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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.
Does the report suggest any ways to eliminate journeys? I expect not. That's the problem - they assume that journeys are always necessary, and increasingly so. How about putting in place policies that incentivise people to live near their workplaces, don't have to drive to go to a shopping mall, reduce the need for long-distance business travel, etc. Not only would that improve "traffic", but actually make people's lives easier and better as a bonus. Worth a thought, eh?
1) Raise the Gas Tax $.25 / gal. On a 20 gal fill-up that's $5.
2) Get rid of the DOT as it exists now. It should be a coordinating organization and encourage investment, not making investments.
3) Return 90% of Gax Taxes collected to the States where they were collected for transportation infrastructure projects, ending the bait and switch tactics used to re-allocate funds based on unfunded mandates. If California wants to invest billions in High Speed Rail, here's the money. This would also stop using fuel taxes for funding other federal projects.
4) Privatize Amtrak, get rid of interstate rail services where it's not profitable.
5) Re-establish the rules whereby railroads were required to have passenger service. This was part of the deal in return for vast land grants and rights of way that all the major railroads benefit from today.
6) Stop federal subsidies for airports, this includes smaller run airports.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
There is actually a serious problem here because the gas tax--by far one of the largest of these--is supposed to be a usage fee, and MPG is increasing. Raising the gas tax isn't a great solution, because people with low MPG are often those who can afford it least, and because raising taxes are always a political firestorm (imagine how much industry would push back too). Electric cars are a whole new issue entirely--don't know how widespread they'll be long term though.
No, transportation infrastructure needs to be fed from somewhere else. One of the current solutions is to stick a GPS tracker in every car, which is admirable on the basis of fair payment for public road usage, but utterly catastrophic in every other way. I think we just need to pay for transport infrastructure from a general fund instead.
Self driving cars are not a solution to the problem, and can't be the solution to the problem. If passenger trains are too full to carry people, then mass transit needs to be expanded. You know, the system we should have been investing in for half a century and ignored because it hurt someone's net worth.
Virtually zero US cities have a functional mass transit system. The most populated areas in the west are prime examples, and lets take San Francisco Bay as our example (since I live here and have first hand knowledge and experience). VTA handles "some" of the South Bay, but limited to North San Jose and Mountain View. Caltrain handles a single strip running North to south from North San Jose to South (not the city) San Francisco. Bart handles SF -> Oakland, and a straight line down to Fremont. These systems don't connect, use different payment systems, have different rates, and are _MORE_ expensive than driving. Example: I can take Caltrain from Mountain View to SF for 8.00 one way, so 16.00 round trip. Then I have to find another commute service to get from Caltrain to my destination, which is more money and time. Taking our "cheap" (said with a hearty chuckle) mass transit is extremely expensive and time consuming.
Lets not bullshit anyone, this is not our only problem. Industrial pollution is a much bigger problem. Generating electricity is a dirty task and a bigger problem. Plastic is a problem, and cheap "disposable" products are a problem. None of those get addressed by making "self driving cars" and some problems such as vehicle exhaust get worse.
Yet instead of addressing the problems with mass transit, California is dumping many billions into a train from Fresno to Sacramento. Go figure..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That sounds like typical government waste. Force everybody to pay another $1,000 per vehicle so that the government can tax everybody per vehicle mile (which will probably end up being less than the cost of the GPS unit.
$1,000 per vehicle is a gross exaggeration. GPS receivers have been in cell phones for years. The cost of the receiver doesn't add $1,000 to the phone.
I won't even get into the privacy issues.
Neither will I, except to say that I agree the privacy issues make the idea a non-starter.
Isn't there already something in every single car that records the number of miles driven?
You mean the odometer. It shows the number of miles drivern, but not where you drove them.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
LA-style traffic jams in Nebraska's hard to swallow, though. What crowd of people would be crazy enough to be living in Nebraska to cause them?
Maybe the crowds that leave the places with the underwater airports?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No, seriously, I don't know what it's like in the empty states but in the growing GDP powerhouses that are the tech cities, people are just not using cars at all.
They might rent a car once in a while, but most of them use transit, bike, walk, take Bolt, take the High Speed train (if it exists), and maybe fly to a place that's far away.
People are already adapting. You're confused because the deadenders aren't adapting.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Isn't there already something in every single car that records the number of miles driven?
It doesn't track road miles (and people will claim they don't drive on roads, and demand exceptions!), or vehicle weight (see the ratio of road wear per vehicle weight and cringe).
Sorry, but the odometer won't be enough.
The mileage tax can have a weight multiplier to account for weight. Make the mileage tax a national tax, and it won't matter what state people drive in.
For those relative few that do significant driving off public roads, they can use a GPS tracker.
Obviously, I haven't read a 300 page PDF before posting.
But self driving cars don't fundamentally change the traffic problem. And what is needed _today_ in dense urban areas is a fundamental change.
One of the easiest ways to think about this is the impact that cars _necessarily_ have on density. Christopher Alexander explained this simply by thinking about how many square meters of surface different transportation systems take up per person.
Walking is relatively efficient - a person walking only needs perhaps 1 square meter to walk as fast as they like; if they are careful and are going slower, multiple walkers need even less space.
Now consider the personal car. Standing completely still, an automobile needs several meters of ground space. If it is moving in a stream of other vehicles, there must be buffers in front and behind it. It is not unreasonble to think of the ground footprint needed for a moving car as 3 meters of width and 4 meters of length, plus multiples of 4 meters ahead and behind, as speed increases.
So a car - even standing still - takes an order of magnitude more surface space than a human who is walking.
This is the fundamental problem with the individual vehicle. For each person you add, you need 10x that many meters of available surface area to the sub-segments of your road network that that person's automobile will be using.
I very much love the automobile and the driving experience. I do my own vehicle maintenance and i have a dedicated trackday car for when I can get away for a weekend of lapping. I live on a farmstead and there are 6 road legal vehicles parked on my property.
However, cars completely destroy urban density, and it doesn't matter how clean you make them, how self-driving you make them, and, how much safety buffer space you strip away. They simply use space too inefficiently for there to be any meaningful density.
Dense urban areas should have pervasive rail coverage, and that rail coverage should largely be in ugly spaces - like underground, or along the perimeter of industrial districts. On average, someone should be able to get to a subway station after a couple blocks of walking.
In urban areas, the roads as we have them today should largely be repurposed for use by busses for trunk routes that are somehow not well served by rail, and for point to point trips in cabs/ubers/lyfts. Private, single vehicle use of the roadways should be exceptionally expensive, and thus, a rarity undertaken only when financially justifiable by the end user. Electric mini-trucks (as seen in Asia) should be responsible for delivery of larger-than-human cargoes, both personal and business related.
At some point, intermodal containers that are human-scale make sense for moving goods within cities, e.g. imagine a standardized container that was about 1 meter cube; this could be loaded into a special cargo car on most current subway lines, and loading/unloading the containers from that car could be done rapidly and automatically... a half meter intermodal cube could be reasonably carried by a person, through door ways, up stairs, etc, and 8 of them could stack next to or on top of the 1 meter cube...
Many new yorkers already live without cars and take deliveries; bringing efficiencies of scale and uniformity to the delivery system would be a good idea. Democratizing it so that, for instance, at the airport you put your luggage into intermodal cubes (or, depending on where you travelled from, your luggage actually IS intermodal cubes...) and ship them off to your neighborhood, and this is largely done automatically, means that you are not carrying heavy things across a 45 minute subway ride, and you do not feel the need to take a cab ride, and yet you and your things still get to the destination at the same time..
Once cabs and cars are not gridlocking every inch of pavement, some roads should get turned into pedestrian areas; outdoor marketplaces, greenspaces, etc.
For anyone that hasn't had the pleasure of doing so, I really recommend spending some tourist time in the city of Munich. They have an exceptional rail system. You may not have any idea how nice urban life can be.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Well, as a cyclist myself I don't see bikes as a the solution. Part of the solution, sure. With substantial investment, I can certainly see bikes meeting the needs of a lot more people than most people think, but that's still a long way from meeting most peoples' needs, much less everyone's.
What I suspect is that we'll need many different modes of transport working together. It's a matter of diminishing marginal returns. At some point adding a dollar to a different mode of transport gets you a bigger bang for the buck than spending it on more auto infrastructure. The problem is that since most people drive still, they don't see the benefits of spending money on something they aren't going to use. For example in my city public transit carries almost 1.3 million commuters every work day, at a cost to the state and local municipalities of $900 milllion. That's a lot of money spent per rider per year, but it's still cheaper than trying to squeeze 13% more auto traffic onto roads that have horrific traffic already.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I moved out of the insanity completely 15 years ago.
I live in a small town. Canada is empty. I could walk five minutes to work, but I'm lazy, so I don't. There's no traffic here, I have 100mbps symmetric fiber internet, and my house (that I own) cost me 1/10th of similar housing in the GTA. I'm a 8 minute no traffic drive to an airport that can have me in YYZ in 3 hours gate to gate direct.
This magic internet thing is awesome!
North America is empty; the insanity that is large cities and million dollar tiny houres is just that.
People should wake up and realize _that_. ..best decision I ever made.
..don't panic
More important than public schools?
Yes. Many times more important than public schools.
Without modern education systems, but with roads: the world might (worst reasonable case) devolve into a 1800's style agrarian/industrial economy where farm-folk trade with the industrial city-folk. Education would happen because books would be traded, and parents would teach their children as they had for millenia. It might not be quantum physics, but people would prosper and ideas would be exchanged.
Without roads (and bridges and tunnels), but with modern education systems: No one can reach schools unless a school is right nearby or they can chop through the woods, ford rivers, cross mountain ranges. Trading of goods and food would not happen except on small-scales. Most families would be like this one: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Road- and railway transport may become less important in the future, I think, at least in two areas, I imagine:
1. Commuting - what the Americans call tele-commuting could become much more widespread; perhaps in a hybrid form, where people go to work in an office facility shared with several other companies, and within walking or cycling distance from their homes.
2. Micromanufacturing, like eg. 3D printing, may replace manufacturing in large factories. If this trend continues, it is possible that all or most raw materials could be sourced locally as well, so that the only things that would need to be transported are the specifications for production.
This only leaves travel (as in going on holidays), and we may find better and easier ways of doing that, which don't need roads or the burning of large amounts of fuel. Airships, anyone? Not the fastest mode of transport, but it could be a lot faster than it is, if we worked on it. I'm only speculating, of course, but I don't think it needs to be all bad.