The question is, what do we want our transportation future to look like? How do we want to pursue opportunities? The purpose here is to identify a few of the opportunities before us and show how the smallest in paradigm shifts can bring about large changes in the way we design our transportation system.
While our communications networks innovate at the speed of light our transportation networks languish in medieval models. Our governments continue to prop up the past, supporting old paradigms in the name of progress.
Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a business model for the train industry. Its just the idea of supporting it with tax dollars while locking out highly innovative transportation schemes seems like a plan bent on destruction. Adding more lanes to the freeway? We all know how well that works. For every new lane, capacity for that lane is incrementily smaller than the lane coming before it.
After all, it is well recognized the concept of individualized transport (in this case walking, biking, or the personal automobile) is not going away. So why are we trying to force square pegs into round holes? Why do we spend such a large percentage of our transportation resources on quixotic concepts giving ever smaller returns on investment? To answer that is to delve into an area of the human psyche outside the scope of this blog.
Our transportation network should be evolving along a curve similar to the communications industry. The average speed of the network should be increasing. It doesn't seem to be heading that way from my perspective. It is estimated that 700,000 years (yes those are human years not dog years) are lost because of surface transportation congestion every year. Lost productivity as a result of traffic congestion in the U.S. is estimated at 2.2% of GNP. Is this a future we want for us or our kids?
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