by evilgenius » Sat 31 Jan 2015, 14:01:09
Last night I was talking to somebody I work with. We both deliver stuff for a living. This fellow was complaining about how busy he was and about how difficult it was for him to get his stuff done because of the traffic. He thought, maybe, that it was because people were taking off early because it was 'Stupor Bowl' weekend. I said to him that, yes, I thought that I too had noticed that traffic was heavier, but that many days it was now heavier earlier, not only this weekend because of the Super Bowl.
He agreed, and then said that was because we were all driving around on a highway system built for 1950's and 1960's traffic. That part is fairly true, I had to admit. Only in the last ten years or so has my city, Denver, addressed expanding the freeway system. We've got all kinds of bottlenecks that develop with even the most moderate levels of traffic. I grew up partly in the area. When I was a kid we had maybe half a million people in the area, and the same basic highway system.
I pointed out to my fellow worker that, perhaps, some of his anger could be directed at the construction going on, which is actually necessary to address the problems. There is, and has been (as I say for about the last ten years), a fair amount of construction taking place upon the existing system. That's when he blew a new fuse, and one not entirely out of line with his argument. He said that, yeah, there has been some improvement, but that most of that amounts to lane widening and beautification over actually adding lanes.
I had to admit he was kind of right. As an example I think of the new project under construction near our actual place of work, the US 36 corridor. It won't have any more regular traffic lanes when it is finished than it had to begin with. What it will have in addition is a bunch of 'High Occupancy Vehicle' lanes and pay to play lanes and new fangled bus lanes, but no additional regular traffic lanes. It's a big political gamble aimed at getting us all to change our attitudes about how we get around. If you deliver stuff for a living in your own car, however, it looks like a lot of money spent making your life more miserable (both during construction and after it), with a shiny coat of paint over it.
Mentioning this led my fellow worker to bring Al Gore into the conversation. He suddenly erupted in an abusive tirade about how Gore wants to spend trillions of dollars we don't have on new cities that don't have any highways. 'No highways, I asked him? What could he mean by that? Then he said that Gore wanted to build this huge infrastructure that was all about mass transit and car pooling and buses and stuff, with no individual cars. He said it would be a failed experiment and that we could not afford that. I gathered he meant this in reference to our agreement that the highway system did need to be upgraded. He simply proposed that the only reasonable upgrade was so that more cars could use the thing in the same manner as they do now. He wasn't up for any political gambling.
This incident made me think about what will really come our way and how it is so hard to know that ahead of time. Our best minds are at work in our markets, and they can't tell you which way those will go from one moment to the next. It seems to me that some kind of spread of our resources is in order, for that reason alone. Whether the political gambling is right or not only time will tell. If it isn't there at all, though, and it turns out we needed it, it could be a little late to suddenly go whole hog and try to build it then. That might turn out to be even more commerce inhibiting than the construction going on now, maybe even commerce destroying. And the big, really big, disruptors coming, like self-driving cars and AI? What will those do? What kind of impact will they have on the levels of people running around and the purposes they have for engaging in such movement? Will an unmanned delivery vehicle go on the same road as the rest of us? What size would it be, as opposed to what size it actually has to be?
So you can see that there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to planning. Some of them seem more likely than others, yet we can't know which ones will actually materialize. People who deny global warming cling to this perhaps more than others when they try to justify their arguments for the future they want built, but we had better all acknowledge the truth of it. We shouldn't build now with only one view in place, and that goes for a lot of things, not just highways and transportation infrastructure. There is room for the conservatives, they might be right or they might simply be afraid, but not for their view that their way ought to be the one that gets built full out, as my fellow worker, no doubt, would like, to the total exclusion of the kinds of things that Al Gore proposes. It isn't a now of either one or the other. It is, and has to be, a now of both. That is, the now of management and compromise.