More Information
2002 Forum
View other years
2002 Oberstar Forum — Rep. Oberstar's Speech
How Should Transportation Change After September 11?
By Rep. James L. Oberstar
The primary purpose of this forum on transportation policy and technology is to look at emerging issues in transportation. I want to single out four issues that I think will shape the nations transportation system in the early decades of this new century: transportation and quality of life, intermodalism and modal connections to move people and goods, the role of technology, and safety in transportation.
For most of the 20th century, the main focus of transportation policy was building a safe, efficient highway system. The national system, interstate and defense highways, as we’ve just mentioned, was built in the name of defense, as was the early going in education. We couldn’t do anything about education, so the national system of defense education educated a whole generation: 16 million returning veterans returning from World War II. The idea was to connect our cities, our farms, our defense facilities. It was also for safety.
My predecessor was one of the five co-authors of the interstate highway system in 1956. The information presented then was that, if we didn’t do something about our highway system, we’d be killing 110,000 people a year. So Congress got to work building on an earlier report that President Roosevelt commissioned, when you could see the end of World War II in sight. He asked Congress to appropriate funds to finance a study that would recommend a system of improved highways for this country, realizing how bad it was in World War II to move goods and people around the United States. Congress appropriated the funds. The study was made. It recommended 44,000 miles of interconnected highways, but nothing was done in the rush to build housing, educate veterans, restore normalcy, and get about our lives again.
But, as we did that, congestion showed its ugly head and we had to address the need. Over 42 years, we invested $114 billion of federal funds in building the 44,000-mile interstate highway system—$14 billion in matching funds from the states added up to $128 billion. The "I" system represents 1 percent of the highway mileage in America but carries 26 percent of the traffic in the country. The vision of those five people who sat down, and of President Eisenhower, who, as a captain traveling across the United States in the 20s, was appalled at the condition of the nation's roadways and, as president, said, "We’ve got to do this"—that vision is now a reality.
Quality of Life
So where do we go from there? The new vision of transportation is beginning, I think, to emerge—shifting from moving vehicles to offering choices in transportation. The initiation of that concept was what we called ISTEA, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. That was a demarcation point, what we used to call "the Highway Bill" became "Transportation Bill." It addressed, for the first time in one comprehensive bill: transit, congestion mitigation, some quality of life issues, intelligent transportation systems, and transportation alternatives, such as pedestrian and bicycle pathways and conversion of railroad grade beds to bicycling.
In 1998, we moved the ball a little further down the court. But, actually, it went back in time to 1956 because the original idea of the interstate highway was also to have a highway trust fund with a dedicated revenue source and a guaranteed revenue stream with which to build those highways so that, at the beginning, you could see the end—instead of stop and go, start today, maybe run out of money, stop building the highway, and pick it up a few years later. It worked well until 1968, when, in that year, President Johnson, on recommendation of the Bureau of the Budget, pulled all trust funds under one unified budget of the federal government and held back some spending from the highway program to dampen inflation at the beginning of the ramp-up of the Vietnam War.
That was the last year for three decades that we had a balanced budget. It looked balanced; it wasn’t. Because all those trust funds were gathered into the unified budget the federal government made, it looked balanced. Over years, as the money was held back in the highway program, it built up to a $29 billion surplus at the beginning of 1998. Then, chairman Bud Shuster and I got to work on taking the trust fund off-budget. We had failed by five votes eight or nine years earlier, and it was time to come back and do it. With the help of Pete Ruane and many others in the transportation community, we got it done. I won’t go into how we got it done—that’s a whole evening story in itself. But the scope of the legislation extended beyond creating transportation choices. It established the programmatic context and the resources with which to establish the earlier vision of ISTEA: livable communities.
I think there has been a shift in the role of transportation in the 21st century. Communities all across this country—and I have traveled to virtually every state in the years I have served in Congress and on this committee, meeting with neighborhood groups, community groups and parent-teacher associations, businesses, Fortune 500 companies—all are coming to a consensus that offering transportation choices that lead to livable communities is a critical, important quality of life issue. It moves us beyond where highways lead us. The idea of highways leading us to destinations has been overwhelmed by the reality of highways leading us to gridlock.
The Texas Transportation Institute, every two years, does a study of congestion in America. The last report put the cost—I call it a double taxation—of congestion at $78 billion in the nation’s 68 major metropolitan areas. In those 68 major areas, people are spending one week in their cars longer than they would if they could drive at posted highway speeds. They’re buying four tanks of gasoline more than they would if they could drive at posted highway speeds, and they are spending $100 a year more on that gasoline than they would if they could drive at posted highway speeds—4-1/2 billion hours of delay and almost 7 billion excess gallons of fuel spent, and the name of the Lord pronounced more often in traffic than in church on Sunday. If you add up all the areas of this country, the cost is in excess of $100 billion.
Equally important, families are losing the precious little time they have together. Much of the southern tier of my congressional district, just north of the Twin Cities, is a place where people have escaped to—for quality of life. To have a smaller town, have a nice family circle, church circles, little leagues, other activities for the kids. They’re willing to drive 70 miles one way for their job; but now they are spending three and four hours a day getting to and from—they get home, they’re too exhausted for their quality of life. They’re too exhausted to pay attention to things that determine what their quality of life is going to be, like electing somebody to public office that cares. They are also running the endless errands that characterize suburban and exurban life.
So, people are seeking alternatives to highways. We’ve seen transit ridership outpace the growth of every other mode of transportation. The census, if you read it in the last decade, shows America grew by just under 5 percent, but transit rider ship grew 21 percent. Aviation grew 19 percent; highway miles traveled increased 12 percent. The renaissance in rail transit shows the success of transit in the last decade. Light rail is one of the most important success stories of TEA-21. Last year, we had 310 million light-rail trips. That’s a 25 percent increase in just five years.
I’ve gone around the country to look at these projects, to see on the ground what really is happening. Denver, Colorado, opened an 8.7-mile light-rail extension in July 1999. I was there. Ridership is up 83 percent. The Southwest Corridor line, that they call it, was estimated to have 8,400 passengers a day; it has well over 13,000 a day—almost 60 percent above their projections. The mayor tells people, "Ride our system free. Leave your car, keep the center city free of fumes."
In Portland, Oregon, Tri-Met opened the West Side MAX light-rail extension in 1998. I went out to look at it. West Side corridor rides are up 137 percent—20,000 more trips a day than were estimated when they built the new system. New Jersey transit trips are up 42 percent. In Santa Clara County, the San Jose line is up 38 percent. Oracle Software Company buys 11,000 passes a year for its employees to use the transit system and leave their cars at home. Microsoft does the same thing in Seattle, Washington, to have their 13,000 employees ride the Sounder and other transit systems and keep their cars off the roadway.
There is also a new emphasis not only on quality of life but health as well, as Dr. Runge and I have discussed. I attended a conference of the Centers for Disease Control four years ago and was astonished at some numbers that I heard:
- 300,000 people a year in America die of obesity—only smoking kills more.
- 24 percent of children 15 and under are clinically obese.
- 75 percent of children 15 and under do not walk or bike—they are driven to school and to activities.
- 20 percent of morning drive time is parents driving a child to or from an activity, adding to congestion.
Forty years ago, over half of all children in America walked to school. Today, less than 1 percent do. We’ve got to change that. I called a group of bicycling organizations together and said, "I’ve got an idea for a change in this circumstance. I’m going to call it ‘Safe Routes to School,’ and gets kids to bike and walk to school. I want your help to get it done." They said, "It’s a great idea, but it’s already been done in England." I said, "Well, it’s not a bad idea, after all." So, I got the study—a sustainable transportation study.
In England, all throughout the country, they ask school kids to draw their route to school. If they drew a straight line, they knew they came by bus or car. But if they drew a line that got to a stopping point, and said, "This is an intersection, I have to watch for traffic," and then they jogged over here and jogged over there, then they walked or they biked. So they brought parents and school administrators and the police establishment together and designed systems to bring kids to school safely by foot or bicycle. They raised curbs, painted them bright colors, put wide striping on cross walks, lowered traffic lights to eye level for pedestrians and cyclists, they formed walking school buses, they increased law enforcement. After three years, in the third year, 1999, there were more bicycles sold in the U.K. than automobiles.
That’s not my goal—to sell more bikes than automobiles in the United States—but to replicate that idea. So, with help from NHTSA [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] with a $100,000 grant, $50,000 from Marin County, California, and $50,000 from Arlington, Massachusetts—Arlington did primarily a pedestrian plan to get kids to school, and Marin County did primarily bicycling but also walking.
After July, August, and early September planning, bringing parents, students, administrators, and the local police establishment together, they launched the [Marin County] program on October 4. Normally, there are 282 cars in the Tam Valley school parking lot that day; there were only 11. They had walking school buses, they had kids bicycling to school and bicycling home from school. They had patrols. Today, 57 percent of the kids in those nine participating schools are walking and bicycling to school.
I went out in January last year to see the program, sat through it with Jeff Morales, the director of Caltrans, and sat in the classrooms. At the end of the day, we all got on bikes and we rode home with the kids, and 20 yards over here were six lanes of freeway stopped dead. We can change the habits of a generation of Americans if we carry on. Now, this program was hardly completed, and nine other states initiated Safe Routes to School programs. California has put $40 million into the infrastructure needed to do Safe Routes to School. We can change habits. We’ve got to start with the kids and move on through.
Intermodalism
The information for our committees as we prepare for the successor to TEA-21 is that, just to keep pace with congestion, we need to build 99,000 lane miles of highway in urban America. It’s not possible to build that many lane miles. We’ve got to invest those dollars. We need to upgrade our road system, we need to maintain our bridges, we need to invest in this extraordinary highway system we have in America. But we’ve also got to find smarter ways to move people.
That leads me to the second point, of intermodalism. In 1987, I chaired the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee, held hearings on this issue, and crafted legislation to create, within the Department of Transportation, an assistant secretariat for intermodalism. I thought was a great idea, I got all fired up about it, but the administration wasn’t fired up about it and made it very clear that they were not interested in having a bill to do that. It’s still a good idea, and it became the "I" of ISTEA.
In 1980, 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product was consumed by logistics—transportation inventory costs. In the two decades since then, we have reduced that to 10 percent, and the savings has been $600 billion to our gross domestic product. Because of the advances in transportation that allowed just-in-time inventory management, productivity gains and inventory practices improved efficiencies in our transportation system. When you can take 6 percent of cost out of the gross domestic product of this country and convert it into productivity gains, you’re doing something really good—and that’s what we did from 1980 through this point where we are of TEA-21.
Much of those gains were due to intermodalism—intermodal systems—connecting ports, railheads, bus stations, airports. Most of America’s cities were ports before they were cities—75 percent of this country lives along the water. We need to address those needs and those opportunities. Better intermodal connections can reduce congestion, cut travel times, and lower transportation costs. The return for public investment in our transportation system, just in highways alone, is twice that of the return on private capital. And, the economic benefits of transit are anywhere from 6 to 30 times greater than the investment cost that we incur in building transit systems.
We have to transport goods smarter and faster and rethink each step in the logistical chain of origin to destination, as some of those slides this afternoon pointed out. The same has to be done with moving people. I was a graduate student at the College of Europe in Belgium. Part of our work was to travel into various parts of Europe and see different economic systems. I traveled from Paris to Lyon, almost 300 miles; it was a 4-1/2-hour trip. (As a student, I could only afford a ticket in the last car. It was a coal burning locomotive. I know why that’s the low budget—I came out looking like a guy from vaudeville, black all over me.)
I came back in 1989, as chair of the Aviation Subcommittee. We were following the trail of Pam Am 103. I just wanted to experience the TGV [Train à Grande Vitesse, or French high-speed train]—same trip: 2:01. At a certain point, the train passed a small airfield where a twin engine aircraft had taken off, and the train passed the plane at 180 mph. There are five systems now in France. They’re paying back the capital cost of investment plus interest and sustaining the slower moving daily passenger systems.
Now, you can fly on Delta Airlines from Atlanta to Lyon. You go by way of Charles de Gaulle Airport. At CDG, you get off the plane, walk a few steps to the TGV, and make the next leg of your trip (2:01) to Lyon—and you get frequent-flier air miles for doing it.
Why not? It makes good sense. Continental Airlines is now doing the same—offering frequent-flier miles to board the train in Philadelphia to Newark, and then use Continental to fly to worldwide destinations. Under TEA-21, we provided funding to study high-speed rail corridors throughout the United States. Nine were studied. Of those nine, six were promising. The most attractive is the Midwest Rail Initiative, according to the DOT study. Within 300 miles of O’Hare Airport is 17 percent of the air traffic into O’Hare— that’s short-haul air traffic. If you can remove 17 percent, you can create 170,000 slots—that is, departures and arrivals at O’Hare. Long-haul service is six times more valuable than domestic short-haul service. Then, the airlines can code-share with the railroads to provide the passenger service into O’Hare. When we meet (this coming Wednesday, I hope) in our full committee on transportation infrastructure to report out the high-speed passenger rail bill, it will have in it a provision to designate the first leg from Chicago to St. Louis.
Amtrak is now finishing up the work on technology of a high-speed locomotive that is diesel-powered, aircraft-engine type, turbine-generated that has already achieved speeds of up to 180 to 200 mph at the Pueblo test track. It may be another year or so before that’s ready for operational use. But that, plus improved rail beds, quality passenger cars, and people will use that train, get more people off the highways, make the highways safer, more efficient, and more productive, and we can do better investments.
That is the kind of thing that I think that we ought to be doing, and we ought to move in that direction. But intermodalism is easier conceived than carried out because there are competitive interests. Trucks compete with railroads, airlines worry about their bottom line, not about ground access. As Jeff Hamiel knows, the airlines don’t really care how you get there—they set the time you arrive. If there is congestion, the road is cluttered with cars, if the parking lot is a mess, they don’t care—they set the time, you come.
At San Francisco, the city is building a billion-dollar new runway to accommodate long-haul, international, and transcontinental service. BART, the transit system, is building an extension out to the airport, and the airline said, "Don’t come on our property, because it might cost us a few more bucks." So, the BART extension goes up to—but not into—the airport. TGV goes right into Charles de Gaulle.
In Minneapolis-St. Paul, they found a better way to do it. They’re bringing Hiawatha light rail right into the airport, so you can carry your bag, get off at the airport, board the plane, and avoid the road congestion. Take a few more people off the roadways—that makes sense. When the rebuilding of Washington National was undertaken, the new terminal was moved close to the Metro line at the airport. You know what happened? Weekday boardings at National rail station are 35 percent above where they were a six years ago.
We have to be able to think ahead, and think out of the box—to go beyond what Ellen [Engleman] and Jane Garvey said, the stovepipe approach of transportation systems: "We’re going to do our thing, we’re not going to look at anybody else." We have got to think intermodally. I remember a discussion with Jeff Shane, after we enacted ISTEA, in which he said it has had a dramatic effect on this department. It has forced us all to come together and talk about our several modes of transportation—and we weren’t doing that before. We are now thinking, talking intermodally. That was 11 years ago. We’ve got to move beyond that.
Technology
What should be the role of technology in the coming decades of transportation? Well, intelligent transportation systems, I think, can address the emerging issues of transportation, improving quality of life, reducing congestion, and help us integrate our systems.
Technology helps us reduce travel times, reduce costs, and improve efficiency of our precious road miles of transportation. Freeway management systems—ramp metering, bitterly contested by some people in the Minnesota State legislature, caused the Minnesota Department of Transportation to suspend ramp metering and do all kinds of testing. Result: Ramp metering has reduced highway accidents up to 50 percent in Minneapolis. It has increased speeds on the freeway by 30 percent, increased freeway capacity by 22 percent, and reduced accidents 31 percent. Technology works—just use it. And it also is saving $40 million a year to transportation in Minneapolis.
Electronic toll collection has improved capacity by as much as 200 to 300 percent where intelligent transportation, electronic toll-collection systems have been installed. And ITS is working for trucking fleets. I visited with Schneider Trucking of Green Bay, a little company south of my district. They use ITS to increase loaded miles by 20 percent. They’ve eliminated driver check-in calls. They saved their drivers two hours a day—getting more efficiency out of their drivers and letting them arrive at destinations rested and in a better frame of mind.
Transit systems are using electronic fare-payment systems in the form of smart cards. Here is the vision of the smart card: Within the next year, a transit rider in Washington, D.C., will be able to park her car at the Metro parking lot, board the subway, ride out to the suburbs, transfer to a suburban bus system, and never remove the card from her purse. It means everything is moving faster, people are not experiencing delay, the system carries more people. All they need is a few more cars on Metro, and they’ll be able to handle the increased load.
Maryland is going to extend that system all throughout its transit program. Smart cards for transit systems have increased revenue as much as 30 percent because ease of use increased throughput—more passengers using it—and preventing cheaters. And it also means that transit systems can simplify their fare structure. If you’ve got the card, all you do is change the coding of the card and you don’t have to do the other things that we are familiar with.
But, you can’t do all these things with management only. You’ve got to team up with labor. Workers aren’t going to support new technology that they think is going to cost them jobs. That’s as old as the Belgian workers throwing their wooden shoes into the gears of new equipment, from which we got the work "sabotage."
I will give you an example. Dave Helberg and I both revere in our memory a treasured longshoreman named Buster Slaughter. Buster would resonate with this story very well. On the West Coast, the inbound vessels send electronic data to the longshoreman reporting on the cargo that their ships are carrying. Longshore workers enter it into the terminal’s computer system. So, now, the terminal owners want to change that. They want the electronic data to go directly into the terminal computers. Longshoremen say, "Oh, wait a minute, that’s going to cost 1,000 jobs." Operators say, "No, no one’s going to lose their job. It will only be by attrition." But, if you think the Belgian workers knew how to throw wooden shoes into the gears, wait until the longshore workers do it. So, they’ve to bring the longshore workers into the process—with education, with outreach.
If traffic at our West Coast ports is going to expand as predicted by threefold in the next decade, they need to start working today to use technology to help them manage the growth in traffic more efficiently. And, if traffic is going to grow that much, they ought to be able to say to their workers, "Look, you’re not going to lose jobs. In the long run, there’s going to be enough work for everybody, so don’t worry about it." But, it’s how you present it.
There are also privacy concerns with the technology side, and that’s something I think all ITS units ought to be thinking about. I talked about Schneider Trucking and their ability to track their drivers. They use global positioning systems. Here is an example: a driver, in his truck, feeling the onset of fatigue, pulled over to a rest stop and went to sleep. The dispatcher looks at his screen—they didn’t used to be able to do this, but now they can—and the global-positioning satellite, 22,500 miles out in space, says, "This truck isn’t moving." The dispatcher sends out an alarm in the cab, wakes up the driver, and says, "You’re not driving. You’re supposed to be on the road. Get going." The driver says, "I don’t like this."
How we use technology also has to be integrated with the people who use it and are subject to it. There are limitations. The automation of the flight deck in today's new generations of aircraft has made flying so much easier and safer that pilots now are—as Jane Garvey knows so well—"systems integrators" of big technology systems. In fact, the flight deck of the future is going to consist of the pilot and a dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches anything. So, what’s the job of the pilot? It’s to feed the dog.
Safety
But we have overlooked the limitations of the human element in transportation. Our bodies haven’t changed much in 50,000 years—we’re still subject to the same circadian rhythms. It’s one thing onboard ship, where it takes a while to go through time zones. But it’s quite something else when you’re on an airplane, or in a truck, or in the cab of a locomotive. I’ve been out to see each of these. I’ve spent a whole day with a truck driver, Bertha. Bertha is really good—she’s got arms as big as my legs—she runs that 18-wheeler, and she gets tired also, and needs rest.
Today, you can fly on a 747, or a 777, or an A-340 from London to Singapore—6,050 nautical miles. You go through eight times zones in 13-1/2 hours. How does the flight-deck crew cope with that kind of challenge? And, with the increasing cockpit boredom of managing these complex systems, there isn’t sufficient training yet for flight-deck crews to cope with these new challenges, technological advances, that are upon us. More work has to be done to deal with pilot fatigue and flight attendant fatigue.
What I’ve learned in years of accident investigation—as chair of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee—fatigue never shows up in an autopsy. Vince Lombardi used to say, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all"—meaning, not that we’re unwilling, but that we’re unable to do what we need to do. We saw some very good slides earlier about fatigue and systems that cope with it.
Those that know me know how much emphasis I put on safety. I learned it working in the mines, working on construction jobs—getting myself through college. It makes an indelible impression on you to see someone killed needlessly in an accident, as I did watching a worker, who had never been trained, backing up an iron-ore dump truck in the wrong way, on the wrong side, where the driver wasn’t aware of him and this 25-ton truck just rolled right over him like a bump of ore in the roadway. I was 100 yards away screaming, from the top of one the dumps. Of course, he couldn’t hear me and the truck driver couldn’t hear.
My father worked in the underground mine for 26 years, 14 years in the open pit, and he said the most unforgettable sound in the mine was the screams of the men in the cage when the cable broke and there was nothing to stop it. The cage is the elevator in the underground.
I grew up knowing safety was just that much of a barrier from you living and dying. So, those figures that Jeff Runge cited are compelling—that the leading cause of death in America in the 6- to 33-year-old age group is highway fatalities. We can fix that.
One thing we didn’t estimate sufficiently in crafting the off-budget status of the highway trust fund in TEA-21, we knew there’d be an increase in construction zones, but we didn’t know how much, Pete. Over 1,000 people were killed last year in construction work zones. There’s now a major effort; in fact, we’re going to see a display of the work-zone safety initiative tomorrow, I hope. It’s going to be here in Minnesota.
We put $2-1/2 billion, Bud Schuster and I—it was one of his very insistent themes and mine as well—in funding for highway safety in TEA-21. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t targeted in the right ways, and much of it has gone into infrastructure, as was needed, but a lot more needs to go into human factors in transportation safety.
Three million people injured a year, 41,700 people killed, $150 billion in cost. You say the number is going up to $200 billion. That’s appalling. We have to awake from our slumber. But, the highway deaths come one at a time, two at a time, three at a time—5,000 plus die in car-truck crashes. That’s the equivalent of a 737, fully loaded, crashing every two weeks. If that happened every two weeks, America would be up in arms—no one would fly. We can do better.
Half of those highway fatalities are alcohol-related. I’ve talked with Jim Ramstad, my colleague from Minnesota, who is a 20-year recovering alcoholic. He’s aware of it every day—starts every day thanking the Lord that he’s alive. We’ve got work to find ways to reduce this curse on America’s highway system. If we can take half of those deaths out, we make this a vastly safer place.
With those thoughts, I hope these discussions starting today, continuing tomorrow, continuing on into future years, begin to put the best minds in this country together, to bear upon these and the other themes we’ve discussed throughout this day. That, out of this forum, will come that inferno of ideas that we need to make transportation better and safer for all of us.
Thank you all for your participation.