TRANSPORTATION OPTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR 2020 AND BEYOND
General System Characteristics - The Department is committed to evolving a 21st century transportation system that is international in scope, intermodal in form, intelligent in character and inclusive in service. Individual modal improvements and more sophisticated integration of modal elements will bring about this system.
Human-Centered Transportation Design - The combination of better understanding of human factors with an increasing sophistication in system design approaches will lead to proliferation of "human-centered" transportation systems. Such systems are constructed "from the inside out," and are driven by the capabilities, preferences and limitations of the users. For example, vehicles for the elderly will be able to compensate in part for their slowed reaction time and reduced visual acuity with sensors, intelligent systems, "heads up" and other display technologies, and night vision hardware. Detecting and instituting countermeasures for fatigue and other performance degradations will be commonplace.
The Evolving Personal Vehicle - Despite some major advances in other modes, the passenger automobile probably will continue to dominate transportation in the United States. However, the passenger car will go through some marked changes over the next 20-30 years. More fuel-efficient gasoline powered cars will be joined by hybrid diesel-electric vehicles, alternatively-fueled vehicles, and fuel cell powered vehicles. The market for automobiles may partition, based on trip lengths and purposes. Electric cars and station cars, powered by advanced or conventional electric batteries, as well as solar-powered and people-powered personal vehicles will assist commuters to perform local errands or economically reach transit system suburban collection terminals. These will complement larger vehicles which will be used for longer trips, or when additional carrying capacity is needed. Both kinds of vehicles should be lighter and safer than current autos, as vehicle structures use more new plastics and composite materials.
Application of improved understanding of human performance and behavior, vehicle crashworthiness, and biomechanics coupled with the structural improvements noted above, will help substantially to mitigate crash impacts. However, most of the systems to improve safety will be introduced as equipment on new vehicles. The integration of new systems on a fleet wide basis may take 10 to 20 years from initial introduction of the technology. The average age of vehicles in the fleet is increasing, as more solid construction and reduced needs for maintenance permit consumers to retain their vehicles longer. Overall safety statistics will improve, but may not fully reflect the benefits of new crash avoidance/mitigation techniques at once.
Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure - Today’s cluster of intelligent transportation vehicles and travel planning and information services will be integrated in new vehicles with smart driver/operator technologies; in-car sensors; on-board emission management systems; and links to the wayside information infrastructure. This will enable efficient, safer, and more environmentally benign ground transportation in 2020 and beyond. Advanced multi-spectral sensors, distributed microprocessors, communications, tracking technologies and display of traffic information in urban traffic management centers will enable more efficient use of limited infrastructure capacity, relieve congestion and lessen the environmental impacts of transportation.
Personal commuting and family pleasure travel will have many more real-time travel planning, scheduling and routing options, thanks to intelligent recreational vehicles, advanced public transportation systems, and automated highway systems. The safety of personal travel and of commercial vehicle operations will be assured by advanced incident management, and onboard collision avoidance radars and intelligent cruise control. Speech recognition software will allow drivers to adjust vehicle controls simply by asking for the change. In-car navigation and information systems will be commonplace, integrated directly into the vehicle’s electronics: maps, weather data, traffic conditions, and alternative routes will be immediately available. Night viewing infrared detectors will enhance driving safety at all times and in all weather, and small video cameras may substitute for items like rear view mirrors. Intelligent driver trainers and simulators will be used to prepare and test for driver licensing and for sobriety testing of drivers, as well as for safety recertification.
For intercity trips, there should also be fully automated highways allowing high-speed auto travel with minimal driver intervention on selected routes. These may be separate highways, or lanes on existing/expanded highways reserved for vehicles with the appropriate high-speed control packages. The intelligent infrastructure for these highways will be compatible with, and possibly integrated into, multimodal traffic control systems directing aviation and maritime movements.
Telecommuting, Teleconferencing and Real-Time Traveler Information - Home-based employees and corporate telecommuters – linked by global networks and logged into "virtual offices"-- should be routine work concepts in 2020. Virtual reality and telepresence applications will be common, and available worldwide, significantly reducing the need for daily commutes to work in some occupations, and enhancing productivity and safety. Video-telephony, satellite-based video, and data communications networks will reduce the need for business travel by a substantial fraction of skilled workers. Home and personal vehicles, trains, planes, and buses will have broad-band communications, computer, video-telephony, and message display ports -- compatible with personal palm-size or smaller units -- to enable real-time travel planning, scheduling and reservations, and access to offices anywhere in the world. This will relieve congestion on highways and roadways, which are now free to accommodate new priority and recreational vehicular traffic.
Urban and Community Public Transportation - Public transportation systems will provide widely available, inexpensive alternatives to the personal vehicle for shorte trips. The recent emphasis on "smart growth" and "livable communities" will promote new human-scale developments which are designed from the start to be served by local circulation and transit systems. Shuttle services will link these complexes with intercity modes for longer trips among clusters of development.
Some low speed, shorter range maglev systems will be integrated into structures, functioning as horizontal elevators among the buildings in employment, sales, and entertainment complexes. There may also be application of such maglev systems as line haul modes in selected urban corridors. Low cost fiber reinforced composite elevated guideways will enable widespread deployment of both maglev and wheeled people movers to link airports, vertiports, and multimodal terminals with the center city and suburban activity centers.
Computer dispatched para-transit vehicles serving the suburbs and elderly and disabled passengers will integrate with, and share HOV lanes with, advanced technology urban and intercity transit buses in more densely developed areas. Specialized and public transit services will reach into rural and lower-density areas, linking their carless residents to urban services. Many of these options will be powered using alternative fuels or use fuel cells.
The transit systems will profit from the technologies of the intelligent transportation infrastructure, with safety and performance improvements in bus vehicle maneuvering, merge collision avoidance, forward collision avoidance, and docking. Automatic vehicle location systems will be commonplace, with positions monitored from metropolitan scale traffic management centers. Real-time information on actual bus positions and schedules should be readily available to potential riders. With an increasing number of elderly people as riders, these systems will exemplify the "human centered design" concept.
High-Speed Ground Transportation - High-speed ground transportation systems for intercity passengers and high value freight will be in place in a number of different corridors in a variety of forms. Systems entirely separate from conventional railroads will serve the Northeast Corridor and the San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco Corridor using either 200 mph railroad or 300 mph maglev technology. Similar lines will be under construction in some less highly populated corridors but most of these will continue to be served by more conventional services offering 100 to 150 mph maximum speeds on upgraded partially grade separated tracks which also accommodate freight trains. Many large metroplexes will also have high speed, 100+ mph, commuter service on a track partly shared with intercity trains.
Intra-regional freight distribution networks - The freight transportation system of 2020 will be a tightly connected network, allowing shippers to tailor their choice of transportation services to the specific freight items to be shipped, their sizes, their priority for delivery, and their destinations. Current priority air cargo services already interface with multimodal freight transportation networks, enabled by people who assist automatic sorting and routing, using "just-in-time" logistics and electronic data interchange (EDI) information traffic. This may serve as a model for other applications.
The coverage of ground (rail and highway), air, and sea networks of transportation infrastructure will continue to expand. Information technology could lead to a fully multimodal "smart" freight control and tracking system, and a rapid ground based distribution system could further expand its reach. Electronic tags will facilitate locating and tracking cargo containers and vehicles in transit, with the information combined with electronic bills of lading and automated handling, sorting, and routing at intermodal terminals. Global in-transit visibility using ground and space-based communications routinely will be used to follow transportation of bulk, parcel, and high value cargo. Fleet management systems for freight vehicles will provide unprecedented flexibility in locating and projecting the arrival times of key shipments. Automation and robotics will enable operation of high productivity intermodal terminals and logistics
chains, to sustain just-in-time materials and products delivery and "lean production" agile manufacturing for industry and trade. Future cars, boats and aircraft will even be customized to order, manufactured, and rapidly delivered.
The expansion of Pacific Basin trade will create demand for faster and higher capacity ships and air cargo freighters. In some urban areas, delivery might be expedited with a network of soft-tunneled underground cargo tubes, coexisting with gas, sewer, electric, telecommunications, and water pipeline infrastructure. Compressed air or liquid carbon dioxide slurries might be used to rapidly convey cargo from some source suppliers to users’ destinations. Special-purpose response units and their vehicles will be pre-positioned to deal with accidents, pollution incidents, and natural disasters impacting transportation, their operations linked through shared control and communication systems.
Next Generation Ferries and Marine Transportation - Ferry services will become more prevalent, to compensate for reduced land available in highly developed areas,. High speed hydrofoils, catamarans, SWATH (small water area twin-hull) ships and hovercraft will operate as high speed ferries in the coastal mega-plexes that will have evolved from today’s east and west coast urban complexes.
Intelligent vessel traffic services, coupled with differential GPS navigation, electronic charts and related vessel improvements, will greatly improve the safety and efficiency of the marine transportation system. Marine security information will be readily available to vessel operators, integrated into the displays of data from which control decisions are made. Ocean-going vessels will be responsible for a large proportion of international movement of bulk commodities, but intelligent control technologies, improved weather forecasting, and higher vessel speeds will have increased the safety of
these operations while simultaneously improving their productivity. As required by the OilPollution Act of 1990, only double-hulled oil tankers will be in service in U.S. waters. 19
The growth of global tourism will lead to more cruise ships of all sizes, linked to planes and trains through multimodal port terminals. These vessels will carry international and U.S. vacationers across the oceans and along major inland waterways. Some forecast particular growth in very large ocean liners, carrying several thousand passengers. Advanced super-high speed "techno-superliners" – the next generation 50-100 knot passenger ships – will be operating both as long distance coastal and ocean-crossing carriers. These vessel technologies, applied to tomorrow’s container ships, tankers and bulk carriers, will help deal with greatly increased world trade volume by improving the speed of delivery for water cargo. Mega-float offshore airports and intermodal terminal-ports will be coupled with high speed sea-ferries to expand air traffic airport capacity and better serve the U.S. and world coastal metro-plex hubs. Larger and larger cruise ships may evolve into self-propelled floating resort "cities," which can migrate based on changing weather and climate conditions.
Future Aircraft and Traffic Control Concepts - A new generation of advanced aircraft, using lighter and stronger materials and new propulsion concepts will replace today’s aging commercial and general aviation air fleet. They will take advantage of an enhanced navigation, communication and surveillance air traffic control system now being deployed. The emerging systems will rely on the next generation global positioning satellites for navigation, and on dedicated, secure aviation air-to-air and air-to-ground space-enabled communication networks to assure safe operations. Aviation security measures will be simultaneously more effective and less obtrusive, thanks to advances in sensor technology.
Travelers may make expanded use of small aircraft and small airports for business and personal intercity transportation, especially in lower density areas. NASA is working on the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) initiative, which is intended to provide by 2022 a system that will enable doorstep-to-destination travel at four times the speed of highways to 90% of Nation's suburban, rural, and remote communities. It includes expanding the number of public-use airports that are equipped for near all-weather operational support of SATS aircraft. SATS aircraft will encompass new avionics, airframe, engine, and pilot training technologies. These new technologies will create new features and capabilities that will significantly improve affordability, safety, and ease of use
over today's aircraft.
The next generation of commercial aircraft will be safer, quieter, and environmentally compatible, as well as more efficient and customized to market niches: low fare, business, tourist, etc. Super-jumbo, wide-body jets may carry 800 passengers on routes serving the Pacific basin or major shuttle corridors, relieving air traffic congestion yet accommodating growing global tourism demand. Such large airliners will be cleaner, quieter, and more fuel-efficient, but will also bring added challenges in security, baggage handling, and traffic management around airports they operate from.
Airport complexes (Reagan National, Washington Dulles, and Baltimore-Washington International; Newark, NY La Guardia, NY JFK International, and Islip/Mac Arthur; Manchester NH, Boston MA, and Providence, RI) serving heavily developed areas should continue to proliferate, with associated ground access problems as traffic levels rise. Inter-airport ground shuttles, maglev systems, short-range air links, and better integrated intercity services may be used to lessen these pressures. These multi-modal linkages, combined with improved weather forecasting and user-oriented ticketing systems, may reduce overall travel delays, and provide alternatives for travelers whose journeys are interrupted by adverse flight conditions.
Environmentally friendly supersonic and hypersonic aircraft with advanced noise and sonic boom reduction technologies will transport passengers and high value cargo faster. Tiltrotors, quiet helicopters, and other vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) agile small and light aircraft will rapidly carry and deliver intercity business travelers to the downtown, to reliever airports, or to suburban destinations, replacing some corporate jets. These aircraft will incorporate "fly-by-light" technology and artificial cockpit vision (which fuses radar, infrared imaging and video) for all-weather, 3-D situational awareness and the safety that comes with it.
Low-cost Access to Space - Low-cost, user-friendly commercial space access is the key to the future of global telecommunications, safe navigation for all types of transportation vehicles, and operations of both civil and military transportation services. Current activities made possible by orbital platforms will become more inexpensive and expand: massive transmissions of voice communications and data will occur in real time, monitoring of changing weather and other conditions at the surface of the earth will improve; positioning and navigation services will become more accessible; and fleet management and parcel tracking will be facilitated. Commercial exploitation of space will continue with expanding telecommunications, new remote sensing applications, medical
complexes taking advantage of the zero-gravity environment, and manufacturing and materials processing complexes in orbit. There may be the first signs of a premium fare space travel and tourism industry. The presence of a permanent space station or lunar base should accelerate these trends.
Manned traffic into low earth orbits should increase substantially. The X-33/Venture Star and X-34 should lead to single-stage-to-orbit shuttles which carry payloads directly into space, return to earth, and then are quickly recycled for their next mission. Low-cost, versatile launch vehicles, associated spaceports, and payload integration infrastructure will make the continued growth possible. Currently in testing are commercial launch vehicles with controlled re-entry characteristics to allow their re-use, and air-launched orbital vehicles which function as air-breathing space planes. In addition to orbital missions, these new classes of aerospace vehicles operating sub-orbitally could provide access to anywhere in the world in less than two hours to transport premium-fare passengers and high-priority freight. Just as with more conventional air services, the space-oriented operations will have to be integrated into the operations of the transportation system as a whole.
The Hydrogen Economy - Several kinds of fuel cells, which produce electricity from combining hydrogen with oxygen, are now in development and testing on advanced transit buses, train locomotives, and ships. The four principal types under investigation at present are molten carbonate, phosphoric acid, proton exchange membrane (PEM), and solid oxide fuel cells. These technologies may lead to a future hydrogen-based fuel economy.
Governments and industries are in a worldwide race to create a hydrogen economy for electric power generation, in the near term reforming fuels to release hydrogen for use in homes and manufacturing plants or onboard transportation vehicles. (Breakthroughs in fusion energy and/or the development of a lunar base or similar source for the Helium 3 used in fusion might accelerate this trend.) Ultimately, hydrogen may be the sustainable energy source of the 21st century, and eliminate greenhouse gas generation by transportation vehicles. Until then, technology advances, coupled with volume-based price reduction, promise to make fuel cells the choice for future personal vehicles.
Transportation Planning and Decision-making - As our understanding of transportation’s contribution to economic growth, the planning process for future systems should become more sophisticated, reflecting advances in economics, policy assessment, risk evaluation, and understanding of political systems. Building on tools like today’s TRansportation ANalysis SIMulation System (TRANSIMS) 20 model, advanced simulation techniques will enable decision-makers to investigate the impacts of their transportation choices on other sectors. Advanced display techniques will portray these activities, facilitating communication of impacts occurring and why choices were made. In addition, the development of personal and electronic networks among elected officials, transportation professionals, and other professional communities will enable sharing of experiences, and foster broader implementation of productive innovations.
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