My opinion printed on pages 10 of the March 2014 issue of the ITE Journal.
Mr.
Schwartz’s call for making the transportation engineer relevant is
important. Sharing this realization, I ran twice for Mayor
of Honolulu on an infrastructure preservation and traffic congestion
relief platform and I garnered almost 20% in both 2008 and 2010. Mr.
Schwartz' advise to transportation engineers is good except for his
instruction to “get people out of cars.” New York
City may boast that 70% of commutes occur on non-auto modes, but it’s
an exception. The next U.S. city with a low auto-mode share barely has
30% of commutes occurring on non-auto modes. Telecommuting is surpassing
transit. Car-sharing, and intelligent and
autonomous zero emission vehicles will maintain the auto mode’s
dominance.
In
30 years or so, my kindergartener son and his cohorts will be commuting
in driverless electric cars that can reach 0-60 mph in
5 seconds, follow at a headway of under 0.5 seconds on narrow high
capacity lanes (some four lane urban highways will convert to automated
guideways with six 8 ft. lanes), be a full office away from home or
work, and still be exciting to drive in off-drivereless
mode outside the city. The future of transportation engineering in the
U.S. will be great as long as we do not expend substantial resources on
modes of the past millennium such bicycles and ordinary trains, except
for limited applications where they may be
both practical and cost-effective.
--
Panos D. Prevedouros, PhD
Professor of Transportation Engineering
University of Hawaii at Manoa
President of Hawaii Highway Users Alliance
Chair of Freeway Operations Simulation Subcom. (TRB AHB20)
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