It's hard to know where to begin in thinking about where we are
and where we need to go - A lot of stars that guide us have shifted
in the sky - but now is the time to start that thinking process. We
have serious work ahead of us. We need to start to make those mental
- maybe even emotional - transitions to new modes of thought to
address the new environment in which we will all have to work.
What's ahead?
The overriding agenda item I see in the new landscape is the
critical need for making the case for mobility - making the case for
transportation as the tool of mobility.
I have spent my professional life as an unabashed advocate for
transportation. I have always argued for its immense value to the
nation, to the economy and to the society. One of the things that
seems to have gotten lost in recent years is the recognition of that
value. A few years ago BTS hosted a conference on the costs and
benefits of transportation - it got 32 papers on costs - and one on
benefits - it came from Europe. Dr. Lakshmannon, then head of BTS,
said no wonder no one uses transportation, it has no benefits.
Too often today, we tend to see transportation only in terms of
its negatives - the delays, the resources consumed, the lives lost,
the pollution generated - to the point where our current goals for
transportation can be met best by everyone's just staying home.
We have highly articulated goals and explicit measures for what
transportation should stop doing; none for what we want it to
achieve!
Transportation's goals are all about speed, cost and reliability
and those are the three things we are terrible at measuring in
transportation!
In years past those of us who plan and build and operate the
nation's transportation system were able to depend on the implicit
recognition of the value of transportation among the general public.
That recognition of the value of transportation's product - mobility
- was and is very real but it's kind of vague, kind of soft. The
recognition of the need for new services and facilities had a
comfortable, almost automatic, consensus, years ago. Today that
consensus has almost evaporated as a social force.
It is our own fault! In general, we have done a very poor job of
making the case for the value of transportation in our society,
depending on the public's own very sound sense of their needs to
make that case for us. That may not be enough in a future filled
with public policy prescriptions.
As Brad Mallory has said, if you base a program on litigious ness
and advocacy - you shouldn't be surprised that it yields advocates
and litigation!
We must begin today to re-establish recognition in the new
Administration and the new Congress of the value of mobility as one
of the great goals of our society. I can tell you that that
recognition - that appreciation is there - we need to reinforce it
and support it. We must make the value of mobility tangible and real
to all our institutions and to all Americans.
Some of the tenets we need to transition to in making the case
for mobility are these:
To me transportation is about society building - not just economy
building - society building ! It ties people together across
distances. Especially today when families are dispersed over the
entire nation. The strength of our economy is the division of labor
and the mobility of workers nationwide. Transportation knits
families back together. The planners still think in terms of
"community" as the people physically next door - our communities
today, as Mel Webber noted years ago, are a product of multiple
voluntary links across vast distances- supported by communications
and transportation.
We need studies of mobility to clarify its function and its value
and to make the case to turn the soft, implicit recognition that
every American has for its value into something tangible and real
that can engender action.
One way of making the case for mobility is look at the lack of it
and its effects.
We are a nation that drives to where it wants to walk! A nation
that brings water from France and puts it on the shelf in the
supermarket next to water from Italy and Switzerland and NJ.
Mobility is central to our being as a society.
As part of making the case we have to challenge some assumptions
that have crept into our rhetoric and thinking. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, another who is transitioning to private life, is quoted in
the Economist magazine this week having said, "beware of certainty
where none exists. Ideological certainty easily degenerates into
insistence upon ignorance."
Among some of the "certainties" we need to examine.
Certainty #1. "America's transportation system is pretty much
complete!"
The first Secretary to say that was probably the first Secretary!
I would say Thomas Jefferson was the first to say it, but he was too
smart!
A nation that adds 25 million people every decade, whose economy
adds $4 trillion per decade; That is still a beacon to immigrants
from all over the world - can never say that its transportation job
is done!
Certainty #2. "You can't build your way out of congestion!"
Yes, you must operate the system well, yes, you must manage the
system well; But yes you must build!
Certainty #3. "Transportation is about more than concrete and
steel."
Yes it is, but there's a lot of concrete and steel required to
make the promise of transportation come true!
Certainty #4. "If you build more - it just fills up again."
Most trips we make have economic transactions at their ends, and
if not they have social interactions of great value to those making
the trips. Given that, "induced travel" which is so reviled today
seems like a very attractive concept to me. Think of all the
"induced travel" we will produce from getting personal vehicles into
the hands of minority populations! We should celebrate it, not
condemn it. Let me tell you where induced demand is going to come
from in the future: from mobility impaired, rural populations and
minorities gaining access to a greater range of jobs and
opportunities, gaining greater participation in the economy and the
society, from the majority of the population gaining the affluence
to act on their social and economic goals.
MY DEFINTION OF CONGESTION: Congestion is people with the
means to act on their social and economic aspirations getting in the
way of other people with the means to act on theirs.
If the price of that new found mobility for those on the lower
rungs of the economy is a little congestion - We should celebrate it
not condemn it.
Certainty #5. We are a customer-driven agency.
I am amused by statements saying we are customer-driven -
customer driven organizations meet their customers needs - they do
not pass judgment on them.
Too often our planning has looked like plotting against the
American people instead of planning for them.
It all comes down to respect for the judgment of the American
people - they are not recalcitrant children to be led to someone's
idea of a more enlightened mode of living - certainly not someone in
Washington. The American people have no obligation to live in ways
that make it convenient for government to serve!
Certainty #6. "America has the best transportation system in
the world?"
Really? Shouldn't perhaps we examine that assertion? Maybe the US
transportation system is not the best in the world anymore. Not the
best in safety, not the best in speed or reliability. The best air
traffic control system? The best built roads? It's still good - but
the best? If not, why not, and how do we get back to being the best?
- are an important set of questions for all of us to pursue. We are
a high labor cost nation - without transportation to reduce our
effective costs we will suffer in world competition.
Where are some of the opportunities and challenges? I will
mention just a few today.
1. Mobility for the new worker and workplace - the
democratization of mobility
2. Safety
3. Tangible
deliverables - a compact with the American people funding for the
future
4. Funding and justifying a new program
1. Mobility for the new worker and workplace - democratization
of mobility
I believe that the major sources of growth in travel demand in
the future will come from the expansion of travel freedom and the
range of travel choices available to our minority populations.
Policies that would increase travel costs or otherwise constrain
choices as a matter of public policy "for our own good" will fall
most heavily on the emerging travel markets - particularly
minorities.
So much of current public policy, aimed at suppressing auto
ownership and use, is unintentionally aimed squarely at those on the
margin of the ability to own and operate a vehicle. Often these
people are actually those who are most auto-dependent. It is clear
that those most affected by such policies will be those on the lower
rungs of the economic ladder.
If the last decade was one of too many commuters, the next will
be the decade of too few. There will be a severe lack of skilled
workers in the future - apparent already. It is this that keeps Mr.
Greenspan up at night! We will have to employ everyone who is
employable. Transportation will have to help. Connecting rural
populations and inner city residents to suburban job centers -
Getting retired workers into new careers - attracting even more
women into the working world. Jobs in the future will be flexible in
a more humanized work place - women have seen to that - jobs of the
future will look to us from this vantage point like part-time jobs.
We can, in this new administration, dedicate ourselves to the
final democratization of mobility. We can focus on the car-less to
make sure that they have the means to access opportunity. If
compassionate conservatism is about anything it must be about
creating access to better opportunity - economic and social - and
better transportation is the way to achieve it.
2. Our Second Challenge - SAFETY
Our view of safety has to be very ambivalent - we can take great
pride in the reductions in fatalities in both rates and absolute
numbers over the years, but at the same must be chastened by the
annual losses that are unconscionably high. The aging of the
population and the resurgence in new drivers will play havoc with
our trends in accidents and fatalities - the new Secretary will have
to double and redouble his efforts - just to hold on to current
average rates.
Dean Carlson in his presentation of emphasis areas for his tenure
as AASHTO President challenged us to envision one day in a coming
year with no highway fatalities all across America. What a wonderful
vision! I ask how many states know how many fatality-free days they
had last year? Dean's State of Kansas, for example, averages less
than two fatalities per day. How many fatality-free days were there
last year in Kansas or any other state? 20? 50? 100? How do we make
that number grow bigger next year?
3. Real deliverables in Reauthorization
We should commit to real deliverables in reauthorization - Steve
Lockwood and I have talked about this…
The transportation community should:
Make a compact with Congress and the people, to produce real,
tangible products by the end of the next reauthorization
cycle-Number one: measurable improvements in safety - more fatality
free days - as we just discussed.
Make a compact to achieve measurable improvements in congestion -
not in general but in specific places - take the key bottlenecks
that The Highway Users identified and lets fix them all - and then
move on to the next bottlenecks!
Make a compact to institute operations systems that will show the
public the time savings that are being produced - that travel time
was 30 minutes before and it's now 25. Demonstrate that lives have
been saved, and time too, as access times to accidents and all
disabled vehicles by emergency vehicles has improved.
Make a compact to achieve real streamlining of FHWA's and other
agencies provision of services to the states and local governments
and their citizens with performance measures of FHWA's success. As
part of that - take the great success story that has been
transportation's response to air quality problems and show the
public and their officials what has been accomplished. Can we
declare victory in air quality? No, but we can show that immense
progress has been made.
4. Finally, we have a new case to be made for our
transportation program and the revenue needed to support it!
Making the case for transportation services and facilities will
be different in the future - As we look at some of the great things
that the infusion of needed funds from TEA-21 produced, we see that
by the end of 2003 we will have reached that level of funding
adequate to, what the FHWA Condition and Performance Report calls,
"Maintain the Existing System" for both highways and transit - at
least theoretically - a level that has always been 30% or 40% out of
reach in the past -still much less reachable has been the "cost to
improve the system's condition and performance" which was often
double present levels of spending.
What that means is that the old "pothole" arguments won't work
anymore - "Give us more money or the bridges will fall down!" - just
won't cut it. Some of us are going to have to learn a new way to
talk about the highway program. No less a personage than Frank
Turner said to me a year or so before his death - when you go to the
Congress with that "sky is falling argument" you might get away with
it twice - the third time they will rightly ask, "what did you do
with the money we gave you?"
We must demonstrate to the Congress that we were worthy of their
trust. The Stewardship report that AASHTO is preparing right now,
planned as a mid-course report to the Congress on what we are doing
with the money they gave us is a great step in the right direction.
It will say, you gave us the money, we are spending it and we are
spending it conscientiously! A great start.
TEA-21 now forces us to address the need to put the case for
reauthorization on a sounder basis. In the past the program used
jobs creation as the nexus of its justification. That was wrong -
and successful. Today, we need a more sound economic and social
understanding to base our work on.
To argue that transportation investment is needed for the jobs
created is like making the case that education is important for the
jobs it creates building and operating schools. It may be true that
it achieves that, but the real value is the more productive society
that comes from greater education - and so with transportation - it
is what happens after the road is built - that justifies the
investment.
If we cannot make the case for engineering failure of the system
we can make the case for economic failure. We are close - there is
very good work being done - that can expand our understanding and
our horizons. More research can carry us forward. But research can't
do it alone.
We need new mechanisms for evaluating and justifying
transportation investments and policies. We need tools to transmit
the basis for investment decisions to the public. We have to tell
the story to the American people and tell it well.
A sense of history would help. Looking back we see that the
Interstate program had both the power to attract and to repel. The
NHS, the corridors program or ITS have shown no such power! Without
such power the entire surface transportation program degenerates
into a highway tax-based federal revenue sharing program, with
always new "constituencies" willing to spend the money.
Simply defending what we have gained won't do as a strategy! A
hockey game where everyone is playing goalie doesn't work!
Where will the new funding levels come from? Most observers would
see no new fuel tax at the federal level - for sure, and little room
at state level - what's left?
