Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 18, 1993 TAG: 9312220245
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A21 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARCIA D. LOWE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In a few short years, the smart-highway idea has grown from a handful of scattered research projects into a massive, coordinated effort. So far, the bulk of federal funding has gone toward the crowning glory of IVHS: the Automated Highway System. Drivers would key in their destination on a dashboard control panel, then just sit back and enjoy the ride - maybe even take a nap. Traffic would hurtle at speeds measured in miles per minute, each car's bumper only a few inches from the next.
Virtually all information on IVHS comes either from universities seeking funds for the research or corporations trying to market the equipment. News stories faithfully repeat the standard promises: Smart cars and highways will eliminate bottlenecks, help prevent accidents, and reduce fuel use and smog. Invariably, the schemes are presented as an elegant means of expanding highway capacity three- to sevenfold, all without the right-of-way headaches and environmental conflicts that increasingly foil new road-building efforts.
Unfortunately, IVHS is unlikely to live up to its splendid claims. For example, say smart highways really do expand road capacity several times over as promised. When all those cars reach their exits, roads of average intelligence will be more jammed than ever. The IVHS lobby itself admits that increases in fuel use and smog may result. And while experts say smart cars and highways would save 1,000 lives by the year 2000, the same target could be met far more cheaply by switching less than 1 percent of annual car travel to public transit.
Hardly an advance beyond roadbuilding, IVHS may spur the construction of new roads to handle the spillover off of smart ones. (And in at least one case - a proposed Virginia project linking Blacksburg to Roanoke - the smart road itself would be built from scratch). It is now fashionable even among U.S. highway officials to say we can't build our way out of congestion. Yet IVHS resurrects the futile hope that we can add enough capacity to keep up with endless traffic growth.
In view of the obvious flaws, one might ask why Washington is handling IVHS - and particularly the automated highway scheme - such a conspicuously large, blank check.
The reasons may have little to do with transportation policy. IVHS America, the chief promoter, is a coalition of more than 500 organizations from the public and private sector, nearly 40 percent of which are from nontransportation industries. Members include such heavyweights as IBM, AT&T, Rockwell, and of course, the Big Three automakers. As an official advisory committee to the Department of Transportation, IVHS America devised the plan on which the federal government will base its strategy for developing IVHS over the next 20 years.
Corporate interests have lent the smart highways agenda a blend of determinism and deja vu. Policymakers are marching to the same drumbeat of patriotism and international competitiveness that was employed to sell the public on the supersonic transport jet, the A-12 attack plane, and other dead-end technology quests. Advocates grimly warn us that Europe and Japan will leave our semiconductor industry in the dust if we're not the first to deploy IVHS. And defense industries have disarmed the peacetime-conversion camp by offering to use smart-bomb technology on smart cars.
There is something very wrong in this picture. Competitiveness and defense conversion are laudable goals, but it's dangerous to twist transport policy to meet them. Unlike semiconductors, transportation is a major national sector unto itself, an integral part of virtually every economic activity; it would make more sense to design transportation policy first, then see how the semiconductor industry could fit in.
Similarly, if defense companies are to be enlisted in the effort to improve transportation, a more effective role for them would be to help implement the landmark policy shift that supposedly occurred with the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 - designed to steer us away from our monolithic car-and-highway focus toward expanded rail and public transit.
A number of IVHS projects do, in fact, address alternatives to driving, including smart buses, smart fare-cards for transit and even smart traffic lights that give priority to buses and van pools. If these were at the heart of the program, it would have a better chance of meeting its stated goals. But as the priorities stand, any improvements to transit or other options are doomed to be erased by the much larger effort aimed at private cars.
If we are serious about confronting our transportation problems, we can't afford to spend billions of dollars on a technology joy ride while our elected officials are asleep at the wheel. The United States needs smart policy, not smart roads. And in any case, even the staunchest smart car enthusiast would have to agree that a landscape packed with cars bumper to bumper can only lead to a 21st-century hell - no matter how fast the traffic is moving.
\ Marcia D. Lowe is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C.
by CNB