THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR TRANSPORTATION-2020
Worldwide, a number of forces are shaping the direction of transportation over the next two decades. Understanding these changes and opportunities is critical to achieving our nation’s transportation goals (Appendix B suggests some goals for transportation in 2020 and beyond.) Key among these global changes are: shifts in demographics, accelerated economic growth and globalization, growing urbanization and motorization, increasing concerns for safety and security, changing technological trends in information and communications, and enabling technologies for sustainable transportation.
a. Changing Demographics
Two major demographic changes will influence the scope and character of world transportation demand in the 21st century: overall population growth and the aging population in the industrialized world. Over the next 25 years, world population is projected to grow from its present 5.5 billion to 8.5 billion people. By far, most of this growth will be in the cities of the developing world. The increased demand for transportation will require the expansion of existing infrastructure for all modes of transportation and perhaps deployment of new transportation alternatives.
At the same time, in the U.S. and many other developed countries, the lack of geographic and financial resources to build needed physical infrastructure will increase pressure for more efficient management and operation of existing systems, and alternatives to some kinds of travel. Information and telecommunication technologies provide a very attractive option for accomplishing this. 15 Related use of information networks for "virtual" business conduct may reduce demand for some kinds of personal travel, while simultaneously increasing demand for other kinds of passenger and freight services. Marine systems may become increasingly important in serving transportation demand in developed coastal areas where land for system expansion has become scarce. 16
While industrialized countries’ populations will stabilize and perhaps even decline, there will be further aging of these populations. Today, over 12 percent of the United States’ and 14 percent of Europe’s population is over 65. By 2020, over 20 percent of the population (about 53 million in the US) will belong to this group. In addition, the baby boomers currently constitute 28 percent of the U.S. population, but control more than 51 percent of the nation’s wealth, some $2.6 trillion dollars. As the group ages, funds formerly devoted to buying homes, raising children, and paying for college will become available to these senior citizens, increasing their freedom for discretionary travel and tourism. This dramatic growth in the aging population will necessitate new approaches to transportation and mobility, among them changes in traditional transit services, transportation infrastructure, recreational travel opportunities, and vehicles. 17 Integrated communities, focusing on the needs of the elderly
and having their own shopping, entertainment and service elements linked by specialized transit systems, already exist and may proliferate as more people retire over the next two decades.
b. Economic Growth and Globalization
Expanding economic growth throughout the world is providing a base for the development of newly emerging upper and middle income classes, demanding access and mobility. Gross domestic product per capita is steadily increasing in many countries. This trend is quite dramatic in newly industrialized countries, particularly in several Pacific Rim nations. More people have more disposable income than in any other period in human history. This income, combined with the influence of the mass media and telecommunications, will continue to create a booming travel and tourism market. As world tourism becomes an increasing share of transportation demand, the capacity of many nations’ surface and air transportation infrastructures will be strained.
In parallel with growth in international tourism and travel will be corresponding increases in international goods movement. Low-cost communication and transportation networks have already resulted in a global manufacturing and marketing enterprise. There will be a continuing - if not expanding - pressure away from warehousing towards "just in time" deliveries of raw materials for use in manufacturing and deliveries of its completed products to the consumer. This will drive the freight transportation system to seek faster line haul performance, and more effective linking between shipment segments. The rise of electronic commerce will create a huge demand for small package delivery services as purchasing items over the Internet becomes commonplace. The burgeoning information infrastructure will simultaneously be a key resource supporting transportation, while simultaneously creating a variety of new demands for transportation services.
In this interdependent world economy, continued growth in international trade will increase the demand for freight transportation facilities. It will also place increasingly stringent cost and reliability requirements on transportation networks, particularly on intra-regional networks that link increasingly dispersed networks of interconnected businesses. Modeled on regional authorities (like the New York-New Jersey Port Authority and the Transcom partnership of today) multi-modal integrated planning, infrastructure investment and operations management will assure cost-effective regional economic development. Public-private ventures following these models should proliferate as the approach becomes more familiar.
c. Urbanization and Motorization
About 45 percent of the world population currently are urban dwellers. By 2025, more than 60 percent of the projected 8.5 billion people in the world will be living in cities -- many of them in mega-cities with populations of 10 million or more. Together with economic development, growth in the world’s urban areas has led to a dramatic increase in the number of motor vehicles over the past 25 years. In 1970, there were 246 million vehicles registered in the world, 44 percent of them in the United States. By 1992, the world had 614 million vehicles, two and a half times the number in 1970, with only 31 percent in this country. In fact, the global fleet has been growing linearly since 1970, with each year bringing an additional 16 million vehicles. Should this trend continue, there would be more than 1.1 billion vehicles in the world fleet by 2025.
d. Safety and Security of the Global Transportation System
Over the next two decades, continued growth in world transportation demand will lead to heightened public and private concerns for transportation safety and security. For example, the growth in automobile use will bring with it a parallel potential for a dramatic increase in automobile-related deaths and injuries. This is particularly true for countries in the developing world, where the number of motor vehicles is growing far faster than the physical, legal, and institutional infrastructures needed to accommodate them. From 1968 to 1985, automobile fatalities increased by more than 300 percent in eight African countries and by almost 200 percent in six Asian nations. Even in the more industrialized countries, where safety records are typically good by historical standards, the private automobile will continue to present safety risks. The need for work on low cost crash avoidance and mitigation techniques for personal vehicles will remain for the foreseeable future.
Greater demand for air travel will place additional stress on an already heavily burdened aviation system. Countries will seek to accommodate air travel demand by moving toward "free flight" -- a system wherein aircraft operators have wide latitude for selecting flight paths, speeds, and altitudes that best satisfy their operational requirements. As a new global infrastructure for air traffic management emerges, questions will arise concerning the reliance on satellite and digital technologies, the increasing dependence on complex software-based aids and systems, and the need for global standards and interoperability guidelines. Moreover, the troubled state of the world and the attractiveness of aviation as a terrorist target make it likely that aviation security, as well as security in other modes of transportation, will be a major area of concern well into the 21st century.
e. The Digital World: An Information Technology and Telecommunications Revolution
In the past, changing transportation needs have typically been met through innovations in three areas: transportation vehicles; the physical infrastructure that supports their use; and the people who design, build, operate, and maintain the vehicles and infrastructure, and who plan and manage the transportation enterprise. More and more, the burgeoning demands on the transportation system will be met through a fourth means: the development of an information infrastructure supporting transportation’s physical infrastructure.
Particularly important is a phenomenon experts call convergence: over the next few decades advances in computer, information, and communications technologies will come together in an integrated information infrastructure supporting all of society. In the home, information, entertainment, and access to electronic commerce will be consolidated in one set of input and display devices. Dramatic changes in the ways of organizing and managing transportation, trade, and work activities also become possible with the availability of "intelligent personal computer assistants,". 18
There will be an increasing number of potential alternatives for various transportation functions, each offering its own benefits. Transportation vehicles manufactured 25 years hence should offer dramatic advances in sustainability, performance, and cost based on refinement and innovation affecting almost every component. Vehicles themselves will be customized and built to personal capabilities, needs and preferences. Advanced computer-based tools will enable concurrent design, testing and manufacture of vehicles, dramatically shrinking time and cost to market. In fact, one component of any strategy to meet transportation needs will be to stimulate development of a range of alternatives to some physical travel.
The wide availability of highly accurate radionavigation services will also be a major force transforming transportation and society at large. The first edition of the Federal Radionavigation Plan in 1980 only referred to radionavigation applications for mariners, aviators, space navigation, and the military. Less than two decades later, radionavigation systems have become a true public utility, and are used in virtually every
area of transportation, and in many other sectors of the economy. Such systems are used on automobiles, trucks, buses, trolleys, passenger and freight trains, police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, as well as by farmers, miners, surveyors, pleasure boaters, hikers, fishermen, and explorers. The timing elements of radionavigation systems are used by the telecommunications and electric power industries which, in turn, support every part of society and the economy. These trends will continue and accelerate with proliferation of public and private sector differential GPS services, and small, low-priced GPS receivers for personal use.
Real-time information on transportation choices and traffic conditions will lead to short-term changes in travel patterns. More workers can conduct business at home or from locations other than their office, including their car or on other modes of transportation. In real time, Americans are already "plugged in" and assisted by personal computing technology at home and work. We are witnessing a steep rise in use of the Internet, and growth in paging and other mobile communications services which permit easy access to the vast array of available electronic information. Although physical mobility will continue to be a prerequisite for many jobs, services, and leisure activities, effects associated with telecommunications advances could stimulate travel and transportation demand. Information technology will, therefore, play a prominent role both in shaping future transportation demands, and in enabling advanced management and
operations to meet those demands in an era of constrained expansion of physical infrastructure.
f. Transportation Sustainability Enabled by Technology
Along with the world’s growing reliance on motor vehicles has come a concomitant increase in environmental and energy impacts -- global carbon emissions, petroleum consumption, air pollution, and congestion. Coupled with high population growth rates and a growing vehicle fleet, sprawling urban development is a major cause of pollution, congestion, and poverty in many of the world’s cities.
These patterns of sprawl have profound implications. Employees who both work and live in low density places have scattered travel patterns -- they do not travel along highly concentrated corridors, and they have few alternatives to the private car when they travel. Conventional transit operations cannot serve low density areas economically. Employees who live in the core of metropolitan areas but work in the suburbs (reverse commuters) also may have limited travel options. Overall, these population and land use trends accelerate the travel patterns linked to the growth of a service-based economy, leading to longer work and non-work trips, more scattered origins and destinations, and greater dependence on single-occupancy private vehicles.
The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program will yield significant improvements for all motor vehicle types, such as lighter weight, lower cost materials; improved emission characteristics; and greatly lessened petroleum requirements in future personal vehicles. In general, technological advances will be critical factors in ensuring that the overall transportation system is brought to its full potential in terms of life-cycle economics, energy efficiency, and minimal adverse societal impacts. Programs for medium sized and heavy duty vehicles will yield similar benefits.
The digital highway and fiber optic communications, and the advent of personal communication systems promise to replace significant parts of today’s physical transportation traffic and further increase the global reach, speed, and productivity of information-assisted and -enabled transportation.
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