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The American Transportation Network of Tomorrow
This report sets out the challenges to America’s future mobility over the next five decades, and the potential solutions identified through a visioning process of the nation’s top transportation experts. A threshold question, however, is “what will this mean to the lives of our children and grandchildren.” The following projection shows how America can change for the better if we choose to invest in transportation—invest in our future.
Connecting the USA and the Globe
The American Transportation Network of highways, transit, rail, and ports is poised on the threshold of a period of innovation unprecedented in our history. The benefits from forward-looking investment will be the underpinnings of a thriving national economy, maintaining America as the international leader in technology and wealth creation, with benefits flowing to all citizens.
Envision a future where our personal communications tools enable us to move about with more choices and efficiency than ever before. We can instantly pick routes and modes to our destinations with the shortest travel times, reroute around slowing traffic, and order dinner for pick up enroute from work while letting loved ones know our exact arrival time and what’s for dinner.
The digital economy will enable many more of us to work from home, the lobby of our condo towers, local coffee shops, or neighborhood parks. We will still travel to get together to work as teams, but many of us will do our work by exchanging information over the electronic network.
More of us than ever will live in rebuilt cities in dense, vibrant neighborhoods where we can safely walk, ride a bike or transit to work, the store, or library. Home delivery is so efficient and flexible, more of us than ever will get door-to-door delivery for the everyday items we use.
Today’s tragic toll of 43,000 people dying on our highways will be a distant memory. Traffic deaths will be rare as we continue to reduce fatalities by more than 1,000 each year. Our insurance rates will plummet as losses from accidents greatly diminish.
New materials, construction techniques and designs will enable us to maintain, repair, and replace the network faster, cheaper, and with longer-lasting life spans made possible by improved life-cycle management. We will recycle an ever increasing percentage of materials in the course of maintaining and expanding the system.
By driving shorter distances, walking and riding transit, and intelligent routing of our travel to better utilize our connected street and highway grid, we will reduce congestion. Strategic investment in new lanes, new corridors, and transit service will remove bottlenecks and add choices for all. Seniors, who will make up a much larger portion of our population, will get where they want to go by affordable public, on-demand transit so they are able to live more engaged and connected lives.
Our cities will be smog-free as we fuel transport with electric, bio-fuel, and other renewable forms of energy which will dramatically reshape our economy. We will no longer be dependent on imported oil and we can reduce carbon emissions to almost zero. We will spend smarter and less on day-to-day transportation giving us more options for housing, travel, shopping and recreation.
Our land-use planning will result in streets and highways that support multiple forms of travel, and take into account housing, neighborhood retail, clean water, and wildlife habitat. We will achieve better-than-before design with improved quality of life, while natural systems are restored and preserved. Trails, bikeways and greenways will provide natural corridors through our cities, connecting to broader agricultural and natural landscapes across the nation where millions of trees planted by school kids, churches, and community groups will flourish and mature.
Our small towns and rural communities will be linked into the national transportation grid and electronic communications systems so residents enjoy access to goods, services, work, and transportation options as never before. Farm products will move with speed and care from producer to consumer ensuring time-to-market freshness as never before.
Freight will move along automated channels, transferring across modes so fluidly that on-time arrival is taken for granted. Automated and secure port facilities load and unload goods with efficiency undreamed of only decades before. Digital tracking and routing is so advanced that every item moving across the network of rails, highways, intermodal transfer centers, and ports ensures that America continues to lead the world in the efficient flow of goods from factory to store shelf and to front door. Rail and truck corridors channel goods through interconnected hubs allowing guaranteed delivery with predefined arrival times scheduled at shipment.
The American Transportation Network will not be taken for granted. A national consensus has grown around the common understanding of the importance of the system to our individual and collective well being. By working together, Federal, state, and local governments, business, and the general public will show a commitment to reliable and consistent investment to support and advance the network. There will be a broad and shared understanding of the value the network delivers in quality of life, economic vitality, and environmental stewardship. The American Transportation Network will be a sustainable system, the envy of the world.
—Gordon Bell, Seattle, Sustainable Transportation Panel Report Writer
Photo courtesy of the Missouri Department of Transportation. Workers install guardrail on Highway 54 south of Jefferson City, Missouri. An aggressive program of roadway safety improvements has dramatically reduced highway fatalities in the state.
