Essay: GETTING THERE IS HARDLY EVER HALF THE FUN

THE year is 2067, a good century away—but the scene seems uncomfortably close to many Americans. In The People Trap, an ABC program to be shown next week, the U.S. population tops 1 billion. Just to stay alive takes a big dose of chutzpah, you shouldn’t get trampled to death. What will most interest many Americans, though, is the time it takes to drive the four miles from Manhattan’s Battery Park to Times Square: three weeks. Weeks? Today, some people can make it in nearly three hours. But there is nothing intrinsically unbelievable about the figure. Traffic at midday in mid-Manhattan makes slow molasses seem like a moun tain-stream cascade, and the 11½ m.p.h. that horse-drawn carriages could do in 1907 seem like a race at Aqueduct. Slowly but inexorably, the cherished mobility of Americans is being eroded by a growing number of strains on U.S. transportation.

The U.S. has not only the world’s biggest and most intricate transportation system, but also its best. The system embraces 214,650 miles of railways, 25,260 miles of inland waterways, a mile of paved road for every square mile of its land surface and 280,696 miles of airline routes. It accounts for one-fifth of the output of goods and services, provides one job out of seven, fields 57% of the world’s passenger vehicles, nearly 100,000 private and commercial aircraft and half the free world’s railroad rolling stock. Still, the system is not good enough for a nation that is growing as fast as the U.S. in population, prosperity and technology. In fact, its liabilities are so great that they are carrying the nation toward a crisis in transportation. If the demand for transportation in the U.S. continues to match the nation’s current economic growth, it will double by 1980 and double again by the year 2000. Yet virtually every expert in the field admits that the nation’s transportation network is in a sorry, uncoordinated state.

The Great Googleplex

Practically every American is familiar with some of the costs, in time and frustration, of this predicament. Almost everybody has from time to time—or, frequently, every day —submitted to the hopelessly clogged, bumper-to-bumper auto jams that not only afflict the big cities but immobilize the multimillion-dollar freeways that were devised to speed an auto-borne population on its way. He has walked a mile or more through the corridors of a palatial new airport just to get to and from his plane, then found himself so far from a city center that the time spent in getting there has equaled his time in the air. He has put up with dirty and inadequate equipment when he took to the rails, experienced the instant calamity of a subway strike or missed an important conference because his airport bus got caught in traffic. For many Americans, getting there is no longer half the fun. It is instead a task that must be faced with gritted teeth and steely determination.

Though personal travel, by auto or plane, is the facet of transportation that most affects the individual American, he pays heavily for transportation inefficiency in other ways. He pays for it in the price of the clothes or the food or the household goods he buys, for it is invariably passed on through the price structure. He pays for lack of planning and inept regulation as his cities become concrete deserts where only autos and auto parks seem to thrive. If he is a businessman, the cost of inefficiency may be high. A 65-m.p.h. train can move steel slabs from the furnaces of Lackawanna, N.Y., and deliver them still hot at an Indiana rolling mill, but mix-ups and wrongly thrown switches sometimes cause freight cars to get lost for as much as seven weeks. High-speed, $15 million ocean ships lie idle for days in port while they are loaded by means of archaic slings. No less an authority than Najeeb Halaby, former head of the Federal Aviation Agency, insists that the U.S. really has no system of transportation at all, only a mishmash of “some of the best components anywhere.”

To get this mishmash into something resembling a shape is the aim of the new Department of Transportation, created last month, 30 years after Congress was first urged to act. In pleading for the new department, President Johnson made a strong indictment of transportation in the U.S. today, deploring “programs and policies which impede private initiative and dull incentives for innovations.” Despite the indictment, Congress did not see fit to give the new department the powers it needs. With 95,000 employees and a $6.2 billion-a-year-budget, DOT (as it seems destined to be called) starts life as the fourth-largest department in the Government, bringing together 32 scattered federal agencies, from the Bureau of Public Roads and the Federal Aviation Agency to the Alaska Railroad and the Great Lakes Pilotage Administration. Beset by myriad pressures, Congress stripped the twelfth Cabinet-level department of many logical functions, including control of the heavily subsidized maritime industry and of route-regulating powers. Still, DOT is a first healthy step toward substituting coherent plans for the decades-old tangle of inconsistent and obsolete rules that govern U.S. transportation.

Most Americans are so busy, or so irritated, at transportation shortcomings right under their noses that they fail to realize how many of the nation’s transport troubles originate in Washington. Ever since 1887, when the Interstate Commerce Act first fastened rate control on railroads, legislators have been piling law upon law and agency upon agency without considering the total effect. The result is a great googleplex: hundreds of federal, state and local authorities that, oblivious of one another, spend $17 billion a year of taxpayers’ money to work at purposes that often cross. Washington, for example, doled out $66 million in subsidy to feeder airlines last year, helping them to serve cities as little as 100 miles apart. At the same time, it poured $4 billion into freeway construction, often enabling motorists to cover the same downtown-to-downtown distance in about the same time.

Though many cities may need both conveniences, many do not make full use of either—which raises the cost of both.

Partly overregulated (railroads), partly underregulated (waterways), and partly free from all rate and route controls (contract truckers), transportation today is a Balkan thicket. Each uncoordinated segment has been encouraged to grab as much of the total market for itself as possible. The predictable result: too much capacity in some places (parallel rail lines), too little elsewhere (a shipping shortage for Viet Nam). On top of that, lawmakers, bureaucrats and private executives alike have virtually ignored the obvious matter of synchronizing transportation by auto, bus, rail or plane. Not a single railroad, for example, connects directly with a major airport. The first rail transit to do so will begin operations next fall, linking downtown Cleveland with a terminal 42 ft. below the parking lot at the Cleveland airport.

A Painful Process

Rapid urbanization has vastly complicated both transportation problems and their solutions. Urbanization is a global phenomenon (soon more than half the world’s population will live in crowded cities), but it is nowhere more vivid than in the U.S., which is amid the sometimes painful process of jamming 85% of its population onto 2% of its land—an astounding change for a nation so recently rural. Hand in hand with this transformation has been the extraordinary spread of the auto: the U.S. auto population has tripled to 90 million in 20 years, is now growing eight times faster than the human population. Thus freed from dependence on rail transit lines that were laid for another era, Americans have sprawled into the suburban fringes, where they are so dispersed that public transportation is ineffective and housewives become chauffeurs for their children and husbands.

Inevitably, as transit service declines and roads improve, more autos not only crowd the routes to town but choke the city streets as well. Chairman George L. DeMent of the Chicago Transit Authority understandably bemoans “the 5 o’clock shadow of smog, noise, tension and wasted time.” Freeway tie-ups have multiplied to the point where airborne traffic spotters in at least 25 cities now broadcast advice about how to dodge them. Frequently, a new freeway built to carry 100,000 cars a day no sooner opens than it is inundated by twice that many. Besides, one mile of freeway takes 40 acres of what would otherwise be tax-paying property, and a single interchange often eats up 80 acres.

Urbanization has also forced the airlines to build their airports farther from the center city, but that has not seemed to hurt business. Having passed buses and railroads to become the nation’s No. 1 passenger carrier a decade ago, airlines have grown so exuberantly that last year they accounted for more intercity travel than both competitors combined. Despite the 43-day midsummer strike, they feel confident enough of the future to have ordered $3.5 billion of new jets for delivery by 1969 and more than 100 supersonic craft for the years beyond that. One reason is their recent hefty gains in air freight, now increasing one-third faster than passenger travel and promising to pass it as a source of income by 1975. Whether the airlines will have enough terminal facilities for all that business is another matter. Travelers already grumble at ticketing and baggage delays, and tomorrow’s jumbo jets will require vast new ground installations that municipal airport authorities seem slow to start planning. In another use of aircraft, vertical, short-takeoff-and-landing craft and a new breed of jet helicopters (which have become highly developed in the Viet Nam war) may well provide a swift new intercity bus service, flying from fields scarcely larger than tennis courts.

Like the Dodo Bird

As for the railroads, New York Central President Alfred Perlman once explained that for years they had endured the lash of critics who “thought the industry was like the dodo bird—with its head where its tail feathers ought to be.” Until recently, the critics seemed to be right. Standpat thinking smothered rail progress for most of the first four decades of the century, while autos, trucks and air travel nibbled away at the railroads’ markets. Belatedly realizing that one track that led to greater efficiency was merger, the railroads since 1956 have persuaded the Interstate Commerce Commission to approve 26 mergers. Getting approved for a merger, however, can be a long-term process: the Pennsylvania-Central merger in the East, which has every logic in its favor, is moving at milk-train speed.

Out to wring all the mileage they can from new technology, the railroads are promoting piggyback delivery of truck trailers, adopting computer-controlled operations and bookkeeping, devising special-purpose cars to win back shippers. Multilevel auto-rack cars, for instance, have enabled railroads to regain $100 million of motorcar hauling lost to trucks, while saving automakers $200 million. A few rail lines are even making a bid for passengers. Though two of his routes run parallel to new expressways, Chairman Ben Heineman gambled $50 million on modernizing the Chicago and North Western’s commuter service—and won. Patronage is now climbing by 5% a year, and commuter profits this year should reach $2,000,000. Some long-haul travelers still prefer stylish comfort to speed. Bookings have risen for the Atlantic Coast Line’s Florida Special since it put in movies and television, hired hostesses to give fashion shows, threw in free champagne and cigars with candlelit dinners.

Whatever future awaits long-distance trains, the rail is being considered a possible solution to the worsening problem of getting people in and out of big cities with dispatch, efficiency and safety. While one lane of a freeway can move only 2,400 persons an hour past a given point, a train can move 30,000. To encourage a revival of mass transit by rail, the Government gave the movement a nudge in 1961 with a law that henceforward mass transportation must be considered a part of city planning. With close to $200 million of loans and grants, Washington has since helped to finance new equipment and several experiments which indicate that better service and modern equipment will lure at least some drivers back to public conveyances. San Francisco is currently building the nation’s first wholly new rail transit system in 60 years, and Washington is planning another. Massachusetts has borrowed $40 million for new subway lines and commuter railroad subsidies. New York State this year bought the bankrupt Long Island Rail Road, the nation’s largest commuter line. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut are splitting commuter rail subsidies with the U.S.

Taking things a step farther, President Johnson last year won approval for a $90 million program to put high-speed (160 m.p.h.) trains—much like those of Japan’s famed Tokaido line—into service between Boston and Washington, the nation’s most people-packed corridor. For a little farther in the future, Detroit auto men are working on a system called Teletrans, in which punch cards would guide 45-m.p.h. private capsules along a track inside a tube. There are also plans for automated superhighways on which card-steered cars would whiz from Detroit to Washington in four hours at 125 m.p.h. Ford has been experimenting with an air-cushioned, no-wheel, 300-m.p.h. train called Levacar.

Emphasis on Esthetics

Advancing technology is already providing, and will continue to provide, dozens of other modes and systems of transportation. In fact, in the struggle to keep people moving in the megalopolis, technology is already years ahead of planning and financing, the intersection at which most of the nation’s transportation jams occur. What is most needed is some overall planning—partly from Washington but also carried out through state and regional cooperation—that would strive toward creating a balanced transportation system feeding passengers swiftly and smoothly from one mode of travel to another. As it is now, there are practically no linkups between the systems; until these linkups actually occur, no truly efficient transportation system will be possible.

If the big cities are to create better rapid-transit facilities and woo the driver back onto them, they may need to receive a bigger share of state and federal tax revenues than they now get. As for the cities and suburbs, they need to get together to form metropolitan transportation systems that will serve both more efficiently. And the public may as well face it: it will probably have to pay more. Many experts feel that low standards of transportation have been the result of artificial low-fare policies, frequently prompted by political considerations. Instead of driving more people to the auto—and the traffic jams—slightly higher fares should make possible a comfort and convenience that commuters will feel are worth the price. So that fares do not rise out of hand, however, transit systems will need to embrace the cost savings of automation as quickly as possible. And, says Alan Boyd. Under Secretary of Commerce for Transportation, “there should be a maximum reliance on unsubsidized, privately owned facilities; we should rely upon competition rather than regulation to the greatest possible extent consistent with the public interest.”

Even with efficient rapid-transit systems, many cities in the future may find themselves forced to use fees to ration scarce downtown space for both trucks and private cars. New York, for example, is already considering raising tolls for incoming bridge and tunnel traffic during rush hours. With the new emphasis on national beautification—and the successful citizen protests against ugly bridge and freeway plans in San Francisco and elsewhere—highway engineers also need to learn that transportation systems, as Under Secretary Boyd puts it, “must give a predominant emphasis to esthetics.” If the U.S. is to head off its looming transportation crisis, the job has to be started soon. Otherwise, the penalty is sure to be a further erosion of that most cherished prerogative of the peripatetic American: the ability to go places at will, and to get there fast.