Packed Planes and Traffic Jams: How to Fix America’s Travel Problems
Improved flight tracking can save jet fuel and reduce flight delays. (Photo: Danil Melekhin / Getty Images)
By Erik Sofge
Travel should be awe-inspiring. But too often the journey itself is defined by overbooked flights, chronically delayed trains, and bridges and roads that are literally crumbling under our wheels. In its 2013 infrastructure report cards, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) quantified the sorry state of travel-related sectors, assigning a C+ grade to both bridges and rail, while aviation and roads scored a D. Some of these grades were actually up from the previous report card (released in 2009), but the numbers remain grim. Airline congestion and delays drain some $22 billion from the U.S. economy every year, while congestion on more than 40 percent of the country’s major urban highways accounts for $102 billion in annual losses. And those are just the problems that can be readily quantified. Seemingly petty issues, like shrinking legroom on airplanes or the sparsity of electric vehicles in most of the country, contribute to the lingering sense that travel, despite all of its progress, still sucks.
The obvious fix for all of these woes is lots of money, and plenty of time. But there are more specific, immediate fixes, too, that involve targeting the nation’s always limited funding toward a given project or system. There’s no need to wait for Google’s crashless cars, Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, or any other sci-fi-inspired Hail Mary to solve all of our people-moving problems. Here’s what technology can actually do in the near-term to improve the state of travel in the United States.
Increase Cabin Humidity in Planes (Like In The Dreamliner)
(Photo: fStop Images - Halfdark / Getty Images)
Dehydration aboard passenger flights is one of the main causes of jet lag, that suite of aviation-based health woes that collectively sap your strength during long flights. Among the benefits offered up by Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is a more humid cabin — up to 15 percent humidity, compared with as little as 2 percent on traditional planes. If that sounds swampy and gross, remember that even 15 percent still leaves the air parched and arid, at least compared with anywhere other than the inside of an aircraft (even Arizona’s average afternoon humidity, for example, is at 25 percent). The additional moisture pumped into the Dreamliner’s cabin is more of a subtle, yet welcome increase.
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The explanation generally given for this feature has to do with the non-metallic composite materials that make up some 50 percent of the Dreamliner’s structure. Other planes, which incorporate far more aluminum in their airframes, could rust when placed in a state of increased humidity. Boeing says that its new 777x model, slated to go into production in 2017, will also boast Dreamliner-like humidity levels. The 777x also relies on composites, but they only compose 9 percent of the aircraft’s structure. Other aviation firms — and the airlines that purchase for them — should take note that it’s possible to make cabins more hospitable without degrading or radically overhauling their material composition.
Burn Less Jet Fuel
(Photo: Lester Lefkowitz / Getty Images)
The Dreamliner’s biggest selling point isn’t the added moisture in its cabin, but the surplus of liquid in its fuel tanks. Compared with the similarly sized Boeing 767, the Dreamliner is 20 percent more fuel-efficient, a product of its lighter overall weight and improved aerodynamics. Burning less fuel hasn’t translated to travelers spending less on tickets, but it does allow the plane to make more direct flights to more locations. If cost-savings from better fuel economy are ever going to trickle down to consumers, the sky would have to be filled with Dreamliners, or similarly redesigned planes from competing firms.
The more feasible path to jet fuel efficiency is also one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in the United States. The NextGen Air Traffic Control is a sprawling set up of upgrades, including the use of GPS data to more precisely track planes. “The technology we use for air traffic control is pretty antiquated,” says Casey Dinges, public affairs director at ASCE. Current air traffic relies heavily on radar, and on ground-based controllers to relay the relative position of aircraft. The NexGen system would transmit location data to ground towers, as well as to other aircraft. “Planes will be able to use less fuel, and make airport approaches more closely than now,” says Dinges. Though estimates vary, NextGen could reduce fuel consumption by 10 percent, saving more than 4 million gallons of fuel per year.
Fight Flight Delays With Satellite Tracking
Another potential result of the NextGen air traffic control system’s sweeping upgrades would be a drastic reduction in flight delays. By taking much of the guesswork out of tracking the real-time position of aircraft, planes would need less of a safety buffer, and could actually fly closer together. That doesn’t mean that near-misses will suddenly increase — if anything, they should be all but eliminated, as pilots are constantly updated with the location of nearby aircraft, whose own automated systems coordinate to avoid anything resembling a close call. The system also plans to collect more data from weather sensors across the country, weather being the single biggest factor is delays. A full, nationwide rollout of NextGen could improve safety, and cut delays by as much as 38 percent.
Of course, it will take years for this system to reach every airport and aircraft, and with billions in funding still required, a sudden change in political will could leave the program’s most promising features on the table. But even if the full benefits of NextGen never materialize, its impact can be felt on a local level. Related upgrades in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., have cut delays during the busy winter season by 10 percent. That’s five flights per day that aren’t delayed, and reason enough to push for NextGen at an airport near you.
Use Automation on Trains to Reduce Driver Distraction
(Photo: Philip Game / Getty Images)
In September 2008, a commuter train collided head-on with a freight train in Southern California, killing 25 passengers and injuring 135. A little over a month later, the Safety Improvement Act of 2008 was signed into law, a bill that demanded that positive train control (PTC) technology be installed on the majority of the country’s trains. PTC, which had been in development for years before the Metrolink crash, shares similarities with the NextGen air traffic system, using GPS and a degree of automation to take human error out of the equation. When a PTC-equipped train detects that it’s exceeding the speed limit for a given stretch of rail, or if it’s been accidentally switched to the wrong track, it can slow or even stop itself. PTC doesn’t turn trains into full-fledged self-driving robots, but it’s a step in that direction.
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Granted, passenger rail is a remarkably safe mode of transport — riders are exponentially less likely to be hurt or killed on a train than on the road in a car — but from increasing safety to simply keeping a closer, more GPS-enabled eye on all freight and passenger trains, PTC has nothing but upside. The key now is to hasten its arrival, and ensure that the system’s December 2015 deadline doesn’t slip quietly by.
By Rail: Let Amtrak Focus On Decongesting The Northeast
(Photo: Barry Winiker / Getty Images)
Ridership in the Northeast Corridor (NEC) — the rail lines running from Boston down to Washington D.C. — constitutes more than a third of Amtrak’s total customers. Naturally, this route is also the nation’s most consistently congested. And the situation can seem hopeless, as infrastructure problems often do. “The challenge with the Northeast Corridor is that you have so much population density,” says the ASCE’s Dinges, “and all the land condemnation necessary to lay any new track.” Factor in the usual funding requirements, measured in the billions of dollars, in this case, and the delays that stack up along the NEC can be interpreted as the cost of doing business in the financial and political heart of the United States.
Or maybe Amtrak just needs to spend more money where more people are riding its trains. This year, Congress is expected to vote on a transportation reauthorization bill that includes a new provision, which allows Amtrak — which receives $1.4 billion in federal funding per year — to invest some of its profits into NEC-specific improvements. That could include long-term projects, such as the development of 220 mph high-speed trains, as well as the installing of entirely new “spines” that increase capacity along the route. For the more immediate future, though, passage of the bill could let Amtrak pursue less politically divisive options, such as improving bypasses and general track conditions, which could lead to minor, but still long-overdue reductions in overall congestion.
Let Tourists Fund Rail Infrastructure
(Photo: Anne Rippy / Getty Images)
Rail tourism isn’t exactly a national sensation, but it should be. Travel by rail can be a vacation in itself; it’s a more fuel-efficient way to see the country than taking a road trip; and it’s safer than just about any other means of traveling. But making a given route tourist-friendly also means that private companies are refurbishing lines that politicians aren’t able or willing to.
The best example of this infrastructure win-win is the Alaska Railroad Corporation, probably best known for its Denali Star route, from Anchorage to Fairbanks. But the success of that and other tourist-packed lines, as well as partnerships with various cruise lines, has allowed the company to not only seek federal funding for regional improvements (such as two major track extensions currently underway), but to use its own money on capital investments. In 2013 alone, ARRC spent $14.3 million on track rehabilitation and other projects not eligible for grants. This level of prosperity and reinvestment isn’t possible in every part of the country, but ventures like Pullman Rail Journeys, which offers an intimate, retro-inspired ride from Chicago down to New Orleans, could inject much-needed cash into America’s most scenic mode of transportation.
Forget Robot Cars — We Need More Self-Braking Cars
(Courtesy: General Motors)
Don’t believe the hype about self-driving cars. Or, at the very least, don’t believe the timetable implied by media coverage of the Google Car and similar robotic vehicles. The design cycle for traditional automobiles, from the first sketch to the first models hitting the showroom, is typically between three and five years, and that’s without having to test autonomous sensors and drive-by-wire components in all forms of weather and road conditions. Robots are still a long, long way from chauffeuring us around.
Luckily, the road to autonomous cars is paved with lifesaving active safety features. And one that consumers (and lawmakers) should consider making universal is the growing class of pre-collision systems. The brand names and functionality vary by company — Toyota calls theirs “Toyota Safety Sense,” while Cadillac talks about “sensor fusion” technology — but these systems all can either brake automatically when sensors predict that a collision is imminent, or alert you to apply the brakes (there are combination solutions, as well, that will brake harder, if the vehicle concludes that you’re underestimating the risk). The features are rolling out right now on select models, but a safety upgrade that’s this significant should be an upsell. Soon, pre-collision tech could be as common — and possibly as required of carmakers — as seatbelts.
Built-In Car Navigation Systems Should Use Google Maps
(Photo: Maciej Frolow / Getty Images)
In-car navigation systems don’t necessarily have to use Google’s navigation software, but ever since the search giant started integrating accident reporting from the Waze app into their system, their data has become more reliable than ever. Waze encourages its users to feed the network with up-to-the-minute details about incidents that are contributing to congestion, data that now shows up on everyone’s Google Maps applications.
Built-in GPS systems, meanwhile, don’t inherently evolve over time. In most cases, updates have to be made manually (at dealerships), and often at great expense. This is creating an unfortunate disconnect: As dashboard navigation systems become increasingly common in new cars, they’re consistently less useful than the free apps in our phones. The solution is a relatively simple one: Partner up with whoever has the best data. And so long as built-in nav systems can receive regular software updates (via cellular connections, not dealership servicing), the source of that data can change in the years to come.
Start a National Pothole Hunt
(Photo: olaser / Getty Images)
Pothole reporting apps are nothing new. But they’re generally local affairs, paid for by municipalities as a way of indicating which roads are in need of repair. That means they lack the user interface polish or the emphasis on positive-reinforcement that makes privately funded apps so popular. Take Yelp, for example, which, for better or worse, has become the go-to service for restaurant recommendations. Granted, no one is going to wax poetic about the yawning craters dotting their commute, but when crowdsourced data is properly collected and presented, crowds of users tend to send more data.
What we need is a truly slick, nationwide reporting app, with the potential to automatically detect some problems (as Boston’s Street Bump app already does, using the phone’s accelerometer and GPS connection), as well as ways of entering in specific data. Users could pick the three worst potholes they deal with on a regular basis, or indicate where the conditions are so bad, that drivers are invading other lanes to steer around widening depressions. Your average citizen isn’t a software developer, obviously, but imagine an app that could merge pothole reports with exiting map services, suggesting alternate routes that avoid the biggest tire manglers.
Wi-Fi Should Be As Common In Cars As Everywhere Else
(Courtesy: General Motors)
A scattered selection of car models offer in-car hotspots, allowing drivers and passengers to connect their phones and tablets to the vehicle’s mobile Wi-Fi network. While infinitely less pressing than making pre-collision systems standard in new cars, ready access to Wi-Fi is among the most satisfying creature comforts.
The largest deployment of this feature is in GM vehicles with OnStar. For a monthly fee of $5, up to seven devices can join the car’s network, breathing life into tablets during road trips, and potentially rescuing everyone in the vehicle from data plan overages. But as more models rely on regular data transfer for their infotainment systems — to display points of interest, for example, or to play music from streaming services like Pandora and Spotify — why not share some of that bandwidth? Whether car owners can choose to pay a monthly or data-based fee, or get limited Wi-Fi service free, in-car hotspots would be another way to soften the blow of long-haul holiday travel.
Car Sharing Should Be As Boring — And Dependable — as Hertz
(Photo: ARUNAS KLUPSAS / Getty Images)
Car sharing is having its growing pains moment. Whether it’s Lyft cars with pink mustaches or Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick saying he’s so popular with the ladies, he calls his company Boob-er, the downside of having an industry dominated by startups is painfully obvious.
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For car-sharing to become as mainstream as car rentals, it needs to grow up — and get boring. That could mean the likes of Lyft and Uber abandoning all traces of startup culture, and marketing themselves as nothing more or less interesting than app-based taxi dispatchers. Or maybe the little fish aren’t meant to survive, and companies like Hertz need to absorb the startups, and make the services as reliable and personality-free as possible. After all, for an idea like car-sharing to reach its full potential, everyone has to be comfortable using it. We rent cars because they’re at every airport, not because Hertz thinks it’s badass.
Make Electric Vehicles Viable in the Northeast
(Courtesy: teslamotors.com)
There’s no law that prohibits the sale of fully electric vehicles (EVs) outside of the West Coast. But there might as well be. The comparative lack of public car chargers in other parts of the country has made this promising technology a non-starter almost anywhere else. Even Tesla’s Model S, with its groundbreaking range of more than 250 miles per charge, is a nerve-wracking choice for consumers in the Northeast. All of the good that electric cars are poised to do is irrelevant until we have the infrastructure to support them.
Why are we focusing, once again, about the Northeast? There’s nothing special about Yankees — everyone in America deserves the opportunity to drive purely on electrons. But let’s start with the next most obvious place behind California — the population-dense, and relatively affluent (in an aggregated, demographic sense) cluster of states that appears ready to commit to EVs. Whether that means begging Elon Musk to spend more of Tesla’s money on installing chargers on the East Coast, or roping utilities and carmakers into similar investment, we need to banish range anxiety. And state or federally funded chargers might not be the worst idea, considering the uncertain future of the gas tax.
Around half of all transportation-related infrastructure spending is currently derived from taxing gas and diesel, which generates more than $30 billion annually. But unless Congress takes action during its next session, the highway trust fund will become insolvent (the deadline is May 31). And along with being politically vulnerable, the tax isn’t compatible with tomorrow’s drivetrains. “The increase in electric vehicles and hybrids is one of the reasons the highway trust fund has reached crisis dimensions,” says ASCE’s Dinges. “When we look to the user fee in the future, it can’t be a gasoline-based tax. We should have a system that’s based on vehicle miles traveled.”
EVs are still a single-digit fraction of the country’s automotive fleet, but a comprehensive network of chargers could be the first step towards periodically collecting and charging according to mileage, rather than the far more distasteful possibility of remotely tracking every vehicle. Municipalities could experiment with taxing each charge, or interfacing with the car’s telematics to obtain data on total distance covered, but not specific routes and locations. It won’t be easy, or painless, to replace the already troubled gas tax. But as with everything related to infrastructure, if we’re going to get it right, better to start right now.
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