The most obvious question relating to transportation issues is "Why drive at all?" Several things obstruct elimination of much of the need.
Telecommuting could reduce fuel consumption, smog, and would produce high-paying jobs in equipment and software. It also makes more time for family. Telecommuting has been severely hindered by the lack of the "last mile" of the specialized cable capable of carrying high-speed Internet service into the home. The Public Utilities Commission effectively delayed telephone companies from running fiber optic cable into the home by forcing phone companies to rely exclusively upon their copper wires (supposedly to protect the poor and seniors from rate increases, of course, such a strategy didn't mean anything to cable operators).
25% of all local trips are for errands. Whether driving kids to school, shopping, or making deliveries. The Internet could provide the link that allows coordination all purchases for the home to be bundled into a single delivery. Guess who is in the way?
It is amazing how much more traffic there is after Labor Day. The reason? Schools. Why are we driving to classrooms and libraries when we have the Internet? Why do we have bricks and mortar schools at all? One could put lectures online, with Q&A over Skype, and testing proctored at the local strip mall. There is no legitimate reason for that many trips other than paying bad instructors too much money while wrecking family integrity in the process.
It's not just the teachers either. The US Postal Service is expensive and inefficient; the virtual monopoly they hold in daily home delivery restricts the opportunity to bundle mail delivery with food, clothing, and other purchased items. From an economic perspective, it's time to end it.
To improve the competitiveness of Internet sales, customers need a better sense of what they are buying online. Interactive voice and picture communications not only rapidly improve transactions, they also broaden the market to include the computer illiterate. Without high-speed cable into the home, none of it is possible. Maybe that's a reason why the dot-com bust was as bad as it was?
Another reason for high-speed cable is to enable customized mass communications necessary to eliminate the need for commuting to schools. It is most instructive to drive a major highway before and after Labor Day. The traffic flow for education alone is significant.
Many Californians would swear that they can't afford to stay at home with their kids, but if they understood how much of their income from that second job went to taxes, daycare, extra driving, or tutoring and counseling to deal with the mess public schools make of their kids, they would probably quit now. Add the prospect of telecommuting and the choice becomes truly compelling.
With that broadband, there would also be less reason to fly, a fact being proven every day by web-conferencing. Considering the security concerns associated with air or rail travel, the costs of hotel accommodations, car rental, restaurant food, and the absence at home, web-conferencing looks quite attractive.
The above is still insufficient to eliminate the need to buy that extra car. There will always be the need for an occasional day-trip while at work, an emergency delivery, or a non-emergency trip to the hospital where the bus just doesn't cut it. Here again, the market is headed toward the solution and government is in the way. It is increasingly common for car rental companies to disperse their fleet for day use and deliver the car. Jitney services, similar to the airport shuttle vans could coordinate trips online, and provide more customized services than a bus ever could, but what do you know but that counties almost always restrict the number and type of cab licenses!
We need simply deregulate taxis, and put them on the web with GPS and AI to optimize trip combination. A bidding system could access closer cabs for shorter wait times. Put it all together: telecommuting, web-conferencing, Internet shopping with consolidated home delivery, online home education, intelligently distributed rental cars and jitney services and many traffic problems would virtually vanish. It only happens if government gets out of the way. But what about the poor? How do they get around in this system?
Government could obviously fund transportation vouchers or discounted ticket prices as they do now for bus or light rail service, especially after having reduced the need via communications services. It certainly beats paying off bond debt and operating subsidies necessary to support massive mass transit projects.
Finally, there is a future in making our highways more efficient that bears discussion. We could load the highways with many more cars and run them at higher speeds than is currently safe for traffic if all the vehicles were under some form of automatic control. For most people, that is rightly a very scary issue, because who wants to cede control of their car to a government agency?
It doesn't have to be that way. One can either control the cars on an automated road, or automate the cars and have them work things out among each other. The latter, being a distributed control system, is actually more robust but would require the very sophisticated global positioning systems now in development.
The big advantage of a distributed system is that the cars could conduct negotiations. Think of what it would be like to be paid to get out of the way so someone could whip through traffic at a 100mph while you were working instead of paying attention to the wheel. Freedom makes it possible. Don't accept anything less.
I’m not sure I agree with everything you posted there, but I absolutely agree with you about schools. Even something as simple as school buses is an enormous source of congestion in many suburban areas. In fact, I look upon the traditional yellow school bus as an indicator of what’s wrong with our whole approach to education.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BoyEHeID8U
All of the suggestions, and they are splendid, do not take in to account that we will be a petro-based world for at least the next 150 years, for which there are more than adequate supplies. In fact, there is a surfeit of crude oil, with price maintenance done by limiting refining capacity.
IMHO, the biggest macro-economic calamity to hit the Western World is the phenomenon of the two-income family. Most women work now. That has (a) lowered western birth rates below replacement, and opened our world to fecund Third Worlders who ain't our friends. (b)Doubled available labor, lowering wages to the point that two incomes ARE REQUIRED to maintain a household. (c)Increased demand for housing, transport, etc. raising the cost of those commodities.
Can't and won't say whether this is "good,"or "bad," just saying that to avoid discussion of the obvious is rather foolish. Tax policy? It is against the two-income family already.
It doesn't have to be that way. One can either control the cars on an automated road, or automate the cars and have them work things out among each other. The latter, being a distributed control system, is actually more robust but would require the very sophisticated global positioning systems now in development.
The CATO Institute recently published a column about automated cars (the latter system). Automated cars are already undergoing test drives (off the public roads, of course). The first automated cars are estimated to roll off the assembly lines in 2018.
But even accounting for those factors, something like 60% of fossil fuels are consumed by transportation and 60% of transportation is commuting to work and school. So eliminate even 40% of the commuting and you've eliminated, or at least postponed, the need for new roads, new sources of fossil fuel and all the problems attendant thereto.
The biggest barrier to such an outcome is, of course, government. Fewer people moving about mean fewer sources of revenue from gas taxes and payroll taxes because, face it, many jobs depend on the need for people to be constantly moving about and support the transportation infrastructure which bleeds much of that income off these same people.