The Future of Transportation

Will the auto and airplane reign supreme?

 

By Alex Marshall

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the political scientist Francis Fukiyama caused a sensation with an essay called “The End of History?” It postulated that, with the relative collapse of Communism, the struggle among rival political systems had ended with a permanent victory for liberal, democratic capitalism. All that was left to do was to refine it.

Is something similar happening with the way we get around? Have we reached “the End of History” with transportation? Will the current system of automobile and airplane travel reign supreme’for now and for centuries hence? Or will something new come along to remake our world, as it has in the past?

The context of such a question is this: Since about 1800, revolutionary changes in our transportation systems have created new types of cities, neighborhoods, and housing, while leaving old ones to wither away, or become antiques.

If history is any indication, we are due for another revolution soon. The car and the highway, and the airplane and airport, have been dominant for almost a century. By comparison, canals lasted about 50 years, streetcars about the same, and railroads about a century as dominant modes of travel.

Yet, some people say that the automobile and the highway are so imbedded in our landscape and lifestyles that nothing will ever challenge their dominance. In effect, they say we have reached the end of the historical road.

“It’s hard to imagine a fundamental change because the automobile system is so flexible,” says urban historian Robert Fishman, author of the 1989 history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, and a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “All I can imagine is a better balance with a revival of the train and transit connections that have been so shamefully neglected.”

But, if the past is any guide, we won’t see a new revolution until it is upon us. People, maybe even particularly experts, have difficulty envisioning a new transportation context from within the current one. Fishman, although himself skeptical of any coming big change, recalls the scholar who around 1900 predicted that the automobile would never go far because it couldn’t match the utility of the bicycle.

Hovering over this discussion is a single word: sprawl. Our low-density, car-clogged environment is the product of our transportation system. Highways and airports produce low-density sprawl. Old transportation revolutions, such as streetcars and subways, made cities denser because housing and businesses flocked to these transportation points. If we do have another transportation revolution ‘ the personal jet pack, high speed trains, the humble bicycle ‘ it could make sprawl even worse. Or, it could reconstitute our cities around new transportation hubs.

The Past As Prologue
Six words summarize transportation over the last two centuries: canals, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, automobile, and airplanes. Each mode remade the economy and the landscape. Each was generally adopted only after government got behind it financially and legally.

The canal era started in earnest in 1817, when New York State had the gumption to sell $7 million in bonds to pay thousands of laborers to dig a 350-mile trench from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal, when it went into service in 1825, opened up the entire Midwest to shipping and made New York the commercial hub of the New World. Other states and cities frantically dug their own canals in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.

Spurred in part by these efforts, other cities and states began investing in a new technology’railroads’that gradually replaced canals. The railroad created railroad cities, like Atlanta, and converted canal cities, like Chicago, into railroad cities. With the railroads came streetcars, first horse-drawn and then electric.

Because the first railroad tracks were often laid alongside the first canals, the canal cities tended to prosper even as the canals declined in importance. Economists call this phenomenon “path dependence,” (even as they debate its significance), and it still occurs. New York City, for example, is no longer dependent on the Erie Canal, but its because of the canal that that the rail lines, highways and airports were located in and around the city.

From about 1875 to 1925, railroads were at their peak. Urban palaces like New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station were built and opened, so that millions of passengers could shuttle across thousands of miles of tracks that stretched to every corner of the country. Few riders could have imagined that within their lifetimes, weeds would grow along thousands of miles of abandoned tracks.

Although the automobile dates to the 1890s, drivers were scarce until cities, towns, and states began paving roads’which took awhile. Many of the first roads were built, ironically, at the urging of bicyclists, who needed better roads to use their two-wheel contraptions. The League of American Wheelmen convinced the Department of Agriculture to create the Bureau of Public Roads. This small agency would grow into the Federal Transportation Department.

But better roads did not happen overnight. In 1922, 80 percent of U.S. roads were dirt and gravel. At first, railroad companies lent their political muscle to the “good roads” effort. After all, their leaders reasoned, better highways would get rail passengers to the stations more easily.

After World War I, the automobile and later the airplane, served by publicly funded roads and airports, began to supplant the passenger rail system and its intimate companion, the streetcar.
World War I helped convince government and business that investing in roads was worthwhile. During the war, massive railroad congestion brought on by the war effort forced some inter-city industrial transportation onto roads via trucks. Surprisingly (for the time,) it worked. Soon, states and the federal government began investing more in roads and airports, and less in train service.

As urban historian Eric Monkkonen noted in his 1988 book, America Becomes Urban, governments and taxpayers were the fundamental builders of this country’s transportation systems. New York state built the Erie Canal. Federal and state governments gave away a fifth of the nation’s total land area to the railroads. Congress, at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, financed the Interstate Highway System. Cities and states built airports. Even the New York City subways, although operated by private companies at first, were built with taxpayer dollars.

Each of these transportation innovations’canals, railroads, streetcars, cars, highways, and airplanes ‘ created new ways to live and work, and thus new types of neighborhoods and cities. The banks of Schenectady, New York are still lined with the ornate buildings created during the heyday of the Erie Canal. The streetcar era, which lasted from the late 19th century to World War II, led to thousands of streetcar suburbs, densely populated communities at the fringes of 19th century cities. And of course, the highway and air travel system created the current pattern of low-density sprawl that defines our built environment.

The Next Big Thing
If history is any indication, we are overdue for another change that will change how we travel, and thus change the form of our cities and towns.

“Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that’s now about 100 years old,” says Elliot Sander, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. While some might say this is evidence of the longevity of car-use and air travel, it’s also evidence that we are overdue for a big change. After all, past transportation eras, such as canals to railroads, have lasted from about 50 to 100 years. Then, something new has come along, and created a new dominant transportation system.

What might the next big thing be? Among the possibilities is the nifty Segway, the “gyro-scooter” that enables someone standing on it to point and ride. Or it could be the Solotrek Helicopter Backpack. A user straps it on and rotating blades overhead carry him where he wants. So far only prototype versions exist. Another variation is the Airboard, which hovers four inches off the ground and costs a mere $15,000. Of all these, the Segway actually seems to have a chance to live up to some of its hype.

Maybe the revolution will come in the form of small airplanes. In his 2001 book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, James Fallows, who is himself a pilot, foresees a future where people use small planes like taxis or rental cars for short flights between the thousands of small airports that now are underused.

Rail is another, more likely, option. High-speed rail networks are common in Europe and Japan, and in theory they hold great promise in more densely populated areas of the United States.

The situation now, as is typical in the United States, is a scattershot mix of aggressive policies by some states mixed with erratic federal actions. Various states and coalitions of states are aggressively lobbying to create or preserve high-speed rail corridors, under the assumptions that being in the high-speed loop will be as important as being on the Interstate in the 1950s. North Carolina are creating a ‘sealed corridor’ for high-speed rail across the state; California and Florida have both received Federal grants toward high-speed rail initiatives; The Wisconsin-based, Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, which is a coalition of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, is pushing for a high-speed network with Chicago as the hub. And of course in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is running what might be called its ‘almost-high-speed’ service, Acela Express. Meanwhile though, Congress perennially discusses killing or reorganizing Amtrak and has yet to really get behind any national rail policy, even while some members are quite passionate about it.

The Buck Rogers version of high-speed rail, a Magnetic Levitation train, has been around for a while, but working examples are still few. Demonstration versions exist in Germany, Japan and even Norfolk, Va. But the only real working version is in China. Shanghai has just finished a $30 billion Magnetic Levitation rail line between its airport and downtown. The train reaches 250 mph and travels the 19 miles between airport and downtown in eight minutes, compared to an hour by taxi. Theoretically, Maglev trains, which float above the tracks on magnets, could reach speeds up to 500 mph. Despite generally parsimonious funding, the Federal Railroad Administration is administering a national competition, the winner of which would get funds to build a working maglev line in the United States.

Whether it’s Maglev or a Segway, the challenge in predicting radical change is that by its very nature it tends to be unforeseen.

“We’re very bad at predicting those big discontinuities,” says Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a transportation consulting firm in New York. “It’s like the Internet. I remember in the early 1980s, I visited a friend at Stanford who had e-mail on the early ARPA network. I said, ‘That’s really cool.’ But I never thought about it as something I could do.” Schaller notes that for the last few years, mass transit use has increased faster than highway use. This hasn’t happened in a half-century.

In fact, most transportation planners are conservative in their predictions. “I would not be investing in jumbo helicopters, dirigibles, personal rapid transit systems, motorized scooters, powered roller skates, etc., although they sure would be fun,” says Elliot Sander of the Rudin Center.

Autophilia
To its defenders, the automobile is irreplaceable, no matter what the predictions. If we run out of oil, they say, we can switch to hydrogen fuel cells. If gas prices skyrocket, we can buy smaller cars. If global warming increases, we can reduce emissions. And if our roads become overwhelmingly congested, we will simply build more roads.

“I don’t think congestion will stop the automobile,” says Jose G’mez-Ib”ez, the Derek Bok professor of urban planning and a leading transportation planner at the Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School at Harvard University. “I think the solution to congestion is to spread out more. There’s no doubt that we will have more mass transit in the future, but as people get richer in places like China, are they going to want to drive, and be mobile, and maybe drive SUVs? The answer is ‘yes.'”

“The automobile will continue to be the dominant mode of getting around,” says Mark Kuliewicz, traffic engineer for the American Automobile Association in New York. “Cars may be powered by something other than gasoline, and hopefully soon, but they’ll still be there.”

End of the Road?
But auto travel is dependent on roads. And an increasing number of critics believe that the expanding universe of highways’what historian Kenneth Jackson has called “the Big Bang of decentralization that started in the 1920s’ — has about reached its limit.

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York (where I am a senior fellow), argued in a speech last year at the World Economic Forum in New York that for political, financial, and practical reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build more highways. More and more citizens accept the fact that we cannot build our way out of congestion and sprawl, he said.

Yaro pointed out that highway construction has drastically slowed in the tri-state New York metropolitan area. From 1951 to 1974, the region’s highway system added some 54 miles a year. In the last decade, it has added only four miles per year.

The message is clear, said Yaro in an interview. “I strongly believe that we’ve used up the capacity of our 20th century infrastructure systems, and we’re going to need a heroic and visionary (and expensive) set of new investments to create capacity for growth in the 21st century.’

A key investment would be “new or significantly upgraded intercity rail systems in the half-dozen metropolitan corridors where high-speed rail makes sense.” Yaro is essentially endorsing some version of the high-speed or improved rail networks being pushed in Congress and by coalitions of cities and states.

Smart Roads
Most experts foresee increasing use of high-tech or “smart” technology to wrest more capacity from overloaded roads. In its more elaborate forms, smart technology includes things like imbedding highways with magnets, which would pull cars or trucks along at 100 mph and stop them when needed.

It also includes cars that brake themselves; GPS positioning systems that allow drivers (or their cars) to sort their ways around traffic jams; and computer chips and scanners that allow governments to price highways and charge drivers for using them, with different rates for different times.

The latter, usually called Congestion Pricing, is the Holy Grail of transportation specialists. Although once considered politically impossible, the idea of paying for using roads may now be acceptable to a public searching for a way out of congestion’even it means ending one of the last arenas of egalitarianism, the highway.

Highway space “is a scarce resource, and if it is scarce, we have to manage it. In a market economy, this means pricing,” says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and author of the new book, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Community.

“This will be the first time we will manage the use of the public right of way. In the past, anyone has been able to walk, ride a horse, or use a motor vehicle without restrictions except for traffic control. But this is changing,” says Grava.

By definition, congestion pricing would eliminate traffic jams on any highway or road in the country. But at what price? In recent years in a federal experiment on Interstate 15 in San Diego, drivers paid as much as $8 during peak periods for congestion-free traveling on an eight-mile stretch of highway. At less busy times, prices dropped to 50 cents.

In 2000, transportation planners with Portland’s Metro regional government modeled how congestion pricing would change the region if used on key highways. They found citizens would buy smaller cars, drive less, and live closer to where they work.

With evolving computer technology, drivers could be charged for using even a neighborhood street. This could work similar to Mayor Ken Livingstone’s successful attempt to charge drivers to enter center-city London. Automatic cameras photograph license plates and send drivers a bill. Instituted in March 2003, the plan has already reduced traffic in London by 20 percent and won over many of its initial opponents.

Managing traffic, whether through smarter internal guidance systems in the automobiles or some version of congestion pricing, has the potential to substantially add capacity and efficiency to our road network, say most experts. “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of planes in the skies in the last generation, even though very few new airports have been built,” notes one federal highway official who chose to remain anonymous. “We’ve done it through better air traffic control.” Reasoning by analogy, the official said the ground equivalent of air traffic control, such as automated guidance systems, better traffic information and more pervasive tolling, could wring substantially more capacity out of our current allotment of asphalt.
On The Ground
Whether the future brings simply better cars, or Star-Trek like transporters, cities and towns here and abroad will change as a result. As current transportation systems evolve, cities and towns are evolving with them.

In France, for example, the high-speed train network is producing new commuting patterns. For example, some people are living in Paris, yet commuting to jobs in Tours, a medium-sized city about 150 miles southwest from Paris. On the high-speed train, this journey takes 58 minutes. In New Jersey, suburban rail towns are reviving around improved transit connections to Manhattan. In Atlanta, the excessive highway building of the last few decades has produced both suburban sprawl, and, paradoxically, a revival of inner city neighborhoods as people flee congested freeways.

So what’s ahead for our communities? Yaro and several others see a future in which new transit lines make the suburbs more like the city. This future is not so imaginary. Around the New York region, classic commuter rail towns are reviving around substantial reinvestments in the rail system, like the new, $450 million rail transfer station in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.

Cities evolve in unexpected ways. The introduction of freeways decimated many downtowns in the 1950s, something unpredicted at the time. Houston’s downtown in 1960, for example, had become mostly surface parking lots. But today in Houston, tall parking garages have replaced much of the surface parking, and the downtown is substantially denser. Perhaps in the future, more office buildings will replace the parking garages, and people will take commuter rail service to work. In fact, the city is already building a light rail line downtown.

We could also go the other way. If auto use continues at the same level and personal jets take off as Fallows and some others predict, sprawl is likely to increase. New homes and businesses would spring up around small airports throughout the country.

An unstable mix of government subsidies, technological promise, and private profit will determine what comes next, and this will vary from place to place. Indicators like wealth will not always offer reliable clues as to what transportation systems particular societies will adopt.

Consider the humble bicycle. It’s used extensively in China, which has a very low per capita income, and in Scandinavia, which has a very high per capita income. In Copenhagen, more than a third of commuters use bicycles. The point is that wealth alone does not adequately predict transportation use. You might say that the Chinese use bicycles because they have to; the Danish because they want to.

What Planners Can Do
For the most part, U.S. urban planners work separately from transportation planners. The average state or city planning director tends to react to transportation decisions, rather than to make them. Planners have tended to focus on zoning and land-use regulation, which is often auxiliary to the real work being done by the transportation engineers.

In a better ordered world, land planners would have responsibility for transportation planning, (or supervise those who do it), and urban designers would be directly involved with state and federal highway planning.

We probably haven’t reached the end of history when it comes to transportation. But whatever the future, it would be a better one if we had a broader range of choices. As a country, we have tended to lurch from one extreme to another. In the 1890s, we had the most extensive rail system in the world’and one of the worst road systems. By the 1950s, we had abandoned our extensive streetcar system. Today, we lack a decent passenger rail system but have a great highway system. Like the fiber-optic cable industry and the Internet rage, transportation has proceeded in a boom-bust fashion.

When the next big thing does comes along, let’s not be too quick to abandon proven modes. The past teaches not only that change comes, but that the best societies offer a range of transportation choices, including using one’s own two feet.
END

–Published in Planning Magazine, May 2003

Resources
–Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. www.midwesthsr.org
–High Speed Ground Transportation Association. www.hsgta.org.
–National Association of Railroad Passengers. www.narprail.org.
–American Highways Users Alliance. www.highways.org
–Transportation Alternatives. www.transalt.org
–Surface Transportation Policy Project. www.transact.org