Mobility 2040

Exploring the Emerging Trends Radically Transforming Transportation Systems in the US

Galo Bowen

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637301074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

U.S. transportation systems face a series of converging crises as population and industrial growth continue to push the limits of what can be supported. Electric vehicles, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet of things (IoT) all play a role in the solution; but how do the different pieces of this complex ecosystem fit together?

Mobility 2040: Exploring the Emerging Trends Radically Transforming Transportation Systems in the U.S. walks you through how we arrived at the current predicament and explores the exciting mobility trends that offer hope for a better future. Journey across the country with author Galo Bowen as he interviews experts in transportation to lay the groundwork for seamless and sustainable mobility within the next twenty years.

This book is for everyone; whether you are a private investor, public employee, policy maker, or simply an American commuter. Let it be your guide as we work together to build a more inclusive and sustainable transportation future.

Part 1:

How We Got Here

Chapter 1:

The Modern History of the US Transportation System

“You must always be able to predict what’s next and then have the flexibility to evolve.”10

—Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO.

While there is no United Nations (UN) official ranking for developed countries, the United States has the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP and net wealth. It is the leader in rapidly evolving industries and technological advances such as in computers, pharmaceuticals, medical, aerospace, and military equipment. These factors, without a doubt, put the US among one of the most developed nations on Earth.

The US economy is also heavily dependent on road transport for moving people and goods. Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4.2 million miles (6.8 million km) of public roads, including one of the world’s longest highway systems at 67,300 miles (108,000 km).11 The US has the world’s second-largest automobile market after China; and with 838 per 1,000 Americans, it has the third-highest rate of per capita vehicle ownership in the world only after San Marino and Monaco.12,13

Amidst endless discussions on the developed and yet very imperfect US transportation system, and after having lived for nearly fourteen years in the United States and having been fully dependent on public transportation at times, I cannot help but ask myself – why does a very developed nation like the US have relatively low levels of public transit ridership compared to wealthy European and Asian countries? To me this was a paradox indeed, and we’ll take a closer look at what caused the US transportation system to reach this point and the factors driving such a large dependency on personal vehicles.

A Disorganized Expansion

In 2011, during a conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy think tank with centers in Washington, DC, Moscow, Beirut, Brussels, and New Delhi, keynote speaker David Burwell (†) referred to the modern history of the US transportation system, with the Interstate Highway System as the foundation, and highlighted the associated large financial investments:14,15

“The modern history of the transportation system is the creation of the Interstate Highway System in 1956. The idea was every major capital in the United States should be connected with at least a four-lane interstate highway. It was a twelve-year project costing $27 billion. This was in 1956, and in fact it was only declared complete in 1991.”

“The total cost was $425 billion, in 1991 dollars. So, it took longer, but it’s a major infrastructure improvement and it has been the foundation of America’s economic development over the last fifty years.”

“When the Interstate Highway System was finally declared complete in 1991, the program was made more flexible to fund not only highways, but a wide variety of transportation projects from transit to buses, to bus rapid transit to streetcars to bikes.”

Although Burwell expressed his admiration for such a massive and bold movement in the transportation sector, he also suggested this transit system lacked direction and focus in the years following completion of the interstate.

“There was no directive, however, for a specific additional system. The result was many states continued to just build highways or felt they could build projects rather than a system. It became highly earmarked, highly project-focused, and therefore unfocused.”

On a similar note, Joseph Stromberg, former writer at Vox, an American news and opinion website owned by Vox media, shared his insights on the rapid deployment of personal vehicles across different American cities.16

“Most of our cities and suburbs were built out after the 1950s when the car became the dominant mode of transportation. Consequently, we have sprawling, auto-centric metropolises that just can’t be easily served by public transportation.”

An Overlooked Public Transit

Despite the common belief the development of the US post-1950s made a poor transit system inevitable, the truth is, Stromberg claims, if we look closer at transportation history in other countries, we realize they combined suburbs with better transit. As a matter of fact, David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University and Arizona State University in the 1950s, stated the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the UK, and Australia were all on the same trajectory of racing toward automobile dependence, and yet in the 1960s a divergence was evident.

Stromberg suggests in the 1960s many European cities put large efforts into maintaining already existing transit systems and expanded them to growing suburbs. Similarly, newer cities in Western Canada—even though they were being designed for personal vehicles—heavily invested in light rail lines and improved quality bus service, translating into higher levels of public transportation ridership than US cities of similar size and density.

Conversely in the United States, the gradual expansion of newer cities in the West and South did not come with the necessary associated investment in public transportation. In certain big cities such expansion dismantled their existing transit systems, replacing streetcar (aka trolley or tram) lines with highways to accelerate commutes from the suburbs. An example of this is Boston; transit blogger Alon Levy explains:17

“In 1912, Boston had this great public transit system with four subway lines and streetcars that fed it… Then they spent the next sixty or seventy years destroying it.”

If you ask me, the results of a long-overlooked US public transportation system are visible today. Public transit is indeed much more reliable and effective in European countries th...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: How We Got Here
• Chapter 1: The Modern History of the US Transportation System
• Chapter 2: Problems with the System Today
• Part 2: Trends To Empower Mobility In 2040
• Chapter 3: Electric Vehicles
• Chapter 4: Emerging Technologies for a Brighter Future
• Chapter 5: Autonomous Vehicles
• Chapter 6: Micromobility
• Chapter 7: Microtransit
• Chapter 8: Shared Mobility and Mobility as a Service
• Part 3: The Roadmap To Mobility 2040: Seamless And Sustainable Mobility
• Chapter 9: Why Mobility as a Service?
• Chapter 10: Realizing MaaS
• Chapter 11: Electrifying and Automating MaaS
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix