How to Fix World Transportation
Keeping people and goods moving safely and efficiently—whether by land, sea, or air—is one of the great challenges of the modern age. Complications include aging infrastructure, sprawling cities, shrinking budgets, and the predictable unpredictability of human behavior.
To find out how to fix transportation for the 21st century—the third in our quarterly Fix This series—Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine gathered an all-star cast: Michael Replogle, global policy director and founder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy; Dennis W. Archer, former mayor of Detroit and co-chair of the National Transportation Policy Project; Christopher H. Lee, founder and managing partner of Highstar Capital; Balaji Prabhakar, professor at Stanford University; O.P. Agarwal, senior urban transport specialist at the World Bank; and Dale Moser, president and chief operating officer of Coach USA. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.
In 2008 a quarter of U.S. scheduled flights were delayed. Traffic congestion cost the European Union more than 1 percent of gross domestic product. Less than half of all container vessels arrive in port on schedule. And 20 percent of CO₂ emissions are the byproduct of transportation. How did we get into this mess, and how bad is it?
Replogle: People today often view traffic as they view the weather, something we can’t do anything about. I think we’re about to come to a point where we start to manage our transportation the same way we manage our electric utilities. That can be transformative for our economy and good for our environment and give people a wider array of travel choices. But that transition—from our current unmanaged transportation system where we have free roads, free parking, and we pay for it by waiting in queues all the time and suffering delays, to a system where we have to pay but we get higher performance—it’s difficult.
Dale, you’ve been running a company that challenges the presumption that the only way people will get from city to city is by car. How big a business can this be, and how important a contribution can it make to dealing with our infrastructure issues?
Moser: Six years ago when we came up with the concept of intercity bus service, express service, I would have said that trying to get Americans out of their automobile was going to be a challenge. But we’ve found it to be just the opposite. We supply all the capital, and we run it on infrastructure that already exists: our highways. We’ve brought 13 million people out of their automobiles and into the bus. And the technology on our buses is giving off 10 times less CO₂ than the average automobile. Those are all federal statistics. So in the short distance, the four- to eight-hour trip, the bus is a viable alternative in North America.
Does it suggest that spending on rail is misplaced?
Moser: Why not give one-tenth of that money to the intercity bus companies that are out there for more capital, and I’ll invest in increasing the routes and still continue to make it affordable for people to move.
Why have public-private partnerships been so tough to do in the U.S.?
Lee: Everywhere else in the world the era of public-private partnerships has been around since the ’80s. I mean you can’t fly to London and go through a publicly owned airport. Every time I go to Shanghai I’m terrified for the future of my kids, because the infrastructure there is just incredible. People are dying to invest money in infrastructure in the U.S. We need $2 trillion to $3 trillion to upgrade our infrastructure. [But] we’ve run up an environment where people in the U.S. think it’s for free. “It’s my God-given right to go on a bridge and not pay for it.”
Archer: The National Transportation Policy Project agrees that it’s important to have a public-private partnership. On the other hand, I would say that when you talk about how we take things for granted and think things are free, go to Europe or the Caribbean Islands or Asia and fill up your tank of gas, and find how much you’re paying per gallon vs. what we pay here. I mean the gasoline tax as it was envisioned and created was to help pay for the infrastructure. It no longer pays for it. It’s underfunded.