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Getting There from Here The route to sustainable transportation is paved with knowledge and creativity

—Anna Nagurney

Professor Anna Nagurney ponders the best way to keep traffic moving. THE PHYSICAL MOVEMENT OF HUMANS and products over space and time is essential to societies and economies. Transportation, and the vast network that facilitates it, directly affects all of us as we travel to work, to school, to visit friends and family, to shop, and to attend sporting and cultural events. In America, and increasingly in other parts of the world, vehicles are the transportation medium of choice. In the middle of the twentieth century there were 2.6 billion people on the earth and 50 million cars. Half a century later, the number of people had risen to 6 billion and the total number of cars to 500 million; add in trucks and motorcycles for 777 million vehicles total. That’s big business: Ground transportation alone provided in 1994 a $900 billion contribution to the gross domestic product. Despite the convenience and economic power of vehicle use, the negative effects—notably traffic congestion, energy waste, and air pollution—are well documented. For example, in the United States, congestion results in over $100 billion in lost productivity annually. In the past two decades, traffic congestion in the United States has caused an increase of 440 percent in the waste of fuel, even though the fuel consumed by automobiles per mile has decreased by 20 percent. In the Boston metropolitan area, the number of gallons of congestion-related fuel waste in 2003 was 60 million—a 362 percent increase since 1982. Today, energy consumption by the transportation sector is 27 percent of the country’s total consumption; in 2004, 14 million barrels of petroleum products were consumed for transportation purposes per day, 66 percent of all petroleum used in the United States. All that driving takes a heavy toll on the environment, especially when it comes to air pollution. The average car travels 100,000 miles during its lifetime, uses more than 3,000 gallons of gas, and discharges more than 35 tons of carbon. The world’s 500 million cars produce 10 trillion cubic meters—imagine an area the size of the UMass Amherst campus, extended 1,000 miles skyward—of exhaust fumes annually. Despite 25 years of engineering progress in vehicular technology, about 15 percent of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide—the principal global warming gas—is generated by motor vehicles. Furthermore, transportation is responsible for approximately 50 percent of nitrogen-oxide emissions, which, in combination with other pollutants, form nitric acid, and fall to earth as acid rain. Finally, 90 percent of the globe’s carbon monoxide comes from transportation-related emissions. With the number of cars on earth expected to double by 2030, pollution will not be significantly reduced without intervention. We are not the first society to be faced with such challenges. The ancient Romans, concerned about congestion, instituted a time-of-day chariot policy banning individual chariots from central Rome during certain hours of the day. A not so different policy in New York City last December during the short-lived transit strike allowed only cars with four or more occupants to enter parts of Manhattan. Taking actions to reduce congestion and energy consumption by carpooling, riding buses, subways, and trains where available, and bicycling and walking whenever feasible, also makes major positive impacts on energy consumption and air quality. Indeed, public transportation can be very effective in these dimensions when it is efficient, comfortable, reliable, and competitively priced. I speak from personal experience. This year I commuted weekly from Cambridge to Amherst while in residence as a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. I took the T to South Station in Boston and then commuted via Peter Pan Bus Lines from South Station to UMass Amherst (via Springfield). My journeys were memorable and fun adventures—and I got to be on a first-name basis with most of the bus drivers. Congestion pricing, while often politically unpopular, can encourage smart transportation practices. It involves levying surcharges for the use of congested routes and facilities during peak traffic periods. The aim is to change human behavior: to encourage drivers to travel during off-peak periods, to seek out routes away from the congested ones, to try different modes of transportation, to use higher-occupancy vehicles, or discourage trips all together (and perhaps support telecommuting instead). Since the early 1900s various countries have instituted congestion pricing. It shows increasing promise as technology develops to implement it, including electronic tolls. To reduce traffic and cut pollution, Stockholm, Sweden, recently began a seven-month experiment to charge drivers entering or leaving the city $7.50 a day. Residents will vote in later this year as to whether the fees should be made permanent. Of course, congestion pricing also holds the promise of generating new revenues that can be used to provide enhanced transportation alternatives, or for other purposes. In China, pricing policies are being explored as a means to pay for new roads and their usage. Global positioning technology (GPS) is another example of technology being explored to address issues of congestion and transportation management. GPS devices now track vehicle location and transmit data for billing purposes. Putting aside privacy issues, it could also be used to obtain more accurate data on travel times as drivers navigate different routes. This would help predict traffic flows on transportation networks. The pathway to sustainable transportation is to educate people about congestion, energy consumption in transportation, and pollution problems. Universities such as ours must continue to research these problems to ensure that decision makers have the knowledge to understand the complexity of the issues, and that our scientists and engineers have the tools to advance the state of the art. Anna Nagurney is Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks http://supernet.som.umass.edu/ and the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management. She is the author of the book Sustainable Transportation Networks (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2000) and several other books on network themes. She is completing a new book on dynamic supply chain networks. Nagurney instructs courses at the Isenberg School in transportation and logistics, management science, and operations management. The above essay was excerpted from “Transportation and Energy: Designing the Route to Prosperity and Sustainability.” The full text, supporting documents, and more resources are available at www.umassmag.com/transportationandenergy.htm

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Getting There from Here

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