Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation (17 page)

Nevertheless, Congress would shoot down Foxx's plan. Americans just don't like to pay for their roads, and members of Congress like asking them to pay even less. And what does all this have to do with the pizza delivered to your door?

Everything. We couldn't be more contradictory about this: More than nine out of ten American voters believe it's important to improve the country's transportation infrastructure, and eight out of ten say it's vital in order for America to stay competitive with other nations. Yet seven out of ten voters adamantly oppose
raising the federal gas tax from its 1993 levels.
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Which is why Congress is basically cooking the books with accounting gimmicks to keep the system afloat year to year, deferring critical repairs and modernization projects year after year.

T
he face of modern transportation is built on equal doses of wonder and fear. There's the wonder of a dinosaur-size boring machine chewing subway tunnels with whirling steel teeth beneath a bustling cityscape. Or the near-instant gratification of a morning click-and-buy of that new camera or shirt or case of food for your very expensive diabetic cat, and finding your purchase on the doorstep that afternoon. Then there's the counterbalancing frustration of street-level gridlock that leaves you in a cold sweat as you crawl toward the airport, your flight time fast approaching. Or those hideous interstate merges with the exit ramps placed exactly at the rushing, turbulent confluence of several freeways, forcing you to make a rapid series of white-knuckle swerves across multiple crowded lanes of traffic just to get home. That's the transportation world 320 million Americans see and experience every day—delightful one moment, a misery the next.

But that's just the visible surface of movement and mobility. Beneath lies the hidden
heart
of our door-to-door system of systems: the constant, never-ending war against overload. In every facet of its past design and future spending, in all its rails, wheels, water, wire, and pipe, the real transportation battle and rationale are all about the overload.

This was true in the age of canals, when the nation's first true goods movement system was built out by 1840, boasting 3,000 miles of waterways linking east to west, with a continuous water route all the way from New York to New Orleans. And it was true
of the bigger, faster, more capacious Iron Horse that overtook the canals with its greater speed and reach, and of the new highways and ports and sprawling logistics centers that came next. Sooner or later something new and more capable always gets added to the transportation mix to augment or supplant the old, easing the overload. While some iterations fade fast—the “golden age” of dirigibles was barely an eye blink—other innovations endure for generations, sometimes far longer than logic and balance sheets suggest they should.

Transportation choices are never purely rational ones. Habit, myth, culture, and lifestyle can and do trump practicality and efficiency in transportation as much as in matters of fashion or art—as demonstrated by America's most popular passenger vehicle, the pickup truck. Developed a century ago for farmers, builders, and other craftsmen, it began as a humble utilitarian alternative to the horse-drawn cart. Now, in an age when few Americans farm and most live in cities, the pickup truck is predominately a lifestyle choice playing on the urban cowboy mythos. Pickup truck popularity today is largely unrelated to most owners' job requirements, making them a statement rather than a need, and it is yet another force pushing overload because of the pickup's inherent inefficiency compared to standard passenger cars. The once homely Ford F series of pickups, America's most popular vehicle of any kind, boasted three no-frills editions—the Heavy Duty, the Contractor, and the Farm & Ranch Special. Now it comes in models the salesmen refer to among themselves as “Cowboy Cadillacs,” with features such as handcrafted eucalyptus wood interior trim; leather seats that heat, cool, and massage driver and passengers; and sticker prices of $60,000 and up.

If a new technology, structure, or method works well or delights its users or both—if it saves time and money or boosts self-image—then users flock to it. The elevated wooden bicycle
highways built in Los Angeles in 1900 with a 10-cent toll—and unfinished routes that left riders stranded—got a well-deserved thumbs-down and closed after five years. The New York City subway, in continuous service since 1904, got a big thumbs-up when 150,000 riders boarded the very first day for a nickel apiece and never stopped coming. It's the if-you-build-it-they-will-come, induced-demand process at work. Making it well, and then later making it bigger or better, promotes demand, a principle that holds true both inside and outside the transportation space. Edison found this with his lightbulb, Ford with the car (and more recently the pickup truck), IBM with the home computer, Apple with the smartphone. The new and strange can quickly become widespread necessity—or at least perceived as such.

Once that happens, once the harvest can be moved by canal barge instead of wagon, once the shiny new streetcar can zip so much faster from suburb to downtown, or that paved road is laid or that new dock is built, demand for what they offer soars. Overload recedes for a time. But with success comes the threat of new overload. Sooner or later there are too many boats, too long a wait for the trolleys, too many cars clogging the street, and capacity has to be increased. There has to be another lane, a bigger dock, a larger vessel, new traffic signals to smooth the flow while easing the gridlock and carnage. Adding capacity takes planning, time, and money and, once built, the increased capacity induces even more demand. The cycle feeds upon itself, the Carmageddon experience repeated time and again, until finally capacity can no longer be expanded. Then either overload reigns, or something new, something more capacious, bursts on the scene to create a system reset: the horse-pulled trolleys of old, supplanted by more capable cable cars, superseded by electric streetcars, surpassed by gasoline-powered private cars filling wider streets and broadened highways to capacity, which will be surpassed by . . . no one is
sure. The time is long past for yet another system reset, and still we wait.

Much of this uncertainty stems from the feast-or-famine transportation investment pattern the country has fallen into during the past century. America has seen only two big transportation building booms during the last hundred years—which is to say, there have been two mammoth, nationwide expansions of capacity. That's it. That's what we're living on.

First came the landmark infrastructure projects that modernized America and put the country back to work during the Great Depression. There were the Lincoln Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, and LaGuardia Airport in New York. There was the Overseas Highway—the name is literal—that connects Miami to Key West with its famous Seven Mile Bridge. This first boom produced the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, rural electrification, and America's first freeway (in Los Angeles, of course, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, also known as the Pasadena Freeway). This boom also produced the dual massive water transport systems known as the Colorado River Aqueduct and the Central Valley Project that supply, respectively, the faucets of arid LA and Southern California, and the farms of California's Great Central Valley that supply much of the nation's produce and all of Domino's Pizza's sauce (and the rest of the world's pizza sauce as well). Most of the nation's almonds, artichokes, plums, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower—the list is immense—are sustained by this water transport system, enabling the Central Valley to generate 8 percent of the nation's agriculture (by dollar value) on less than 1 percent of its farmland. Many other iconic working monuments of transportation that serve as economic engines to this day were built by “make-work” Depression-era programs such as the Works Progress Administration, along with three quarters of a million miles in more mundane but no less essential roads, more
than 7,000 bridges, a thousand airstrips, and tens of thousands of nameless dams, levees, tunnels, and drainage projects.

The second big wave of transportation investment took place two to three decades later, during the fifties and sixties, when most of the modern Interstate Highway System was built, capitalizing on (and then feeding) America's unprecedented postwar prosperity and growth. This 48,760-mile highway network has most visibly transformed passenger car travel, but the real revolution lies in what it did for trucking. The interstates paid for themselves many times over by allowing the unprecedented explosion in goods movement that, in turn, enabled America's modern, import-driven consumer economy to take off and take root. The rapid growth of ports and containerization—and such retail giants as Walmart and Amazon—needed the interstates in place to make their business models practical and complete, because existing rail freight could not handle it all or serve the last legs of the goods journey from warehouses to stores and homes. When the interstate system celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1996, it was said to have returned by then an estimated $6 in economic productivity for every dollar spent building it.
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That number has easily doubled since then.

Public investment in American transportation has never again achieved anything close to those two big door-to-door building booms. Since the completion of the Interstate Highway System, America has spent about half as much on its infrastructure as some European nations, calculated as a share of gross domestic product. China invests almost five times as much as the U.S. Sweden, which is far less dependent on cars than America due to its well-used and well-loved mass transit systems, still spends about as much each year on roads as the U.S. (again, not in absolute dollars, but as a share of GDP).
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Despite the widespread perception that American taxpayers overspend on their transportation
systems, they have rarely been more miserly than they are in the twenty-first century.

Some of the most important elements of America's transportation system—all those iconic structures we drive and ship and fly through, under and over—are now fifty to one hundred years old. They face problems of age, decay, obsolescence, or insufficient capacity—and deferred maintenance. Sixty-five percent of roads are rated in less than good condition. One in four bridges require major repairs or are too weak for modern traffic. About 45 percent of Americans have no access to mass transit. The World Economic Forum ranks America's infrastructure sixteenth in the world in overall quality, with the rail system coming in fifteenth and road quality sixteenth.
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The country that built the first transcontinental railroads and the first interstate highway system has indeed fallen on hard times.

Meanwhile the U.S. Department of Transportation estimated in 2015 that economic losses just in the form of wasted time and fuel because of traffic jams have reached $121 billion a year. This is the aged hardware—4 million miles of roads, streets, rails, waterways, and pipes—with which the United States moves $20 trillion in goods, the stuff of our daily lives, from state to state, city to city, and country to country every year. The material moved through all those systems weighs in at more than 17 billion tons.
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By way of comparison, the Empire State Building weighs 365,000 tons. America moves goods equivalent to 46,575 Empire State Buildings door to door every year. If all that was loaded on just standard 53-foot semitrailers, it would require 425 million big rigs to move it, with every truck filled to the legal 80,000-pound limit. That would take about eighty times more trucks than the entire U.S. fleet of registered semitrailers.

The cost of decades of neglected maintenance and modernization was demonstrated in July 2015 when the eastbound side of
an obsolete bridge on Interstate 10 near Hell, California (you just can't make this stuff up), collapsed during heavy rains. Interstate 10 is a major route eastward for goods coming out of California ports, farms, and factories, with more than eight thousand big-rig trips a day passing through that stretch of highway. Alternative routes slow consumer, commercial, and industrial goods deliveries by up to a day, which in today's economy is a body blow; the extra fuel and lost time alone from this one bridge accident cost the trucking industry an estimated $2.5 million a day. And that's just one little bridge on one truck route. Multiply those losses by the 61,000 other bridges in as bad or worse condition nationwide, and the risk to commerce and prosperity is almost incalculable.
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The poor condition of America's transportation infrastructure leaves us less prepared today for severe weather than at any time since World War II. Severe wind, rain, and flooding puts added pressure on poorly maintained and unsafe bridges, overpasses, tunnels, dams, culverts and roads. It took only one big storm—Hurricane Sandy in 2012—to devastate the New York and New Jersey region and paralyze coastal areas up and down the East Coast, disrupting the systems that move our food, water, energy, products, and people door to door. Sandy inflicted $75 billion in damages, and a return to normalcy required many months. If the predictions of climate scientists are borne out, we are entering an era when super storms such as Sandy may become all too common. If so, America should be building more resilient transportation systems and structures as soon as possible, rather than allowing them to grow weaker through deferred and unfunded repairs and maintenance.

Beyond roads, passenger rail infrastructure is decaying, much of it ancient. A pair of century-old, leaky, and unstable tunnels handle all passenger trains crossing the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey, one of the busiest—and most urgently
in need of repair—rail tunnels in the country. A plan to build new ones was scuttled by the governor of New Jersey in 2010 so he could channel the funds into road projects.
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Half the 1,000 bridges in the Northeast Corridor—the nation's most critical and crowded rail lines, running from Washington D.C., to Boston, with stops at all the major cities in between—are about a century old. Several tunnels still in use were dug just after the end of the Civil War. Ridership on Amtrak in the corridor hit 11.6 million in 2014, a 50 percent increase since 1998, but the system is crumbling beneath those passengers, and lags far behind the rest of the world in both speed and reach.
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