As a follow-up to my previous post, “Virginia, the De-Synchronization of Change and Fundamental Change,” I thought it useful to recapitulate what Alvin and Heidi Toffler have to say about the American transportation system. A vast infrastructure of four million miles of public highways, roads and streets, 23 million commercial trucks and hundreds of millions of automobiles, they write, “was a response to the mass society that grew up with mass production, urbanization and work patterns that required masses of workers to commute back and forth over the same pathways on uniform schedules.”
In 2000, the Tofflers note, some 119 million Americans wasted 24 billion hours getting to and from their jobs. But as mass production gives way to “increasingly customized, de-massified and decentralized knowledge production, large numbers of people no longer work in city cores. Work patterns shift from fixed schedules to anytime, anyplace, including home … altering the way time and space are used.”
The Tofflers look to “intelligent transportation” as a Knowledge-wave solution. The U.S. Department of Transportation concludes that intelligent “freeway management systems” could reduce accidents by 17 percent while permitting highways to handle 22 percent more traffic at greater speeds. Likewise, computerizing traffic signals could decrease travel times by 14 percent and delays by 37 percent.
Here’s where their analysis gets juicy:
But pressure from pour-more-concrete lobbies greatly outmatch the political influence of the nascent information-technology sector. When President Clinton in 1998 signed an act allocating $203 billion for repairing and “building roads, bridges, transit systems and railways,” the amount set aside for intelligent systems was approximately one tenth of 1 percent — this from an administration that touted its support for the “information superhighway.”
The U.S. transportation system, on which most business enterprises directly or indirectly depend, is still gridlocked by a political powerful triad of oil companies, car manufacturers and often corrupted highway-construction firms. … The key elements of America’s infrastructure – and their component subsystems — are de-synchronized and fought over by vested industrial-era interests and breakthrough innovators advancing the knowledge-based wealth system. Wave conflict again.
Virginia, one would think, possesses a IT industry with sufficient mass and political clout to nudge the Commonwealth’s transportation system in the knowledge-intensive direction espoused by the Tofflers. Sadly, Virginia’s tech lobby has functioned as a cheer-leader for the solutions advocated by the “pour-more-concrete lobby,” committing a miniscule amount of its political clout to pushing IT-oriented solutions. “Breakthrough innovators” do exist in Virginia, but they are small, politically powerless and largely unrepresented by the tech lobbies.
Of course, as the Tofflers fail to recognize, even liberal application of cool IT technology cannot, by itself, solve Virginia’s transportation problems. There simply is no way around the need for fundamental change to human settlement patterns, governance structures and transportation funding mechanisms.
Still, the Tofflers do intuit that the changing relationship between work and the workplace re-shapes the demand for transportation capacity — a subject that I am writing about for other publications and will address here on the Bacon’s Rebellion blog when I can. They also describe accurately how vested interests — not only auto companies, oil companies and highway construction firms but real estate developers and land speculators — have mobilized to thwart reform. While “Revolutionary Wealth” hardly offers the definitive treatise on U.S. transportation solutions, the Tofflers provide a useful context for understanding the problem.
