
Simple solutions to complex problems are always simple, but never solutions.
The current rate of sea water rise is around 0.12 inches per year since 1992 according to the most alarming estimates found to date (and those were adjusted because previous measurements we showing only 0.04 inches per year, which of course was not nearly scary enough to it's back to the data "correction" engine!)
Let's say the politically revised figures are correct. That means in 30 years (2045 being only 30 years away now) sea level rise will have been 3.6 *inches*.
Which airport is that going to put "underwater"? Please explain.
You warming alarmists are worse than the anti-vaccers in terms of just chucking reality out the window, even when you get to make up your own rules!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it's not FUD
American infrastructure is deteriorating: that's not controversial nor inaccurate
the FUD would be in denying that fact. like the kind of FUD some uninformed/ irresponsible people and congresscritters use to deny the funding we need to keep our highways, tracks, and airstrips from crumbling
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In 1894, it was realized by 1945 the streets of London would be under NINE FEET of horse manure, and no solution was in sight. There was the very first international urban planning convention four years later in NYC, that had to give up as unsolvable problem of how and where to transport and put all that horse shit!
That way we live like maggots now in the big cities, burrowing through equine feces packed a hundred feet deep....oh wait, something changed everything.
Finding it "more" won't help unless the funds are directed usefully. Roads, not bike paths. Asphalt and structures, not "prevailing wage" giveaways to union bosses. Pavement, not pensions. Honest bidding, not corrupt deals for cronies. Projects that benefit people, not animals or trees or "the Earth".
A lot more people would support more infrastructure spending if they thought they'd actually get their moneys' worth of useful infrastructure built. Of course, if the money were spent responsibly, we wouldn't need nearly as much "more" infrastructure spending. Right now, the only recourse we have to stop the funds from being skimmed and diverted is to refuse to make the funding available at all.
$800 Billion in "shovel ready jobs" to fix national infrastructure that at the time required an estimated $2 trillion to fix. Here it is 6 years later, that money spent, now the infrastructure needs $3 trillion to fix.
Yea, lets give them more money to not spend where they promise it. First get rid of the corrupt administration and then we might be able to talk when the next one gets into power (but I doubt that one will be any better).
Infrastructure for Bikes costs a lot less to construct than infrastructure for cars.
Instead of designing infrastructure that assumes cars — design for bicycles — then there is no more oil crisis, people live longer and happier.
I commuted in a car every day for over 7 years — and going 113km x 2 = 226km day — and three hours a day wasted sitting stuck in traffic.
Sold the car, bought a bike and moved in to town — ten years later — still one of the best decisions of ever made.
A 10 year cyclist in from Toronto.
Bicycles are the key to a sustainable future.
Ok, so here's part of the problem:
In Denver, CO the elevated portion of I-70 is falling down. Literally. If you ever looked at the underneath of the elevated portion of I-70, you would NEVER drive on it again. We're talking about basketball sized chunks of concrete falling out, exposed rebar, nightmare stuff. So let's fix it.
You can put a $50,000,000 band-aid on it to keep it from falling down for maybe 5 years, or you can pay $500,000,000 to fix it right. But that's for Today's traffic. To do it properly, you need to model traffic patterns out years in advance. To increase capacity and fix it properly, we easily get into $2,000,000,000.
Remember, C-470 was called "The Highway Colorado Doesn't Need" when it was first built, and now it has traffic jams on it on a daily basis (Seriously, I remember when County Line was a dirt road and Highlands Ranch was actually a Ranch).
*BUT* that's not the only problem. When you build roads and expand them, you need Right-of-Way. You have to buy people's houses to buy that ROW. People sometimes don't want to sell their houses and complain. One job we were expanding a backwater state highway (2 lane road) that was seeing a large increase in traffic into a 4 lane divided highway. Problem was, a neighborhood developed around the road. People complained, and sued the DOT, because they knew their 70-year-old houses existed before the road. The DOT pulled photos from the archives, engineers ($$$) went to court to show the houses were not only built after the road was there and paved, but that was why the houses were build (a road was there). That's the kind of crap that happens EVERY time you need to do a major build or upgrade.
Now on to the Odometer problem:
People drive in multiple states all the time. And your little commuter car isn't doing the major wear-and-tear on the roads anyway (Unless you drive a hummer, or another large truck that qualifies for the Heavy Equipment Tax by weighing more than a tank), that's commercial trucks, many of which are overloaded for road conditions (Truckers routinely ignore signs for height / weight restrictions).
Also, some states pull stupid crap and don't QA/QC their asphalt mix before putting it into production (MODOT, I'm looking at you), causing huge problems with roads that crumble too early.
The weather problem:
Some states in the U.S. have a horrible freeze-thaw cycle that demolishes roads. Water is bad for fiber (Internet Superhighway). Water is bad for concrete (Regular Superhighway). Water is bad for fire (Burning Superhighway). Water is good for fish (Not a Superhighway).
Look at the problems a state like Nebraska faces: 100 degree plus summers, -10 degree winters.
Then you go into the East Coast nightmare. The interstate highway system was formed in 1956 (June 29th, 1956). No biggie right? Well, a lot of these are now eligible for the National Register of Historic Places (or getting their quickly).
Don't even get me started on wetlands (irrigation ditches, you know, the places used to collect and store water. Yeah, they formed their own little ecosystems in 40 years and are now considered wetlands, gotta work around that).
My $0.03 /We need another president like Eisenhower that will force people to invest in infrastructure //And NOT use the DOT to Force policies on states ///Federal Highway Funds are not provided to states that don't follow DUI laws, FYI.