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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.
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?
Hey, let's spot the libertarian with idealogical and impractical ideas!
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
Example: I can take Caltrain from Mountain View to SF for 8.00 one way, so 16.00 round trip.
Those fares are high - That 3 zone trip would cost $7.25 cash fare, or $6.75 if paid with a Clipper Card. But if you were a regular commuter, you'd buy the $179 monthly pass, which equates to around $4 each way. It's over 40 miles by car, you'd be hard pressed to pay all expenses for a car for 10 cents/mile.
The train takes around 45 minutes to make the trip. Driving with no traffic also takes around 45 minutes, but during commute hours, 60 - 90 minutes is more realistic. If you can live and work near the stations on both ends, the train makes much more sense than driving. The financial district in SF is just a 15 - 20 minute walk from Caltrain, so there are a lot of jobs within walking distance of the SF Caltrain station, and SOMA is becoming a bigger and bigger job center.
The problem with Caltrain isn't the expense -- it's quite reasonably priced with a monthly pass, the problem is the schedule... trains run infrequently, non-comute headways are 60 minutes, and many stations are served infrequently (or not at all) by express trains so even during commute hours, some stations have 60 minute headways, so staying at work a few extra minutes could mean getting home 90 minutes late. Plus, infrequent trains mean commute hour trains are often standing room only... and their train cars are not built for standing - there are few handholds and narrow isles can make it hard for passengers to get on/off trains.
But you're absolutely right that the Bay Area suffers from too many competing transit systems, with disparate and often confusing fare structures, they finally have a single regional payment card (Clipper Card), but the even that is clunky and works differently on different systems. BART gets the lions share of funding (both through a dedicated sales tax and grants for capitol projects), but is very expensive for users, not very reliable, and is running at capacity with very little that can be done to improve capacity without spending billions of dollars. Yet they keep expanding the system.
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.