The Transportation Experience : Policy, Planning, and Deployment
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THE TRANSPORTATION EXPERIENCE This page intentionally left blank The Transportation Experience Policy, Planning, and Deployment William L. Garrison David M. Levinson 3 2006 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press www.oup.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrison, William Louis [date] The transportation experience: policy, planning, and deployment / William L. Garrison and David M. Levinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-517250-8; 978-0-19-517251-5 (pbk.) ISBN 0-19-517250-7; ISBN 0-19-517251-5 (pbk.) 1. Transportation and state—United States—History. 2. Transportation and state—Great Britain—History. I. Levinson, David M. [date] II. Title. HE203.G37 2004 388′.0973—dc22 2003028117 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Dedication Marcia S. Garrison Trinh Ann Carpenter This page intentionally left blank Preface A preface provides a place to alert the reader to the authors’ point of departure and the decisions made about topical emphasis, inclusion, and exclusion. As would be expected, there will be emphasis on topics the authors give high priority and have special knowledge of, either through experience or research. Such topics include the effects of transportation improvements on economic and social development, how transportation organizations and technologies function as systems, and research and development policies that might improve technologies. There will be emphasis on the growth dynamics of systems—their innovation, development, deployment, and ultimate stagnation. Our emphasis on growth dynamics, systems, and learning is unconventional. Why dance to a different drummer? It takes conviction and hard work to proceed in an unconventional way. Why hard work? Much of the policy literature is not relevant, so one has to dig hard. Why conviction? We think we need to do better and can do better. Our experiences tell us that we need new approaches. Garrison began work in transportation policy and planning in the 1950s in the State of Washington. The issue for the State was the development and funding of a freeway program. Studies emphasized both rural and urban development needs, capacity and other design features of facilities, and schemes for funding. Funding was to be tied to tolls and what is now termed value capture, and some valuable insights were obtained on the development impacts of transportation investment. Emerging program decisions in Washington State were mooted by the passage of the 1956 Interstate Act, and the stage for the work shifted to Washington, D.C. That was during the late Eisenhower years and the focus remained on highways, mainly cost allocation. With the Kennedy years, activities extended to other modes, yielding about a forty-year experience in national planning and policy debates and studies, enriched somewhat by experiences in other nations and work with service providers, as well as work on regional economic development and science and engineering policy topics. State and local government experiences have been limited. The context for work included congressional boards and commissions, agency advi- sory committees, and studies performed for the Congress or for agencies by nonprofit organizations, augmented by informal discussions. Sometimes experiences responded viii Preface to opportunities, but most responded to issues or problems. In transportation these included safety, interstate funding, decline of passenger railroads, airport investment needs, reversal of transit’s fortunes, deregulation, maritime subsidies, congestion, roles of rate bureaus, tolls on inland waterways, state and local roles, and so on. To manage these issues, recommendations were sometimes informed by studies, but what may be termed conventional wisdom was often the major force shaping recommendations. Levinson’s career has been shorter; he entered the professional world in the late 1980s in Maryland as a transportation planner and modeler. His experiences ranged from the technical aspects of model development, the policy world of growth manage- ment, the planning of new networks (none of which has been built), and the economic and engineering analysis of intercity transportation and ITS technologies, along with research into traveler and institutional behavior. While over the past two decades the Internet and other communications technologies have radically reshaped how we conduct our activities, nothing similar has emerged in transportation. The view of the transportation world in the past two decades has been shaped not by its growth but by its maturity, and the seeming inability of society to build significant infrastructure, to implement important policies, or to develop and deploy new technologies. That which is pitched as important is really minor; that which is posited as novel is often a rehash of nineteenth-century technology at twenty-first-century prices. Much was learned from those experiences. We can claim a few accomplishments and doing no harm. At the same time, we lament opportunities not grasped and progress not made. At best, we came away from experiences with the feeling that the paths of existing programs had been mildly pushed in new directions and that programs had been polished a little. Sometimes new initiatives were suggested, but their implementation was rare. One important thing we did learn was not to think of ourselves as transportation geographers, or transportation engineers, or transportation planners, or transportation policy analysts, or transportation economists, but rather, to coin a term, transportationists. The study of transportation is sufficiently interdisciplinary to warrant a discipline of its own. The movement of people and goods across networks over time and space is the unifying object of study. The central research questions in transportation concern what moves, why and how people and goods move, how networks operate, how the interaction of travelers and shippers and carriers and networks shapes behaviors, how networks are (or should be) built and paid for, and so on. Conviction leading to an unconventional approach followed from optimism. Surely we can do better. It also followed from a sense of urgency. The transportation modes in the developed world are well deployed. Their technological and organizational formats are mature. Consequently, productivity gains come hard and the modes have limited capabilities to further energize social and economic development. We need to think harder. We need to do better. William L. Garrison David M. Levinson Acknowledgments My transportation experience began as a user and sometimes operator of trains, planes, trucks, ships, and automobiles. Traveling a bit more than the one hour per day the average person does, that’s about four years worth. I learned some things, but not nearly as much as I learned from when visiting places and people involved in providing facilities, building equipment, and providing services. Places included laboratories and test facilities and people included independent truckers, labor union leaders, and train crews. Managers have included all kinds of people ranging from owners of tankship fleets and railroad executives to public agency managers. Robert Pfeiffer of Matson Navigation, Downing Jenks of the Missouri Pacific Railroad, James Forman of United Parcel, G. Plowman of the U.S. Steel Company and onetime Deputy Secretary of Commerce for Transportation, and G. P. St. Clair of the Bureau of Public Roads were a few of my great tutors. On quick review I count about twenty tutors, and I am sure that number would double and redouble with more recollection. I was learning about the transportation modes and about the ways actors viewed their worlds, where they were coming from so to speak. What to make of the messages I was receiving? Living a university life, I am used to sensing the ways career selection and academic fields affect where my colleagues are coming from. A similar understanding extends to actors in the transportation world. Actors’ values and sense of role, the insti- tutions they create, and the rules that guide their actions are shaped by experiences. There is more. Ideas are light baggage, and the transportation experience has traveled and impacted widely, sometimes in a surprising fashion. Robert’s Rules of Order, used in the United States to guide meetings, had its roots in public meetings on inland waterway improvements. Several decades ago I began to use the transportation experience as an organizing theme in my courses. This book grew from notes originally developed by me with the modest objective of supporting classroom