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Driving Trends of Congestion
"Congestion is one of the single largest threats to our economic prosperity and way of life. Whether it takes the form of trucks stalled in traffic, cargo stuck at overwhelmed seaports, or airplanes circling over crowded airports, congestion is costing America an estimated $200 billion a year.
Each year, Americans lose 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of fuel sitting in traffic jams and waste $9.4 billion as a result of airline delays. Worse, congestion is affecting the quality of Americans’ lives by robbing them of time that could be spent with families and friends.
Congestion is not a fact of life. It is not a scientific mystery, nor is it an uncontrollable force. Congestion results from poor policy choices and a failure to separate solutions that are effective from those that are not.”
—Norman Mineta, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation
It is a surprising fact that traffic volumes and particularly freight volumes are growing much faster than the U.S. population, or even the U.S. Gross National Product. Several fundamental and powerful forces underlie this trend.
First, traffic volumes and freight movement rise with economic growth. As affluence increases, so does travel. Likewise, rising affluence means rising consumption. As the economy grows, more goods are consumed. Goods must move along complex supply chains that originate with raw commodities, move to various value-added manufacturing processes and ultimately to warehouses and stores and to the doorstep of the American consumer. As the economy grows, so does the volume of goods shipped.
Secondly, despite a decline in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output continues to grow. American manufacturing is increasingly relying on high-end, high-value products to differentiate itself from growing foreign manufacturers who focus upon high-volume but lower-value products. America’s high-end manufactured goods need to travel great distances just to reach consumers in our own country, much less the thousands of miles to reach export markets. The populations and economies of Asia represent the most significant source of American exporting growth. This growth means American manufacturers are relying on our highways, railroads, water ports, and airports to be their conduit to these foreign customers—as well as to the traditional domestic ones.
Third, shipments are growing because of the efficiency of America’s just-in-time strategies. A significant portion of America’s productivity gains in recent years have come from logistics. As producers learned to lower costs by reducing inventory, the need for high-value, time-sensitive shipments has grown geometrically. American producers and consumers now demand a precisely tuned and reliable logistics network to provide what they want, when they want it. This applies to fresh produce in a Minnesota supermarket during February as well as to auto parts for a Detroit assembly line at the start of a production shift. A just-in-time economy means there are more shipments, generally of lower weight but of higher value, than in the past.
The just-in-time logistics strategy has created some of the largest and most influential new American companies. Amazon could not exist without an instantaneous supply chain. Wal-Mart revolutionized retailing with its just-in-time inventories. Dell Computers eliminates stores by having consumers design computers on-line which are then delivered within hours. The profound influence of just-in-time practices created new economic models but also profoundly stressed America’s transportation network.
Fourth, the growth of international trade stimulates ever-growing imports and exports. As mentioned above, the value of international trade is growing from the equivalent of 13 percent of the economy in 1990 to 35 percent in 2020 and 60 percent of the economy by 2035. The foreign and domestic demand means that tons shipped in the United States will rise from 16 billion today to 31.4 billion by 2035.
These trends are fundamental, they are inexorable, and they are escalating. These are the trends that create 21st Century challenges that were unheard of in the 1950s—the last time the United States set a new national transportation challenge. Then, the Interstate Highway Act envisioned a nation united with a new transcontinental highway network. Now, the U.S. needs to be united with a seamless and flexible system of modes to accommodate the frenetic and competitive global marketplace.
