Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (34 page)

Perhaps that sort of lapse is inevitable when thinking of what the world should look like in twenty years. So much can—and will—change in two decades: twenty years before 2015, cell phones were dumb and heavy as bricks, and apps were the things you put on the table before dinner. Google didn't exist. The Web barely existed.

Twenty years before that, personal computers didn't exist, except as a kit you had to assemble. Gasoline cost 58.7 cents a gallon. Kids still walked to school.

Levinson says there's a simple solution: Make shorter-term plans. Set some ambitious but achievable goals that can happen in two to five years, and stop worrying about those big, bold, and mostly failed projects that look good at a ribbon cutting, then yield more bills than benefits. “Instead, choose the projects with the highest return on investment. You get a very different set of investments when you look for the one that has the most benefits instead of which ones are the sexiest or have the most political appeal.”

So, what are these investments? It turns out they are not a secret. It's well-known what works. We could solve traffic. All you
have to do is treat it like a market, subject it to the laws of supply and demand. All you have to do, in short, is price it correctly.

In other words, we need to revisit the worst four-letter word in the door-to-door business: the toll. Not for the revenue—though that wouldn't hurt, either, given the decline of the gas tax. It would be to change behavior.

Here's the problem. Peak times—primarily rush hour, when commuters go to work in the morning and come home in the evening—are when highways and streets are overloaded. People get stuck in traffic, lose time, waste gas, and have accidents. The movement of goods is affected and the economy suffers. The rest of the time, the off-peak drive times, most roads have plenty of capacity. Think of it as electricity: there's always plenty to go around except in hot summer days, when everyone turns on the air-conditioning and overload follows. Utilities charge extra for using more power at peak times—that's Supply and Demand 101—but the purpose of the higher rates is also to persuade people to reduce their usage to avoid overload.

Roads can work the same way. But right now there is no cost difference for driving at peak times rather than off-peak. Which is why more than half the trips during rush hour aren't work trips. People are going shopping or driving kids to school or going to breakfast (or happy hour) at peak times because they can do so without consequence. There is no mechanism to make them think about the delays they're imposing on the commuters and truckers who have no choice but to be there at that time. Putting tolls in place during rush hour, and taking them away at non-peak times, would provide an incentive for drivers to shift their optional non-work trips to different times.

“If just ten percent of those non-work-related rush hour drivers were persuaded to stay away during peak hours, congestion would disappear,” Levinson says. “It's the single best thing we could do.”

The technique is called congestion pricing, and it has worked in London, Milan, Singapore, and Stockholm. It's the cheapest cure for traffic jams there is, because it requires little new infrastructure and we know it works. It could even take the place of the desperately needed hike in the gas tax that Congress refuses to consider. But aside from a few small-scale demonstration projects, congestion pricing has not been politically viable in the U.S. Elected officials consider tolls to be toxic with voters, traffic cure or not, market based or not.
¹⁵

The aversion to tolls extends to trucking, as well. A fully loaded heavy truck weighing in at 40,000 pounds does 10,000 times the damage to road surfaces than the average passenger car,
¹⁶
but in general they are not charged in tolls, fees, or gas taxes in proportion to their true cost to the infrastructure (the gas tax for heavy trucks is only a dime more a gallon than for cars). Tolling by weight would solve that inequity, but such proposals are routinely shot down as job killers that would raise the cost of goods. But in truth, giving trucks a pass on the damage they inflict to streets and highways is an enormous subsidy that the nation's taxpayers have to cover anyway.

Related simple solutions include persuading businesses to reduce rush hour travel with a simple time shift: have some employees start a bit earlier, others a bit later, staggering their commutes. Another way to tame rush hour would be for employees to work from home one or two days a week, even half days. Tax incentives for cooperative employers and tax penalties for uncooperative ones might be used. But there's no reason why employers couldn't do this simply out of a desire for happier, more productive employees who get to avoid driving in terrible traffic. This is a potentially zero-cost solution to congestion and, again, even just a 10 percent buy-in could lead to a permanent Carmaheaven. It is the ultimate low-hanging fruit of the transportation world:
time-shift commuters. It could even be as little as a half hour shift, because traffic behaves like a wave due to the habits of humans: rush hour traffic is heavier at the top of the hour than at the half hour.

Another cheap solution to traffic congestion would be the conversion of many—not all, but many—intersections from traffic lights to traffic circles. Mini-circles work well in residential areas instead of four-way stop signs. This is another simple strategy that, like tolls, met with an irrational hatred when proposed in American communities. But the circles—also called rotaries or roundabouts—are proven, with abundant evidence in the U.S. and abroad, to be far safer. They also speed up the flow of traffic by as much as 20 percent (a no-brainer: the cars don't have to stop and wait for lights to change). There are fewer crashes in circles, and those that do occur are at low speeds and never head-on. The kind of high-speed, blow-through-a-red-light, crushing impacts with other cars and pedestrians that happen daily at signaled intersections just don't happen in traffic circles. Circles are also cheaper: there are no lights to power or maintain, no sensors embedded in the streets, and nothing to fail during a blackout. There has been a slow uptick in the number of traffic circles in the country in recent years, but America is still the land of the traffic light.

Mass transit is another area that could be fixed far more cheaply than most believe. And the focus should be on the most humble of containers: the bus. Investing in bus transit gets the most bang for the buck, because the infrastructure—streets and roads— is already in place, which means the cost of adding service is far lower than trains and trolleys. But big rail projects are sexy, they draw in big federal grants, they're photogenic—but they're not solving traffic problems. They're not having a transformative effect on the door-to-door travails Americans face each day.

To understand what it would take to make the bus the new stars of transit, Levinson suggests we look to the streetcar, the former king of the transit world. Why did the streetcars that flourished before World War II fail? Why did LA abandon the biggest streetcar system in history? Simple: cars got in the way. As good as those old systems once were, people fled them because they became slower than cars. And that was because cars were allowed to drive on their tracks and get in the way. Then the trolleys had two causes of delay: stopping for passengers and stopping for cars. That made them slow. If trolleys had gone faster than cars, if the cars had been kept out of their way—if the tracks, which were there first, had been sacrosanct—the story might have ended differently. And communities that are now reviving trolleys are making the same mistake by allowing cars to drive on their tracks. It seems more convenient that way, says Levinson, but it's a recipe for failure.

Buses are in a similar position. They tangle with cars constantly, and end up losing. Buses always take longer because of the problem of stops plus traffic. No one who commutes by car will switch to bus riding because buses get them somewhere faster.

But what if they could? What if buses were given priority over cars—their own lanes on city streets? This could be justified on the grounds that one vehicle with fifty people onboard should have priority over a car with one person onboard. One bus can take fifty cars off the road. Decades ago, Los Angeles dreamed of streetcar lines or monorails running on all the freeways. Why not buses? Give them the carpool lanes. Let them go faster than the speed limit everywhere the freeways go. How many times would a commuter stuck in traffic have to see a bus zooming by, unimpeded, before he or she decided to give it a try?

This has been attempted in limited fashion in a number of cities with express transit ways, but why not make it the rule instead
of the exception? If a bus is both faster and cheaper than a car, it would be a far more attractive option.

There's still the last-mile problem, and this is where the new dynamic of ridesharing services can complete the solution. The transit authority could partner with a rideshare service—or create its own—to get riders to bus stations (or rail stations, for that matter). Offer riders a package deal, a true door-to-door solution, at a rate that beats car ownership. It's possible. Lyft has launched a service called Lyft Line, a rideshare minibus that picks up multiple passengers and charges far less for the trip than for a single rider. Over half the Lyft rides in San Francisco are now Lyft Line rides. This is how public transit agencies need to think. This is how they can gain market share. Lyft executives are already publicly positioning the company as a partner with mass transit rather than a competitor. A rideshare–express bus combo will certainly cost a lot less than paying $12 billion for light rail with a 2.6 percent share of commuter ridership. If such a service could be fast, convenient, and affordable compared to owning a car and commuting alone at peak hours, it could change the door-to-door world in a big way and prepare the way for the driverless car (and driverless bus) of the future.

As for goods movement, where bus express lines don't make sense, give the carpool lanes to the trucks. Absent that, just relieving congested car traffic with tolls and bus ways would open up the road for the movement of goods. The reduction of congestion would reduce the need for new construction and free up funds to repair the existing roads and bridges that the goods-movement system desperately needs.

This is just a sampling of the sorts of high-impact, affordable solutions available. There are also the safety measures available now: collision avoidance systems that step in when drivers doze or are distracted or just make errors (systems that airliners have
had for decades); automated breath analysis for preventing drunk driving; governors to prevent speeding. We could deploy them now if we had the will. In terms of the lives saved and medical costs avoided, they would pay for themselves, over and over. Driverless cars may make all this moot, but at best, that's a decade or two in the future. There are solutions available today.

We have indeed, reached a fork in the road.

Then there is the matter of global warming. It's impossible to understand the transportation embedded in our lives without acknowledging the carbon footprint attached to it and the meteoric increase in that footprint from the last forty years of globalization and off-shoring. That rise is a direct byproduct of our door-to-door economy—including the rise of China as the leading carbon polluter, where so many of the emissions are tied to the manufacture and transport of U.S. goods. This is not what anyone wants to hear. When it comes to global warming and transportation, the same strange psychology comes into play that enables drivers to shrug off a road death every fifteen minutes and a trip to the emergency room every 12.6 seconds. The inextricable link between our cars and climate change, like the endless parade of crashes on our roads, are simply perceived as the inevitable cost of doing business—our normal state, nothing to get excited about, nothing to do about it. Yet our fears over the disruption and cost that would arise from
halting
the carnage or the carbon are perceived all too acutely. Just discussing the possibility of scrapping our current way of moving ourselves and our stuff leaves Americans feeling either bereft, angry, or convinced that embracing change means giving up what we know and love best.

This fear of deviating from a “normal” that is literally killing us masks what should be obvious. As author Naomi Klein has so ably documented in her 2014 book,
This Changes Everything
, a shift to clean transportation and carbon-neutral energy through
technology that's already available can create
more
, rather than fewer, opportunities for prosperity, security, and quality of life for the vast majority of American and world citizens. What would that require? Nothing less that this: a rapid shift to electrically powered and autonomous shared cars for shorter trips that aren't covered by walking or biking. Clean mass transit systems, built on some of the highway lanes now dedicated to conventional cars, would expand to cover a greater share of longer trips. Rail, trucking, and ships dedicated to goods movement could start reducing their carbon footprint by transitioning from bunker and diesel fuel to natural gas, then electricity and carbon-neutral biofuels as those sources ramp up. These moves would be powered by a revamped grid dominated by renewable power sources that are
already
price competitive with fossil fuels. Embedding more miles and energy in our products can no longer be the winning strategy. Removing miles, shrinking the distance or the carbon (or both) needed to go door to door, must once again be the low-cost, low-risk approach, as it has been for most of human history. This means an end to the silent but massive subsidy that excuses energy companies, carmakers, and consumers from paying the true price of fossil fuel dependence, including the costs it imposes on national security, the environment, the climate, healthcare, and human lives.

In the business world there would be big losers in this shift—the powerful fossil fuel industry. But there would be equally big winners in renewables, in producers of electric cars, autonomous vehicles, and electrical infrastructure. Tens of millions of jobs would be created to convert homes, ports, logistics centers, military bases, and factories to solar, wind, and bio-power with built-in energy storage for round-the-clock use and charging of our vehicles. Imagine offering America's 174,000 coal industry workers first dibs on those jobs, and everyone else a G.I. Bill–like
free college or vocational education in exchange for signing up for five years of public service building this sustainable version of America, or exporting it abroad through a new green Peace Corps. We wouldn't be giving up our way of life. We'd be making it stronger. All we would be doing is a long-overdue upgrade of a filthy, creaking, overloaded, inefficient century-old model that has worked miracles but is now past its prime—so expensive that it's left us trillions of dollars behind in maintenance and repairs, even as it sabotages the delicate balance of our climate.