CNN Predicting Transportation Change in Near Future

In a headlining article on CNN.com, CNN experts are predicting that the next 10 years will be a time of drastic change for the transportation industry.  Experts are predicting there will be changes in each of the big three transportation sectors; rail, air and automobile.

According to Brett Snyder, airline consumer expert, the trend of low-cost airlines will continue as they are the ones make most of the money.  But they will evolve to charge passengers for every from using the bathroom to possibly having standing-room-only sections on flights.  This could turn dangerous as those who can afford to pay will suddenly have all of the amenities while others will have little to no amenities or flying options, thus segregating the airline industry.  I think that the current model with most airlines sticking to tradition charging and services with some ultra-low cost airlines giving travelers cheap options is working and should remain the same.  If there is too much evolution to cheap flights, then the airline industry may not be able to sustain itself.

The article also address the importance of the new laws in California and Nevada allowing for driverless cars to be on the roads.  This will allow for more research and development and implementation according to some.  it is predicted that the current timeline shows that non-experimental driverless cars will be used within the next 5 years in states that allow it.  This could potentially be huge for the auto industry and driverless cars have the possibility of making roads more efficient and safer and thus more sustainable.

The article also touched on the use of rail lines in the near future.  The article points out that "more passengers have used Amtrak this year than ever before in it's 41-year history."  This is believed to have happened because of better service and better funding as the country looks for ways to improve it's transportation network.  It is even predicted that traveling between major cities by train on a daily basis will soon become a normal thing.  This could potentially make drastic changes to the transportation network of the future.  If the train industry begins to catch on again, then there is a possibility that if there is enough of a demand then more rail lines and stations will be built, thus further improving the rail industry.

It is clear that the US transportation industry is headed for some major changes, I am just not sure where they are headed, and how positive they will be.

What do you think?

For more information, check out the article yourself.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/27/travel/future-travel/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Thanksgiving Crashes Down Where Safety is Enforced

The week that revolves around Thanksgiving can always be a hectic one with traveling both for the holiday itself and the pseudo holiday that is Black Friday.  Because of this traffic is more congested and there are typically more incidents.  One state chose to take action this year and combat the annual traffic and accident nightmare.

This year Illinois implemented a new "Drive to Survive" campaign using both media PSAs and stricter enforcement to decrease motor vehicle crash fatalities by 63%.  In 2011, Illinois had seven crashes and eight fatalities with no special campaign and only two crashes and 3 vehicle fatalities over the same time period this year.  Illinois Transportation Secretary Ann L. Schneider says the improvement can be attested to "significant progress in recent years to improve traffic safety and reduce fatalities....and Thanksgiving holiday weekend was no exception."

For more information you can read the article below:

http://www.chillicothetimesbulletin.com/article/20121127/NEWS/121129694/-1/opinion

I think that this is finally an example of how a combination of enforcement and PSAs to decrease traffic incidents.  It seems other places typically try and have just PSAs or just enforcement.  I believe that a combination of every viable option is necessary, and this is proof.

What do you think?

Human Barriers, Helping Pedestrians??

Picture of human barriers near Lincoln Financial Field on game night.

Above you can see a picture that I took a while back leaving a Sunday night Philadelphia Eagles game.  The game was against the rivaled New York Giants so the crowds were expected to be higher than usual.  The area around the stadium has a lot of pedestrian traffic coming from the dozen or so massive parking lots that supply parking to most of the stadium.  Because of this, for this game the city lined some of the curbs around the stadium with pedestrian barriers.  This was obviously done to prevent pedestrians, especially ones under the influence of alcohol, from attempting to cross the street and obstruct traffic, or worse, be hit by a car.

While I think that in some cases this type of pedestrian protection is great, and I do believe that this may have helped, I think it also could have, and may have caused some issues.  For one thing, the barriers then corral pedestrians into the crosswalks, which cause a back up in pedestrian traffic.  This in fact causes pedestrians to then hope the barriers and walk in the roads.  I know this because I was one of those pedestrians who chose to jump over it at a point where the road was actually closed off to vehicular traffic.  I also witnessed several drunk pedestrians try to climb over them and fall, landing almost directly on their faces (luckily I saw no injuries.)

My point is, while these barriers were placed to make everyone safer and keep vehicular traffic moving, from what I saw they did more harm then good.

What do you think? 

Speed and Crashes

Chapter 14 of William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation discusses the role that speed limits play in sustainable transportation.  Black discusses how motors consume more gas and produce more emissions as speeds increase as well as congestion.  What I think the most important part about speed and sustainability is the number of crashes, both fatal and nonfatal, that occur because of the speed limits.

First off I would like to preface this post by saying that as a writer I can not write this post from an unbiased perspective as I live in a family who has lost family members due to driving accidents and almost lost more that was directly due to speeding.  I also find myself speeding quite a lot so I am pointing out that I am a hypocrite in many cases.

From William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation chapter 14, page 165.

The above chart is a break down of fatal and nonfatal crashes on the various classifications of roadways in the US.  According to Black, no real connection between speed and fatalities can be made in most cases.  I for one though would have to disagree.  There are many cases in which drivers are driving too fast and can not control themselves when presented with an obstacle or a possible incident, thus crash.  One could then say that those drivers were probably speeding and going above the speed limit and I would attend to agree with this statement.  So the real question is not if there is a correlation between the speed limit and crashes, but if there is a correlation between crashes and drivers exceeding the speed limit.  I would certainly think that there must be a correlation between these two things, as it is one of the main reasons not to speed.  For example, my mother was in a major car accident that led to several injuries.  The accident only happened because a teenage driver was speeding at 45 miles an hour in a 25 mile and hour speed zone over a hill and could not see her stopped for pedestrians and rear-ended her.  If the driver had been traveling the correct speed, the one that was designed for the hill, then the accident would either not have happened or not have been as serious.

The question then is how can we better enforce speed limits.  I think there are a few ways that this can happen.  One is to make fines for speeding higher enforcement must go up.  By enforcement I mean not having a car parked in plain view of everyone because many times that causes cars to suddenly slow down to speeds much slower then they need to.  As someone who regrettably does speed, I know that I slow down if I think I am being watched and would certainly slow down if it meant several hundred dollars in tickets as opposed to getting a ticket for a "dirty license plate" which I did receive once.

What do you think about speed and safety?

Policies Must Change

Chapter 13 of William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation, entitled "A Contimuum of Policies" is the first chapter the book's section on policy in sustainable transportation.  The chapter begins, as always with a quote, this time from Daniel Sperling who in 1995 said, "Government policy toward motor vehicles is fragmented and increasingly misguided, resulting in small environmental benefits being gained at exorbitant cost."  While I agree that there are certainly some bad decisions being made in policy throughout the country, and the world at various different levels, it is not always the fault of those in charge.  For example, the lowest level of policy makers for transportation are towns, cities and counties.  These policy makers can affect the level of sustainability in transportation by controlling land use by zoning, controlling some aspects of public transportation and controlling parking.  Some of these actions can take years to take place and can sometimes even conflict with themselves.  It is also hard for even a large county to properly make decisions as they run on what are usually small budgets and  little resources and can not make effective changes.

For many states, the same problems that have plagued local municipalities and counties have made it difficult for states to make major changes.  While they do have more resources and more power, states still have small populations relative to the rest of the nation and thus, can not make effective changes.  This seems to hold true for every state, except for California according to Black.  Because Southern California has had such horrible air quality problems since it's initial population, California has been one of the only state to pass effective and sustainable clean air and emissions acts and has essentially set itself to be the standard for the rest of the country.  California has even recently continued toward a more sustainable transportation future and has become the first state to legalize computer driven cars on the road.  Even though there are none on the commercial market, this will allow for the research to be completed.

I think for the rest of the country, and the world to properly begin to make sustainable transportation solutions, many aspects of how the state of California runs it's policy making should be studied and used elsewhere.  What do you think?

Reliable Urban Planning- Can it happen?

As sustainability and transportation sustainability become a bigger and bigger issue, urban planning, along with land use planning and design, is becoming much more common in many areas.  At one point everything naturally happened and evolved, if there was a thoroughfare, a population increased and all the needs of a population such as stores, entertainment and amenities would pop-up as well nearby and communities would become, to a certain level, self-sustaining.  But with the change in the world economy and how our civilization runs itself, such communities now must be planned to try to make transportation more sustainable.   One of the biggest ways that planners try and make transportation more sustainable is by reducing the number or required trips, or the number of wasted trips.

William R. Black goes into great detail about this Urban Planning in chapter 11 of his book Sustainable Transportation.  Black discusses the different models, including the gravity model, that have been used to model traffic flow and how people will move.  But as Black points out, there are new theories every day and no model as been definitively proven as one that works right.  It seems that it is pretty much impossible to affecting and accurately predict or model how  people will move.  For example, a model can not accurately predict that I may need to first drive over to Giant, then get a call and have to drive across to a friends house to pick them up, then once again go back to Giant because I forgot something, then head across town to a different store, then go to work...you see where this is going.  Along with this modeling, urban planners are now attempting to use zoning and new construction to build sustainable communities that harbor more sustainable transportation such as walking and can basically be self sustaining.

One example of this is the currently under construction City Center in Washington, DC.  The several block site will have apartments, condos, offices and retail.  It is being designed to be a green community type area that would have a lot of foot traffic and could potentially have people living, working and shopping in a several block area that self sustains itself.  the problem with this is that you can not decide who lives there and the rent is high because it is in downtown DC.  This will attract the upper class who can easily afford to travel wherever they wish.

This brings us to another issue that Black brought up.  Black brought up the issue that no matter how close you build what someone may need in a trip or how short you make the travel time, a human still may not go there or may take a longer travel time just by human error, a want to move about more, or the necessity to make multiple trips to different areas.

So the basic question is, can Urban Planning even help?  I do think that Urban Planning can help.  For example there are communities that area able to be relatively self sustaining such as Celebration, Florida which was built by Walt Disney Corporation.  While the community is based as close to the workplace of almost all of its residence and it has many of the amenities such as retail and health services, each house still has a 2-3 car garage which leads one to believe that there are many more trips leaving, or even around Celebration then initially designed.  I think that planing such as this can help, but it is impossible to plan for the human factor and impossible to plan and model the human races ever changing needs, especially when any infrastructure change can change those needs.

What do you think?

Pricing-Turn the Problem Into the Solution

You don't have to be a genius to know how bad our current economy is.  So many would think that the cost of traveling, especially via personal car is already high enough with the rising cost of gas, along with high prices cars, tolls and maintenance.  Many would look at this as the problem in transportation and is making it less sustainable.  But in fact, transportation authorities could turn this problem into the solution.  If certain aspects of the transportation industry were more expensive, it could force people into more of a multi-modal transportation system that relies on many different forms of transportation, thus making the system as a whole more sustainable.  This is exactly what chapter 10 of William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation entitled "Pricing and Taxation" is about.  Black even starts the chapter with a quote from Lee Schipper in 1996 saying "Any policies or strategies to reduce the problems of transport without strong pricing components will only produce weak results" (Black, 117.)

Black continues throughout chapter 10 by discussing several different ways that charging fees can be used to help make a system more sustainable.  These include congestion-free pricing, which are basically toll toads, congestion-free areas which areas in central business districts such as London and Singapore where cars are charged fees to drive through them, and various taxes for pollution, fuel and use.

While almost anyone would agree that at the surface, charging more does not sound like a good idea.  But in my mind I think that all of the different proposed ways of using taxes and fees to both make money and keep people off the road is a good idea.  While some would say that these fees could cause less business, I think that most business will stay afloat as most trips should just shift onto other, mostly more sustainable, forms of transportation.  I think that if driving were to become a luxury again, then the transportation system would adjust to make due to the necessary trips.  It would also encourage more sustainable villages and districts where more necessities are located close to each other to reduce the number of trips in general without decreasing business.

What do you think?  Do you think making personal transportation such as cars is a good idea?

Solutions-Policy and Technology

The domain of the policy-making unit must be congruent with the domain of the causes and effects of the problem with which the policy deals.  This is often called the principle of subsidiarity.

-Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley (2004)

This is the quote that William R. Black starts off the 8th chapter with in his book Sustainable Transportation entitled "An Introduction to the Range of Possible Solutions."  In this chapter Black does not propose any specific solutions to the problem of our current unsustainable transportation system to any great extent, but simply proposes that there are two basic ways that one can look for solutions.  One can look to improve the transportation system via either policy changes or changes in technology according to Black.

Break Down:

Policy:

One way for the transportation sector to become more sustainable is for the government to create new policies.  These policies could range from changing the required average gas mileage on vehicles to how transportation systems are designed and tolled, to where funding goes and how the money is raised.  There are a million different ways to make policy changes to make transportation more sustainable, it is just a matter of finding the right combination.

Technology:

Along with the right combination of policy changes, technology changes must also exist.  These technology changes would most likely come from the private sector, with possible funding or help from the public sector.  These technologies would include smarter cars, better, safer forms of transportation that are more efficient as well.  Just like policy changes there is a multitude of technology advancement that can be made to make transportation more sustainable.  In fact, it is practically impossible to compile a list of all viable changes and advances that could be made.  While most of these are not aimed at fixing the entire problem, a combination of many of them could help fix the problem if done correctly and in time.

To conclude this summary I will refer back to Black's ending to chapter 8.  Black states that there are obviously many ways for both technology and policy changes to help fix our unsustainable transportation network, it just requires a population that is willing and able to implement these changes.  Some can be as simple as asking, or forcing, people to drive less like in the 1970's during the oil crisis, while others take more time and are much more complicated.  But until people step up and decide to do something, a list of ideas will do nothing.