Traffic engineer Ted Trepanier’s career-altering epiphany hit him like a ten-car pileup that long weekend of July 15, 2011, better known in Los Angeles as Carmageddon. That’s when he finally noticed America’s transportation revolution hidden in plain sight.
Not that Carmageddon’s planners sought revolution. All they wanted was to fix the soul-killing traffic on Interstate 405, and to do it the old-fashioned way: by adding lanes, the go-to gridlock solution for generations.
Trepanier watched with interest from his home in Seattle, then incredulity, as Carmageddon turned into Carmaheaven and the worrisome lane closures made traffic, however briefly, better. Traffic planners had bedrock beliefs about how to fix things and how things worked on streets and highways. Now, in Trepanier’s view, those assumptions went out the window.
Ted Trepanier had embraced a vision handed down long before he was born, a vision of ever more cars, trucks, lanes, and parking spaces. Roads and streets were, first and foremost, for drivers, and their free movement was everything. Such car-centrism had been wildly controversial a century ago but has since taken on the staying power of Moses’s tablets. That’s how the world worked. Until now.
His colleagues viewed Carmageddon as a curiosity, but Trepanier saw a turning point—a shift from a world dominated by car ownership to one of mobility by any means. Just a few years ago, Carmageddon might have been more like the nightmare everyone had feared, but something fundamental had changed, and the bewildering trends Trepanier and his colleagues had been trying to ignore since the start of the new century now made sense. That’s why app-enabled car and ridesharing were displacing traditional cab and car rental companies (who were resorting to lawsuits and lobbying to stave off the future) and why carmakers and computer companies were investing billions in perfecting driverless cars that were best suited to a sharing economy, not a three-cars-for-every-household world that Detroit longed to foster. That’s why the country had hit peak cars, peak shopping trips, and peak roads years before while online giant Amazon was in growth mode, homing in on robot warehouses, 3-D printers, drones, and that Holy Grail of online shopping, same-day delivery. Why drive to the store when someone will drive your purchases to you? Next-gen Amazon computers have even begun predicting customers’ orders and shipping before the orders are actually placed—all to make personal driving unnecessary, even unattractive.
And perhaps most important this switch from a focus on car ownership to an embrace of a smorgasbord of mobility options that played out during Carmageddon explains why so many Millennials, America’s largest demographic, are losing interest in driving and buying cars. The number of “zero-car families” has been steadily climbing every year since 2007, after shrinking year after year with dependable regularity since 1960. One in ten American families has no car at all. Detroit would have sold another half million cars in the past decade if not for car-sharing smartphone apps. The transportation world had been passing him by, Trepanier realized, and, like all revolutions, the new trends could be seen either as dire threat or golden opportunity.
Trepanier, a baby boomer who grew up believing that his car’s pink slip was the key to freedom, suddenly understood his twenty-seven-year-old son who has never owned nor wanted a car, who sees car ownership as a cost and burden and a parking nightmare that limits rather than unleashes his mobility. His son just wanted to get door to door simply, easily, cheaply. “Why would I want to blow all my money on the care and feeding of a car, Dad?” he had once said. “So I can pay to park it all day at work, or outside places I can get to just fine without a car?” Carmageddon didn’t surprise Ted’s son at all. From his point of view, LA had simply, finally wised up.
And so, says Trepanier, had he. He left the government and joined Inrix, a Microsoft spin-off that created a free smartphone app that gathers real-time data on traffic worldwide better than all the billions spent by government on sensors and traffic cameras. Inrix is a major player in crowdsourced, cloud-stored traffic mapping that it uses to enable mobility rather than just offer GPS driving directions. BMW is deploying it first, as is the New Jersey Department of Transportation. Its technology tells drivers how to get places not based on the shortest distance but on real-time traffic, congestion, construction, public transit, and parking data. Your BMW will be able to tell you to pull off the freeway at the next park-and-ride and hop on an approaching commuter train or bus because it will get you where you want to go faster and without parking hassles and the congestion that results from drivers circling in search of parking. Carmakers are actually building technology that tells people to do the unthinkable: to get out of their cars.
Monorails. Flying cars. Nuclear-powered cars. A helicopter in every garage. Subway bullet trains traversing the country. Moving sidewalks. Magnetic highways to guide vehicles so drivers can relax and play board games with the kids. Rocket planes that go suborbital to cover long distances quicker.
We were supposed to have all these by now, or so the predictions of the future went a couple generations ago. Traffic was supposed to have been solved. Energy and pollution, too. All you had to do was go to the World’s Fair back in 1964 to find that out.
The problem with predicting the future is that what seems to make sense today often doesn’t match up with future reality. Computer networks and the Web were imagined years before they were part of daily life, but no one predicted how networked smartphones would impact transportation, enabling ridesharing, traffic avoidance, and e-commerce that displaces trips to the store, the bank, and the post office. A hundred years ago, streetcars were predicted to last forever as America’s most popular form of mobility because they were clean, efficient, cheap, and easy. Fifty years ago, the idea that bicyclists and pedestrians would want to reclaim lanes from cars would have sounded absurd. Or rather, having local governments allow and encourage it would have sounded preposterous. And no one would have predicted that doing so would improve traffic flow and safety. Yet efforts in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and cities around the world have seen a reduction in congestion after they “calmed” traffic by forcing cars to slow down and share the space. Many drivers and civic leaders remain unconvinced by the data that supports the value of traffic calming, and the political battles over such ideas have become yet another front in the culture war. It is one of the perversities of the era that, in the political arena, bikes and trolleys are deemed “liberal,” while cars are “conservative,” even though in real life all political persuasions use these various modes of travel equally. Or that cars are by their very nature the least conserving form of personal transportation.
Surprisingly for a car-centric community, almost all the official traffic studies and plans for the Los Angeles freeways, going back to the 1920s and continuing on into the sixties, called for mass transit embedded in the freeway medians: heavy rail early on, then light rail, then lines to connect to and revitalize the existing Pacific Electric street car system, and finally, in a fit of Disneyland inspiration and envy, monorails with quiet rubber tires cruising up and down the centers of freeways. Many of these plans were supported by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and other prominent business leaders. Yet all were eventually discarded, either by voters who rejected extra taxes, or by politicians angry that their city wasn’t on some proposed route, or simply because the age of the motorcar had arrived and Los Angeles saw itself as ground zero. Let San Francisco build its sixties-era Bay Area Rapid Transit System trains to connect all the cities up there. LA wanted freeway lanes, not rails.
And so Los Angeles’s privately owned trolley and interurban rail system—once the largest such system in the world—was shut down, the rights of way sold off. My streetcar suburb of Seal Beach marketed its real estate in the early 1900s with newspaper ads pointing out that Pacific Electric’s Red Car Line of electric trolleys could get prospective buyers there from downtown LA for a nickel. Now the last Red Car is a rather forlorn single trolley parked on the last twenty feet of track next to the Seal Beach town library, converted into a small museum with scant hours and even more scant visitors. There are no more trolleys to the beach cities and ports of Southern California, which once delivered both passengers and freight in the region. The lines that served the areas of the city now occupied by Los Angeles International Airport disappeared, too, although air travelers today would give much to be able to take such a conveyance instead of the 405 Freeway. Meanwhile, San Francisco constructed what is now considered to be one of the more cost-effective mass transit systems in the U.S. built since World War II. Travelers can land at the airport there and take a BART train almost anywhere in the Bay Area.
Most of the nation followed LA’s lead.
Not until 1990 did Los Angeles embark on an ambitious light rail and subway building project in an attempt to re-create some of the mass transit service so blithely abandoned a generation ago. The city could have kept all that for pennies on the dollars now being spent.
It’s tempting to judge those earlier decisions harshly, to condemn the shuttering of a valuable transportation asset and the refusal to build a new one when it would have been so much easier and less expensive to lay those tracks when the freeways first went in, rather than trying to shoehorn them into a built-out urban landscape today. But were those decisions wrong? Mass transit ridership was dying in the region even before World War II. And for all the money being spent on new light rail and trolley systems now, ridership is only a fraction of what it was a century ago. Cars won. And the decisions made to reject those multimodal freeways were rational at the time. People wanted cars. They didn’t want to see America from the train. They wanted to see the U.S.A. in their Chevrolets. They wanted to drive to work in air-conditioned comfort, not walk to the streetcar or train station, then wait around on crowded platforms.
All the billions spent on mass rail transit in LA in recent years, the most ambitious build-out of multiple routes anywhere in the country, has not reduced car traffic jams as hoped. It helps somewhat, but the reductions make it hard to justify the expense. This mirrors the experience nationwide, even as about 25 percent of surface transportation spending goes to fund mass transit. Mass transit use has picked up a bit in recent years but still is lower than it was a quarter century ago and far below its absolute peak in the 1920s, when it was the best and most desirable way to get around the nation’s cities and suburbs. Indeed, suburban development followed the extension of mass transit lines back then in the era of streetcar suburbs, because the trolleys were considered a prerequisite for suburban development. Most streetcar suburbs have been absorbed into cities proper since then, and suburban development after World War II eschewed following mass transit and instead relied on car accessibility. The new mass transit spending is not enticing waves of new riders to abandon their cars and ease road traffic. The convenience of the car parked in front of the house trumps the inconvenience of getting to a train or trolley or bus. In the 1920s, Americans were not deterred by this last-mile problem. People walked to the stop—no big deal. Now it is a very big deal. We are conditioned to expect service door to door, and mass transit just doesn’t do that.
Public transit has become yet another tussle in the culture wars. Critics say mass transit spending, at least on the federal end, should be shifted to highways in order to deal with traffic. But that strategy can provide no more relief for congestion and overload than the mass transit projects. The $3.6 trillion in unfunded maintenance and repairs on the nation’s roads and bridges would barely be scratched by slashing transit spending. The hidden subsidies for drivers, who have never borne the full cost of the roads they use and who now barely pay half through gas taxes, are just too great. Besides, what would the money be used for? The strategy of adding new lanes—even boosting that highway in Texas to twenty-six lanes—just doesn’t work. Traffic is worse on the 405 after the Carmageddon lane addition. It’s been shown time and again.
Los Angeles and California have spent millions on traffic control centers with state-of-the-art monitors, street and freeway cameras, computer algorithms that let traffic lights and freeway on-ramp meters be timed and adjusted to alter and maximize the flow of traffic. In truth, these systems are amazing pieces of technology, wonderful in emergencies and for disaster response—and making sure celebrity limousines get to the Oscars on time. But they really aren’t very good at “controlling” everyday traffic, at easing congestion significantly and keeping ordinary cars moving at ordinary times. Their effect is negligible on that score, perhaps shaving a couple minutes here or there off a trip. Traffic congestion in the city and region remains some of the worst in the country.
The old approaches, experts such as Trepanier say, just aren’t working. The old predictions are failing. The old rules are wrong. Building for speed in dense urban landscapes—laying down stroads where there should be streets—kills people more than it eases congestion. And the old way of paying for roadbuilding and maintenance based on gasoline purchases isn’t paying for nearly enough. The fact that Americans are driving less per capita than in years past has only exacerbated the chronic underfunding of transportation in America.
No one was predicting any of this ten years ago. No one.
The Millennial generation is, statistically, somewhat less interested in cars and driving and suburban living than older generations. How much of that is due to a bad economy and a tough job market is hard to say, and there is a tendency in the popular media to overstate the Millennials’ divergence. Plenty of them still drive, plenty of them want cars, plenty of them would jump at a nice home in the suburbs if they could afford it. The divergence is real, however, and measurable: Americans between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than in 2001—a greater decline in driving than any other age group.1
That might sound dramatic, but focusing on it, using it to posit a longer-term shift that will drive transformation in transportation, is yet another risky prediction. And it distracts from a much larger and more far-reaching distinction: Millennials have embraced the app-driven sharing economy that really is disrupting the transportation world. It’s calling Uber instead of driving home drunk, or relying on the crowdsourcing of the traffic app Waze. It’s not about Millennials loving buses, bikes, or trolleys more than cars. The trends more suggest a tendency to be transportation omnivores in ways that car-centric older generations are not. Ride services such as Uber and Lyft are alluring because, with a simple app, a car can be summoned to take you where you need to be, without parking concerns, without car payments—other than the fare for that one trip—or insurance costs, or responsibility to navigate. If your road travel needs are below 10,000 miles—the average nationally is about 13,400—dumping your car and taking a ridesharing service may save you money. The inefficiencies of owning a car, of having it sit idle twenty-two hours a day even as it is Americans’ second largest expense after housing, is especially grating on a generation that has been burdened with a flagging economy and shortages of jobs, not to mention unprecedented educational debt. It is as Ted Trepanier’s son explained: Why would Millennials love cars? They’re too damn expensive for what they bring to the table. Mobility agnosticism is the Millennial superpower that is truly disrupting transportation—that and the emergence of a few key technologies.
President Obama’s secretary of transportation, Anthony Foxx, is hanging an entire national policy on this shift, a policy he has dubbed “Beyond Traffic.” His report of the same name calls for a reordering of priorities more in line with the Millennials’ mobility tendencies. Assuming the country gets over being stuck on an inadequate 1993 gas tax and makes transportation funding sustainable for the first time since Jimmy Carter was president, Foxx envisions making mobility, not cars, the center of a balanced approach to transportation policy. He says the country must embrace new technology, particularly automation and connected cars, for safety, congestion reduction, and efficiency. Continuing current policy will bring disaster within the next twenty-five years, according to Foxx, whose report provides a grim summary of the current transportation picture:
In the race to build world-class transportation, America once set the pace. We used to have a big lead.
In the 19th century, we built the Erie Canal and Transcontinental Railroad. In the last century, we took over building the Panama Canal, completed the Interstate Highway System, and set the world standard in freight transport and aviation.
But our lead has slipped away. We are behind. Way behind. The quality of our roads, for example, is no longer rated No. 1. We’re No. 16.
And it is not just that our infrastructure is showing its age—our country, in many ways, has outgrown it. If you drive a car, you now spend, on average, the equivalent of five vacation days every year sitting in traffic. If you drive a truck, highway congestion has made you an expert at navigating bumpy side roads—and you are not alone. Every year, trucks are losing $27 billion on wasted time and fuel.2
Foxx’s report is understated and diplomatic, 316 pages of reasoned argument, history, and prediction. But it accurately describes a system overloaded and failing, with grave consequences for safety, the movement of people, and the movement of goods that sustains our economy. This is not a cheery picture. It is a picture of a transportation system still capable of delivering incredible results that make life and work better and more prosperous, that takes us and our stuff door to door better than any other civilization has dared to imagine. But it’s also a system living on borrowed time and showing the strain. It is a system that has become unsustainable.
The good news: there are five important trends that will bring change, in some cases massive change—if they continue.
Three of them affect the goods-movement side of the door-to-door machine. First, there is the transformation of China from a low-wage factory sweatshop economy into a true economic powerhouse, where workers are demanding—and getting—better wages, benefits, and working conditions. The ready supply of rural peasants who flocked from the countryside to keep China’s factories moving has begun to dry up. Higher wages in China make offshoring of jobs and manufacturing less attractive to American companies. They have also roiled China’s economy and relentless growth. This is driving the second trend, still nascent, of “re-shoring”—a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. that would have been offshored in the recent past. The more likely scenario is not a large-scale return of existing jobs to America but the increased likelihood that new technologies and products that emerge and create jobs in the future can stay in the U.S., sucking miles out of the door-to-door system for the first time in many years.
The third trend, also related to the other two, is the emergence of the fledgling 3-D printing industry as one of the major disruptive technologies on the horizon.3 The promise of this “factory-in-a-box” technology is the ability to manufacture products locally at a competitive cost, even in small quantities. The latest 3-D printers are being used to produce increasingly complex products, from aerial drones to prosthetic limbs to car bodies. It may take a decade or more of development for the technology to mature sufficiently, but the possibilities are revolutionary. Imagine ordering a product online and instead of it being physically shipped from factory to store to customer, the proprietary design is shipped as a digital file via the Internet to your neighborhood 3-D print shop, where you pick up your purchase later that day once the printing is complete—transportation virtually removed from the process, “streaming” products as we currently stream video.
The technology is not there yet, but it’s hard to imagine a greater disruption in the door-to-door universe if the range of materials it can fashion becomes broad enough, and the costs low enough. Such a technology would revolutionize goods movement . . . by eliminating the movement. And the overload.
The other two emerging trends are more about moving people than goods, although they could have profound implications for the have-it-now e-commerce economy as well. The first is the sharing/crowdsourced world of traffic apps and ridesharing. They are disruptive in their own right, demonstrating alternatives to car ownership never imagined before the rise of smartphones. But their greatest impact may be as a test case and as a necessary first step on the way to the most disruptive transportation trend on the horizon, the one that could inspire as much change as the invention of the car itself: the driverless car.