Brace Yourself for the Next Transportation Revolution

In articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, Bill Ford Jr., executive chairman of Fort Motor Company, has unveiled his new vision for how automobile technology can improve traffic safety and reduce traffic congestion. “Urban mobility is going to be an enormous challenge if we do nothing about it,” Ford told the WSJ. “We can sit back and let it happen to us, or we can start to present solutions and create business opportunities along the way.”

Ford Motor is investing in systems that will help cars avoid traffic jams, reserve parking spaces and even drive themselves. It is expanding the use of crash-avoidance technologies and broadening collaboration with car-sharing companies like Zipcar Inc. In his “Blueprint for Mobility” Ford envisions a future in which automonous cars are connected to datases that coordinates automobile travel with public transit and other transportation methods and parking.

While other car companies have not articulated the same expansive vision that Ford is promoting, many are moving in the same direction. There is considerable momentum, for instance, behind the development of common standards that would allow vehicles to signal one another to avoid collisions and support systems geared to minimizing highway congestion.

Let me make it crystal clear: I don’t see automotive technology as a panacea for urban congestion. Insofar as the technology is adopted, it could reduce the number of crashes and increase the capacity of the existing road/highway network. But it would be expensive, increasing the price of automobiles and making them more unaffordable than they already are. To provide mobility and access for all Americans, there is no substitute for shared ridership systems or for more compact, walkable human settlement patterns that reduce the need for automobile trips.

My purpose in highlighting Ford’s ideas is to show how new sensors, GPS technologies, wireless technologies and database technologies are beginning to transform transportation. We are in the early stages of a revolution — possibly the greatest revolution since the introduction of the automobile, certainly since the building of Interstate highways — in how Americans move from place to place. As citizens, we must anticipate these new capabilities, encourage their proliferation and design communities that optimize the benefits that flow from them.

A secondary point is to note where these innovations are coming from. They are not coming from Congress, nor from the federal bureaucracy, nor from think tanks, nor from money-losing, monopoly, government-run mass-transit enterprises. They are emerging from the profit-driven private sector.

Government-run transit monopolies were relatively harmless when transportation technology was stable and predictable, and the field didn’t change very fast. Stodgy monopolies didn’t innovate but at least they could keep up with the slow evolution of technology. That may longer be the case. Just as the U.S. had to bust up the old ATT telephone monopoly and deregulate (at least partially) the telecommunications industry to reap the benefits of new fiber-optic, wireless and satellite technology technologies, Americans — and Virginians — need to re-think their commitment to such organizational dinosaurs as the Metropolitan Washington Area Transit Authority (MWATA) and a host of local bus and light rail authorities across the country.

Does it make sense  in an era of prolonged fiscal austerity to double down our public commitment to mass transit systems that not only require enormous up-front investments but lock in operational deficits forever? We need mass transit and shared ridership systems because automobiles are becoming increasingly unaffordable. But the government-owned, unionized mass transit model has proven a massive failure.

A transportation revolution is coming. Do we really want that revolution to be dominated by the automobile industry? Do we really want the transportation systems of the next  century to be defined by Bill Ford and his counterparts at Toyota, Mercedes and BMW? Well, it will be unless we replace monopoly models of mass transit with entrepreneurial models.