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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.
They want more funding. As do most governmental departments that release these gloom and doom scenarios.
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"
Hopefully people will stop traveling so much so we won't need as much transportation infrastructure in 30 years. It has already dramatically decreased because of teleconferencing. Conventions have taken a huge hit because of this.
Hopefully products will stop traveling so much so we won't need as much transportation infrastructure in 30 years. We already have rudimentary 3D printing. In 30 years I hope we can print everything we need where its needed instead of wasting time, money, fuel, packaging and other resources moving stuff around. Then when you're done with that item you throw it in the de-constructor which recycles the parts. Need more raw materials? Shovel in a few scoops of dirt. Sure, occasionally you'll need to add some essential elements you might have but think of all those local landfills to be mined!
No, in 2045 we should not need much of DOT. The world will change.
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.
"The report presents a vision of 2045 with LA-style traffic jams in Nebraska... Among possible solutions outlined are self-driving cars..."
what, so you can sleep through the traffic jams?
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
See pg.116-125 of the report, it's not as freakishly alarmist as the summary indicates (and the pages are big font and full of pictures). It points out that Louis Armstrong airport in New Orleans is almost two feet below sea level, focuses on the increasing frequency of storms and their hazards to low-lying transportation hubs (costs of storms increasing over time and higher for major ports in high risk areas), and has graphs of historic sea levels with sources cited...there's a few hundred miles of track that will be underwater, which is an entirely reasonable statement given where they build some of them, but it doesn't really say that about airports at all.
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.
30 years and airports will be underwater? I'm willing to believe man has an effect on the climate, but alarmist crap like this doesn't help your cause. Did John Kerry start working for the dot?
RFA. The report clearly is talking about flooding due to more severe weather. Which is a claimed product of global warming. With the case in point being both JDK and Newark Liberty having closed as a result of - wait for it - flooding during Sandy.
By 2045 we'll be down the other side of the slope, most citizens of the USA and elsewhere will not be able to afford to own and operate a vehicle and a good chunk of the expected population growth will have died off due to measles and other preventable diseases. Boom, problem solved. You're welcome.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
'The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued a 300-page PDF outlining the grim future of transportation infrastructure in America over the next thirty years'
There, I've fixed that. Because DOT has no idea what transportation here in Canada will be like over the next 30 years!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
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! --
Similarly, Forbes relies on the Heartland Institute's James Taylor (also not a scientist) to report on climate change. How bad is the Forbes reporting? Well, in an August 2012 interview, I correctly stated that in a warming world, hurricane intensity can increase and these increases are being observed. Also, rainfall, storm surge, and storm size can be affected.
In response, Mr. Taylor attacked me and discussed the frequency of landfalling U.S. hurricanes, as if the two were the same. Obviously, he either misunderstood my comments or does not have the knowledge to interpret them. When I asked for the right to rebut Mr. Taylor, what did I hear? Crickets. Did Forbes feel even a bit embarrassed when just over a month later, Superstorm Sandy hit the U.S. coast, causing approximately $65 billion in damage? Do they feel embarrassed now that the newly released IPCC report supports me, not their non-scientist Mr. Taylor? Perhaps we will never know. - http://www.theguardian.com/env...
What's actually going to happen is automated roads. It's inevitable. You enter the road and your autopilot takes over, running all traffic without stop and go, bumper to bumper, at the highest speed practical for the response characterics and safety margins of the vehicles. Like a train. No autopilot, no drive on road (you can take the back roads). This will increase throughput under load by a multiple.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Show me an airport that doesn't close during hurricanes then you can talk.
Not just closed "during" the hurricane. >20K flights were cancelled over 6 days. Not just because of the hurricane proper but because of major damage from severe storm sruge flooding. I can show you lots of airports that don't get storm surge flooding.
The DOT's assertion is that these events will become more likely. I don't know the validity of the assertion, but that's the assertion.
Can we talk now?
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/8395...
thanks for your pointless sophistry
the simple fact is we do not fund american infrastructure enough, and this hurts our economy in relation to places that do
it's not complicated nor difficult to understand
here, educate yourself:
http://www.economist.com/news/...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fa...
http://www.infrastructurerepor...
after you have some actual understanding of a topic, only then should you speak on the topic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The problem is the incredible amount of semi-trailer truck traffic. It's bumper-to-bumper. One gets behind one semi- passing another on a two lane highway east or west bound with the passing truck doing ~0.1 MPH faster than the passed truck at 65 MPH. It can take 10 minutes to accomplish this and traffic backs up behind this blockage. And passing through Omaha is an LA scenario.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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.
Congress has the funding to "keep our highways, tracks, and airstrips from crumbling". But instead of spending it on infrastructure, they are spending it on bailouts, stimulus packages, entitlements, and other waste.
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.
We are going to overrun this planets capacity to sustain us. What then?
War. Sad but true. And it won't be the first time.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
we can very easily maintain our infrastructure, but we choose not to
it means we're stupider than our fathers and grandfathers, and don't deserve what they built for us
well, some of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we won't need roads.
Thats not the projected rate.
The IPCC based on atmospheric and ocean science gives its best guess as 13 inches over the next 30 years assuming climate change isn't gotten under control. Worst case estimate goes as high as 6 foot by 2100, although thats probably unlikely and based on catastrophic run-away.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
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.