Home | A Vision for a Congestion-Free America
A Vision for a Congestion-Free America
Imagine a system where travelers are free of congestion, where travel is predictable, fast and reliable.
Improving Performance
“Congestion is one of the single largest threats to our economic prosperity. Each year, Americans lose 3.7 billion hours and 2.3 billion gallons of fuel sitting in traffic jams. Worse, congestion is affecting the quality of American’s lives by robbing them of the 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
Traffic congestion is crippling our road network. The average commuter spends one work week each year stuck in traffic. Slowdowns in freight movement on the roads and on the railroads cause billions of dollars in delay. Businesses recognize that getting employees to work on time is important and getting goods to market on time is essential. Congress understands this as well. Reducing congestion should be one of the highest priorities for the next reauthorization bill.
It is estimated that 50 percent of congestion is due to inadequate capacity. The remaining 50 percent is caused by crashes, breakdowns, construction work, weather, and special events. To deal with these issues, the nation must invest in capacity, maximize the performance of the current system and work to reduce demand through use of other modes. The next Federal transportation program should feature the use of advanced technologies and better systems management techniques to reduce congestion, improve throughput, and increase system reliability. Highway managers can use the resources they are given to reduce traffic delays through quick clearance of fender benders and breakdowns, better snow and ice control, and advanced public notice of construction work and major events. It is vital for our quality of life and the productivity of our economy to provide a transportation system for the future that is fast and reliable.
Advanced technologies can be used to improve services for transit riders as well. Customers should be able to receive real-time information about when buses or rail cars will arrive or depart, and use smart cards interchangeably on all transit services. Another way to improve transit system performance is to make connections as seamless as possible. Joint use of terminals by intercity passenger bus, rail and local bus services will increase the convenience to customers. Passengers desiring to travel from one city to another could receive trip schedules on the web giving them portal-to-portal instructions on routing and pick-up points.
The dial-in “511” traveler information system, which is available in 28 states today, will be significantly improved and operate in all 50 states by 2015. In the future, travelers will be able to receive real-time estimates of travel times and parking availability. Traveler information will become a commodity, available from national firms competing to gather and sell information to shippers, travelers, and public agencies.
Traditional traffic sensor systems can be replaced with information generated from vehicles communicating their location, speed, roadway condition, and weather information directly to roadside receivers. This information could improve traffic signal control and ramp metering, and enable managers to monitor flow on parallel routes, diverting traffic to roadways with underutilized capacity.
Reduce Demand or Where Possible Shift It to Transit
Demand management strategies can be used to reduce peak period congestion and slow overall growth in vehicle miles of travel (VMT). This would include shifting as many passenger trips as possible to transit, intercity passenger rail, use of congestion pricing, such as variable toll rates, and telecommuting.
States and local government can work together to limit the amounts of additional highway arterials that will have to be built. Community design can be used to maximize local trips being made on local streets, and only provide for trips on arterials when absolutely necessary. Strict access control can be applied to arterials to preserve their capacity to the maximum extent possible.
Preserve and Modernize the System Built Over the Past Century
Imagine that the highway, transit, and rail systems built over the past century, have been rebuilt and modernized so they last for at least the next 100 years.
The first priority for our future transportation network should be to preserve and modernize the system of highways, transit and rail already in place. (Figure 13). For highways, routine maintenance will no longer suffice for facilities which had been in service 40 to 50 years. Pavement foundations need to be rebuilt and many bridges rebuilt or replaced. Many structures need to be modernized to carry heavier truck loads, faster design speeds, and traffic growth. As this reconstruction work proceeds, techniques need to be used to minimize disruption to the traveling public. These include the use of components fabricated off-site, longer lasting materials, work at night, short-term shutdowns to allow intensive work, and incentive contracts to get contractors to finish work faster.
Photo courtesy of the Florida Department of Transportation. Design-build contracting was used to speed the rebuilding of the Escambia Bay Bridge on Interstate 10, replacing spans damaged by Hurricane Ivan. The estimated life of the new span is 75 years.
Improved asphalt pavement technologies will be developed that will continue to meet the nation’s needs. This will include the increased recycling of Hot Mix Asphalt pavements to conserve resources and reduce costs, development of Warm Mix Asphalt to reduce energy consumption and emissions, construction of Perpetual Pavements for long life and easy maintenance, and Porous Pavements to reduce noise.
Figure 13 
Concrete pavement technologies are improving as well. Thin unbonded concrete overlays, four to five inches in depth, have proven to be a rehabilitation option for composite (asphalt over concrete) pavements that exhibit significant deterioration. When properly designed and constructed, unbonded resurfacing has been shown to increase load-carrying capacity and extend pavement life. With current trends toward increasing traffic demand and projects located in congested urban areas, rapid repair is essential. The installation of precast slabs for rapid repair of concrete pavement has shown that the concept is sound. Real life instalation of slabs in Minnesota have been successfully completed in closure times between five and eight hours. California is exploring whether advances in concrete pavement design, construction, and materials technologies can make it possible to achieve100-year concrete pavement service life.
Photo courtesy of World Highways, April 2007. GPS and laser-guided earthmovers whose work is guided by three-dimensional software programs, can get the job done faster and more accurately.
New materials such as composites may be part of the solution. Fiber-reinforced polymer composites are lightweight, high-strength, corrosion resistant materials which can be prefabricated off site and rapidly installed, minimizing traffic disruption. Thirty years from now composite technology will have expanded to include nanocomposities which may offer even greater advantages in terms of installation and service life.
For transit, many bus and rail maintenance facilities will need to be updated. Stations, tracks, and bus shelters will need to be refurbished and bus fleets and rail cars replaced. Because of increased demand, many bus, light rail, subway, and commuter-rail systems need to be modernized and their capacity expanded. The costs of funding the preservation and modernization work will require resources well beyond those available in 2007.
The Urban Land Institute report titled, Infrastructure 2007, described the situation well. “Mature economies with established but aging infrastructure networks face gargantuan bills for deferred maintenance on roads, water systems, dams, and electric grids. Retooling systems—building rail corridors and incorporating mass transit—will require huge additional capital outlays that many governments are not prepared to pay. Americans only start to recognize a potential crisis and continue to put off the day of reckoning. Caused by two decades of underspending, ‘a yawning budget gap’ swallows initiatives to fund deferred maintenance.”
According to U.S. DOT’s latest Conditions and Performance Report, transit infrastructure has an existing backlog of $27.66 billion: $13.7 for vehicles, $2.3 billion for stations, $6.9 billion for systems, $$3.5 billion for facilities, and $1.3 billion for guideways. It shows that in 2004, transit capital investment nationally was $12.6 billion, some $9.2 billion short of U.S. DOT’s 2006 “cost to improve” estimate for transit of $21.8 billion.
What level of investment will be required in the future just to preserve the Interstate System? U.S. DOT’s 2004 Conditions and Performance report estimated that it would take an annual investment of $31 billion to fund Interstate preservation. Adjusting that “constant dollar” estimate to “year-of-expenditure dollars,” AASHTO estimates that it will take at least an annual investment of $49 billion to do what is necessary in 2015, and $72 billion annually by 2030. If investment fails to keep pace with the preservation needed, the costs will spiral upward to even greater levels.
An analysis of future investment requirments for non-Interstate highways, transit, and rail is addressed in the AASHTO report, Future Needs of the U.S. Surface Transportation System.
Photo courtesy of the Missouri Department of Transportation.The transportation system of the future will demand seamless connections for passengers traveling by air, public transportation, rail or highways.
