In the very old days, when people decided to venture away from their usual homelands, the journey to a new land was a long, dangerous, arduous trek. Today we can navigate the globe in a matter of hours. A few hundred years ago, a trip into town from the nearby countryside might take a day or more. Today we can get there in under an hour. Surely, one of the great achievements of modern humanity has been our mastery over distance. And it’s a good thing too. As our world becomes smaller through trade and communication, our ability to visit other lands increases. And as our cities haphazardly expand, our need for reliable transportation and infrastructure becomes vital. It is because transportation is so vital to our evolving world that we should take some time to think about the efficiency and the safety of our transportation infrastructure.

Transportation issues can be easily divided into two main groups: local travel and long distance travel. Both levels of transportation must be designed to service their specific needs while maintaining a balance between personal usefulness, cost efficiency, and appropriate ecological responsibility. Transportation infrastructure is a shared property and must thus be considered as such by both those who use it and those who care for it. Our attitudes towards transportation need to be readjusted to allow other thoughts to have a chance at success. Obviously, both our modes of transportation and the infrastructure to support them will continue to change over time, but by accepting this fact at the beginning, we can make projected accommodations to facilitate that change when it comes, reducing long term costs and minimizing the use of resources.

So really, the place to begin is with the way we view transportation. By some twist of fate, the evolution of transportation became intertwined with a part of the human psyche with the result being that to humans, mode of transportation is equal to social status, with the fastest traveler at the top of the chart. (This eventually spiraled out of control. Today we are all expected to move so fast and accomplish so much in a single day that our species seems to be evolving these abilities into our genetic code. But I digress…) As personal transportation progressed to the point where everyone could now go pretty fast, we rose to the challenge to continue our transportation castes through the creation of bigger or sleeker or tougher personal transportation, all the while our identities becoming one with our mode of transport until we almost view them as extensions of ourselves. We’ve managed to transform transportation from a convenience to a personal right. We’ve made getting from here to there and back again a personal statement instead of just letting it be what it is…getting around.

So let’s step back from the attitude of transportation and move into a more practical look at transportation. Which is the more important: how you get there, when you get there, or that you get there? Easily, the “how you get there” question is the least important, but it is the one we all place the most emphasis on. I say enough of that nonsense. Getting to our destination and getting there in a timely fashion are what matters. With that in mind, let’s step outside the box and take a glimpse of what transportation could be like, with a little help from new energy development and better city planning.

Local travel tends towards two goals: errand travel and employment travel. One kind is erratic, the other is fairly consistent. Some employment consists mostly of more travel. Personal vehicles do nearly all of this travel. In smaller towns, this may not seem to be a problem, and as energy becomes more advanced, even the pollutant effects of singular travel may be negated. But in large cities and their ever-growing suburbs, the problem of traffic congestion and pollution grows more staggering every year. How could we reduce, or even eliminate all those individual vehicles, yet still provide people the means to get to work and back, or to deliver the goods that their job requires? The answer lies in the two words capitalists hate to love: Public Transportation.

Fortunately, I’ve been on public buses, vans, taxis, trains, and the like, so I have a healthy contempt for most of our public transportation systems. The reason they exist in this state is because of our attitude towards transportation, which I mentioned that we need to work on. Public transportation is a good idea ruined by bureaucratic idiocy. And corporate greed. And public apathy. But what if we could develop a flexible, high speed, semi-private, public transportation system that would get you to within a half mile from your place of employment? (Think electromagnetic monorail with separate “cars” able to disconnect and reconnect at specified intersections and depots.) What if we developed a subterranean cargo delivery system that delivered all goods from a central location to a specified neighborhood for more local disbursal to shops? (Think pneumatic cargo tubes like those at a drive through bank, only bigger.) Couldn’t such systems greatly reduce pollution, reduce congestion, and even reduce massive road development? As for local errand travel, if development can be steered away from the car and be based more around the local areas, public transit could take many forms.

If local transportation suffers from inefficiency in use, long distance travel suffers from inefficient service and infrastructure. As our nation makes incredible advances in personal entertainment technology, we have done little or nothing to update our antiquated airports, harbors, and railways in the area of security or technology. And our public-private management practices are increasingly tilted in favor of the private entities. Our transportation tax dollars (read fuel taxes, airport or rail use taxes, or any other travel related excises, taxes, or fees), when they don’t get diverted into general funds our pet projects, are supposed to be used to maintain and improve our airports and roads and railways. We build these places with our hard earned money. Then we turn them over to private businesses that charge us to use our airports and rail lines. And in their efforts to increase profits, they cut services and amenities, stifle consumer regulation, and decry security measures as intrusive to their schedules. This is the worst kind of capitalism, and our airline conglomerates are among its most eager practitioners.

It is time for the public to reclaim what we built and paid for. It is time to insist that business become true partners with regards to public transportation, especially long distance transportation. We need to upgrade our technology and security measures while increasing passenger service and economy. We should expect those businesses that operate on public property to be responsible for returning some of their profit towards maintenance and improved service. If they balk, why not develop a national airline and a national rail service, funded by tax dollars, available to all citizens at a reasonable price that would cover costs of operation and maintenance but not produce a profit. After all, the ability to travel around one’s own country or to others should not be based on money. Travel increases knowledge. Travel increases tolerance. Travel is a necessity.

In the end, we may not even really have the option of ignoring public transportation much longer. As fossil fuel resources are increasingly consumed, and until we develop new forms of energy, our current modes of travel will become too expensive for many to operate on a daily basis. Further, international resource usage may change supplies available for personal transportation. And as public transportation increases, so too will the need for increased security measures to be established to ensure public safety. Why not begin to establish alternatives today, before we need to have them in place? Why wait until it’s too late? To do so
could negate the progress we’ve made over the last century and once again, distance could become a barrier.

As with any new ideas, initial suggestions are often subject to criticism based on financial costs, lack of technology, or murky management structures. So let me say this: Yes, the financial costs of overhauling our transportation infrastructure may be expensive, but the returned investment in efficiency, security, and maintenance will be realized in time. The cost of waiting until we’ve no other options could be even more expensive. Yes, we lack some of the technology we may someday have, but we can begin to prepare by reducing our subsidies to obsolete methods and encouraging new development through creative outreach like that used in the commercial space race. And yes, honest management will require honest stewards, but I believe they can be found among us, and that they will be found. We really should begin now.