The United States Government needs to address the issue of
the future of transportation and decide what a national system will look
like. As I see it, there are three
choices: continue as we are until we run out of oil, move to electric or
biofuels but maintain the current road infrastructure, or move to a system
which involves investing in new infrastructure such as a dual-mode or guideway
system.
The general consensus is that our current system is not
sustainable. Everyone agrees that oil
production can not continue indefinitely, but nobody knows how long the supply
will be available, or if they do know, they aren’t sharing the
information. I agree with the authors of
Two Billion Cars, we need to move toward electric or biofuels made “from
grasses, algae, trash, and crop waste (Sperling & Gordon, p.237).
Technological developments are already
progressing in this direction and a national system would add support for
continued research and development. It
is easier to reach a goal when you know what the target is, and the government
needs to decide on a target. Companies
don’t want to invest a lot of resources into something if they aren’t sure what
the return on their investment will be.
The Two Billion Cars authors speak a lot about “carrots and
sticks”. I am a firm believer in
positive reinforcement or “carrots”. It
is better to create circumstances that make people chose to do what is best rather
than forcing them. For this reason, I do
not agree with the authors about the personal carbon account. I look at the amount of people who can’t
grasp our current money system which benefits them on a personal level; I don’t
think they will remotely grasp the concept of a carbon system that benefits society
as a whole. I see a future carbon
account as one more way for a limited few to benefit at the expense of
many. It will become one more way to
separate the “haves” from the “have nots”, and just screams Big Brother is
watching (Orwell).
Rather than dictate how much a person can travel, we should
work to design and create places that people don’t want to travel far away from,
making smarter developments. People
generally want to do what is best, but there can be conflict. Examples such as the Trimet bus that hits the
homeless man, riding a bike because he couldn’t afford to ride the bus, the
paratransit parked in the bike lane for fifteen minutes because they don’t want
to block the resident’s driveway, the Prius that hits the high school student
on her way to school in the morning, the PSU
professor biking in the bus lane who gets honked at by an oncoming bus
(1). These are all example of how each
individual thought he was doing something good for the environment on their own
personal level, but it was at the detriment of another who was also saving the
world one commute at a time. With a
national transportation policy encouraging smart development, we gain a better
sense of community so accidents and incidences like this don’t need to
occur. We can have shorter commutes,
giving us more patience to wait the few seconds for others, and gain a better
understanding of how our decisions affect the greater community.
Our current system of transportation encourages building a
road system to accommodate cars. We expand and repair this system repeatedly as
needed to appease drivers. Eventually we
will run out of the resources needed to continue paving over the country. The answer seems obvious to me that we need
to convince people that they don’t need to travel so many miles. There needs to be a lifestyle change. To me,
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| MegaRail System |
I do not know what a national policy for transportation
should look like, but I think the dual-mode guideway concept (Schneider,
Ehlig-Economides & Longbottom) is a better choice for the future. There are arguments that it has a high
initial investment for the new infrastructure, and we should continue to invest
in our current system. I would say in
response, we can’t afford to not move to a new system. The future holds an increase in population as
well as an increase in cars. We do not
have the land necessary to continue to support the survival of that many people
and transport them in a standard that they have become accustomed to. The travel times desired, right of way
necessary and maintenance concerns all need to be factored into the decision
and our current methods do not appear to have long term feasibility. We need to look beyond initial cost and
convenience and base our decisions on long-term costs and benefits, and it
needs to be done soon.
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| AVT-Train |
References:
Two Billion Cars
By: Daniel Sperling
& Deborah Gordon
Published: Oxford
University
1984
By: George Orwell
Published: The New
American Library, 1949
(1) Personal observation within the past year noted for their irony. Of the two accidents, the bicyclists sustained minor injuries and continue to bike with no apparent long term repercussions. Trimet and the city have been informed that the assisted living address serviced with paratransit is actually the driveway that would be blocked if they parked on the side street, but they refuse to change the route. The PSU professor was just trying to cross the street and merge with rush hour traffic.
Dual Mode Vehicle and
Infrastructure Alternatives Analysis
By: Christine Ehlig-Economides and Jim Longbottom, April
2008. http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/big/CEETIreport.pdf
Dualmode
Transportation Concepts website:
Maintained By: Jerry
Schneider
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