EDITORIAL Land of the slave and home of the wimps

EDITORIAL

Land of the slave and home of the wimps

In the words of the splendid song America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sure is in war. But in transport(ation) issues America is the land the slave and the home of the wimps. American highway planners in particular are now almost completely servile to silly fantasies about the potential of rail. They rarely put the case for highways.

A lot of Americans stuck in creep & crawl traffic on their expressways will declare that transit is the answer. Each thinks “the other guy” will ride a train or a trolley, emptying the highways of excess vehicles and allowing him to fly along the expressway unimpeded. The trouble is the “other guy” wants transit for you, not for himself.

Almost noone wants transit for themselves.

And no wonder. Transit only makes sense for people who chance to live and work and have other activities close by stations, and where there are clear corridors of intense transport demand between those in order to justify frequent service. American cities that developed substantially before the age of mass ownership of the automobile do have some market for transit but only if it is heavily subsidized. Most property development of the past half century, whether housing or commercial, has been low density. Though long lamented as ‘sprawl’ building density has continued to decline, so much so that even highrise office buildings have almost entirely ceased being built in the United States. The Otis elevator company has been saved from extinction by exports to Asia and by the Americans for Disabilities Act which requires lifts for wheelchair people going up the two and three levels that are the norm in contemporary ‘office parks.’

These lowrise office buildings are laid out for cars, surrounded by car-parking. The whole physical fabric of built America with the exception perhaps of Manhattan is built around roadbased vehicles as the principal means of transportation, and the evolving social fabric is reinforcing this. Modern American life with wife and husband both working leads to many so-called ‘chained’ trips in which, for example children are dropped off or picked up, then dry cleaning left, or materials acquired for weekend home renovation, these multiple visits often done in the course of a single ‘commuter’ trip. Some use their vehicle during the workday. No form of transit can compete with the personally owned car, minivan or small truck for its flexibility and convenience as a child and shopping goods lugger or a mobile office. So even in the American cities which have good rail transit — New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington DC — road-based transportation is dominant and still gaining mode share. There is no sign the trend to increased dominance of rubber-on-road technology will cease.

To be sure over very long distances (like over 700 to 1,000 mile trips) and for a few very bulky commodities (like coal) rail competes. Now that many rail lines in the northeast U.S. have had their clearances raised to about 20 feet allowing double-high trailers as well as containers on flatcars the rails are carrying growing quantities of long distance cargo, but partially as ‘land bridges’ in competition with ocean-to-ocean shipping. The future is liable to see many changes, most of which seem likely to help rubber-tired vehicles. Electronics will allow special expressway lanes (abandoned HOV lanes?) to be converted into guideways for automated travel. Highways can be built for long multiple trailer combinations or road trains. Greater axle weights will be accomodated by air suspension and heavy truck designed pavement. The growth of airfreight internationally will probably take air cargos inland as compared to the coastal based containerships, closer to where they need to go and therefore rail will rarely be relevant. Intermodalism is a current buzzword that everyone intones as virtue incarnate, and obviously it makes some sense, some places. But moving people and goods from one mode to another is always going to be complicated, expensive and time-consuming, and will remain a great handicap for modes competing with the highway. First and last legs of journeys being by rubbertired vehicle is the highway’s greatest source of competitive advantage, which always gives it a great start on winning the middle of the trip as well.

The anti-highway lobby in the U.S. has put many obstacles in the way of new highway developments, notably air quality requirements, and the diversion of highway fuel tax proceeds to other modes. The chutzpah of the transit lobby is amazing. A recent press release from the American Public Transit Association was headlined: “Mass Transit Asks Senate to Repel Raid on Its Gas Tax Fund.” “Its”! At issue was a proposal to use some gas tax money for Amtrak, the hugely subsidized long distance rail passenger operation. Until just a few years ago it was understood that federal and state fuel taxes were a highway user fee intended to pay for the upkeep and construction of roads. Most went into a highway trust fund to ensure that what had been taken away in taxes from motorists went back to them in better roads. It was a test of a ‘good government’ ethic that officials kept their sticky fingers off this money, and ‘diversion’ of these funds was a stinging accusation of fiscal impropriety. By now however the fuel taxes are so disconnected from benefits to motorists that legislative moves to increase the tax rate usually fail. So do referenda giving electors the say. People don’t trust the politicians to use the gas tax properly so the traditional funding is heavily jeopardized.

Mention must be made of policy fiascos too. Legislated unanimously in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 was the “employee commute option” program, a euphemism for trying to deny a lot of employees the single occupant car option by federal government efforts to dragoon state governments to dragoon employers to dragoon their employees into carpooling and using transit. The progam was so unpopular and so ineffective it collapsed under the weight of its paperwork. Most environmentalists even went along with its cancellation by the U.S. Congress earlier this year.

“Its” gas tax fund

Amid all this there has been very little active highway advocacy. Highway people have been merged and absorbed into Transportation Departments, transportation lobbies, and transportation institutes and their monies all mixed up in transportation programs and, though outnumbered, the transit enthusiasts have used their sense of righteousness to assert a ‘right’ (the notion of a right is expressed in the possessive “its gas tax fund”) to an increasing share of the pork. The state of demoralization of highway people is indicated by their acceptance without demurral of repeated statements by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and many others that the era of highway building is over, finished, kaput, and the challenge now is demand management (suppression really) and using high technology to reduce congestion. The assertion is made that there isn’t the space to build more roads, there is too much opposition wherever you try to locate them and there isn’t the money anyway.

Well there is going to be money if tolling is adopted wherever major new building or major renovations are needed. If people really need it they will pay the tolls. Let’s be blunt and assert: money solves most problems. It can buy space to build new highway lanes or buy the means to make them acceptable, like putting them underground. It can buy off a lot of opposition by incorporating into the project some of the things that the more practical opponents want. Give ‘em the bike paths! Give ‘em better looking sound walls. Give ‘em lots of landscaping and give ‘em substitute swamps. If necessary bury the thing: make it a subway. They are showing the way in Paris, Tokyo, Scandinavia, Holland and Australia where multiple underground highways are under way. Of course there still will be some opposition but too often these days American highwaymen won’t even fight for needed projects. Where there is a fight the highwaymen can win, and win in the most unlikely projects — think of the splendid Central Artery and Third Harbor Tunnel projects (largely an undergrounder!) now being built smack in the middle of Boston.

Most places however there is a fatalistic sense that it just can’t be done anymore in America. Take the San Francisco Bay area. It desperately needs an extra Bay crossing, most obviously midway between the San Mateo and Bay bridges. It could be called the Airports Link Crossing since it would link the San Francisco and Oakland airports and improve access to each, but it would do a lot more for area transportation. It would be an extension of I-380 on the San Francisco Peninsula with direct access to the airport independent of overloaded US-101, and on the Oakland side of the Bay after interchanging at the airport would go along the Nimitz I-880 a short distance before hooking into the I 238 link which takes Castro valley traffic from I-580. Yet such an obvious project is never even discussed so far as I can gather. It doesn’t even figure in 25 year “visions.”

In Europe and Asia they are building stuff like this all over the place. The San Francisco Bay Airports Link described above is a 10 mile stretch of mostly shallow bay. In Toyko Bay a Japanese toll agency is in the middle of construction of a combined tunnel and bridge of similar length (9.4 miles) and in similar conditions (see report on Trans-Tokyo Bay Highway.) In the Øresund strait between Copenhagen Denmark and Malmo Sweden a bi-national authority is using prospective tolls to build a 10 mile bridge-tunnel link for road and rail. Simultaneously 65 miles west on the other side of the island of Zeeland on which Copenhagen is situated, the Danes are building 8.3 miles of bridge over the Storebaelt channel to the Jutland peninsula. Within four years trucks and cars will be able to drive between Norway and Sweden in tunnels under, and bridges over, the channels of the Baltic Sea into Denmark and Germany. Scandinavia will be united with Europe by fixed crossings! Reliance on those costly and unreliable Baltic Sea ferries will be at an end. In Hong Kong four huge bridges are being built to provide access to the new airport on Lantau Island. In China a 10 mile bridge is being built across the Pearl River delta at Humen in Guangdong province.

The adventurous highway crossings spirit is not entirely dead in North America. An 8 mile bridge is being built across the Northumberland Strait between New Bruswick and the island province of Prince Edward Island. And we have the Wilson Bridge replacement just a few miles from the White House. But that’s about it.