What does the future hold for commuters? For six months, Tempo has explored the current commuting culture: the rhythms and rituals of our daily travels, the train rides and bus routes and congested tollways that frame each workday. Here, in the final leg of this meandering series, we look at how time and technology might transform this way of life.
With the next millennium a blink away, some transportation thinkers and visionaries foresee a future in which gridlock grips us even tighter but technology offers intriguing escape hatches. Here is what they have to say. Fasten your seatbelt; to get to their offices, your great-grandchildren might speed through the clouds.
Sam Skinner, Chicago attorney and U.S. Transportation Secretary in George Bush’s administration:
“The time will probably come, in 30 or 40 years, when we will be able to get into an automobile and it will drive itself to wherever you want to go. You won’t have to do anything. Everything will be done by sensors and auto-pilots.
“Everyone is looking at smart-car technology and the ability to manage traffic mobility through technology. With more advancements in Global Positioning Systems and road sensors, as the two major areas, this will have a lot to do with what happens.
“The same thing will come with airplanes, I might add. The time will come when an airplane takes off and lands without any interference whatsoever. The pilot will be there for emergencies. We’re close to that now, as a matter of fact.”
– Celebrated science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl, of suburban Palatine:
“What I would like to see — whether or not it’s going to happen, I don’t know — would be a system of driverless, robot-controlled taxi cabs. So there’s no private car driving and probably no bus routes. You call for a cab, but it arrives quickly and they’re all over the city.”
– Mike Borgstrom, vice president of Wendella Boats, which expanded its “river bus” commuter system this year and plans to add another boat to next year’s service:
“We noticed this year that more and more people are using us just to get around, and not for a fun thing, and that’s going to get bigger in the future. The city has asked us to look into expanding to different locations on the river, like Chinatown to the south and at least up to Erie Street to the north. Maybe farther.
“I really envision an entire river transportation network in the future. The water’s certainly a lot cleaner than it used to be and people are using it for recreational purposes. We see a lot of canoers and kayakers. That means they’re that much more aware of the possibilities.
“I know the mayor loves the river. This will mean more improvements, which increases the possibilities. I mean, you can’t drive anywhere anymore and the buses and taxis can’t move, either. The water looks better and better. It’s efficient. If we offer more stops in the future, more people will ride.”
– Siim Soot, executive director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois-Chicago, says more emphasis will be placed in the next century on improving automobile safety, and that smart cars will especially benefit aged drivers:
“Even the elderly, who now have to rely on public transportation or shared rides to get around, will own these new types of vehicles. This will help one of the pending problems in this country and this is how the elderly get about when they aren’t sharp enough to still drive on their own.”
– Alan Pisarski, a transportation analyst in Washington, D.C., uses U.S. census information for his “Commuting in America” reports about travel patterns. He, too, believes that 50 years from now, automation will make car travel far safer:
More Top Picks Best Speech Therapy Tools For Toddlers
“Families may have two specialized vehicles. One might be a small car resembling an enclosed golf cart for quick trips around town, probably on an electric rail or something similar. The other could be a bigger car for road trips. This one might have special computer systems to help drivers navigate and sensors to tell them, for example, when they are too close to another car.
“The bad news is people get very nervous about turning control over to a machine. The good news is if you automate the process . . . you can cluster these vehicles very tightly and go very fast. So the safety improves tremendously and you don’t have to worry about killing 40,000 people a year in auto accidents.”
Faith Popcorn, founder of BrainReserve, a company that tracks consumer and cultural trends, predicts commuters will soon use their cars as places for multitasking on wheels:
“Consumers will want to be accomplishing at least five tasks at once. Our cars will become mobile and armored cocoons. We will be eating, cooking (microwaves in the glove compartment) and storing food (fridge under the seat) in them. When we need to work rather than eat, the microwave will pop out to be replaced by a fax. Commuting will no longer be a time where we’re forced to disconnect. As with everything else if we want our commute to be electronic-free, we’ll have to do so consciously.”
Chris Maddy is a spokesman for Cirrus Design, a Minnesota company that manufactures a small airplane suitable for commuting short distances. The Cirrus SR20 and planes like it are becoming less expensive and easier to pilot, Maddy says. He predicts a growing number of affluent people will use personal aircraft to travel to and from the office each day, especially where small airports and airstrips are nearby:
“We’re never going to be able to accomplish an airplane in every garage as they talked about after World War II. But we know there’s a market out there for people who want to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible.”
The Cirrus SR20 is designed to draw a second look from some of the people who fear the danger and difficulty of piloting their own planes, Maddy says. In an emergency, a parachute deploys to lower the small plane to the ground, and the cockpit is meant to be less intimidating, starting with the instrument panel:
“It looks a lot like the dashboard of a car. There aren’t a lot of dials you don’t understand. There’s a 10-inch computer screen that tells you . . . where you are, how fast you’re going, how high you are. Eventually, as the infrastructure is made available, you’ll be able to obtain real-time weather, obtain information about the traffic around you.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is expected soon to announce the next step in its “highway in the sky,” a plan that eventually could go Maddy’s idea one better and result in the average person taking to the sky in a small, safe, affordable personal aircraft that will go four times the speed of a car. By 2001, a consortium of companies and governmental agencies, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, is expected to complete work on the hardware and software of that next step — a new concept for flight path guidance systems. Says NASA spokesman Keith Henry:
“Twenty-five years from now, depending on how some things work out, you might be able to put someone in a small airplane, just push a button, and they’ll arrive at the other end safely — and we’ll put great emphasis on the word `safely.’ It’s out there. It won’t happen by 2007, but it could happen in the next two or three decades.”
Robert Hicks, director of the transportation division of Public Technology Inc., a Washington, D.C., non-profit agency that researches technology issues for cities and counties, envisions many more Americans working from home — or telecommuting — in the next century because of environmental problems, traffic congestion and advances in technology. (The International Teleworkers Association & Council based in Washington, D.C., says the number of full- and part-time teleworkers in the U.S. already has grown from 4 million in 1990 to 19.6 million today.):
“A hundred years from now, (telecommuting) is probably going to be commonplace. Everything’s going to be so decentralized, I think.”
Noting that Americans might accordingly be charged to drive on public streets and highways, Hicks adds, “They might be charged, say, 10 cents to get on at 10 o’clock at night. But at 8 in the morning, it could be $2. An agency in the future could charge based on the level of congestion. Federal money has been looking at trying to test these things to see how feasible it is.”
Dawn Marincic, a traffic engineer at Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute:
“We will continue to see a change in peak hours of traffic because more people have flex time and they are working at home. Those hours are actually expanding now, so we will see more hours with heavier traffic, rather than the former rush hour becoming lighter. This will stretch out the traffic jams.
“Now that we have so many big businesses out in the suburbs and not everybody is going downtown to work, we will also see more traffic problems going both ways. Unless we get people to stop being so tied to their cars, it is just going to keep getting worse.”
Brian D. Taylor, professor of urban planning at the UCLA, notes that since women entered the work force in larger numbers, many trips to and from a job involve other stops as well — dropping off a child at day care, for example, or stopping at the grocery or an evening class. It is a process known to researchers as “trip chaining,” and it is the reason many people choose to drive rather than take mass transit:
“What we see is that commuting in the future will be less of a relevant category. . . . Over time, it will be harder and harder to separate commuting from the tapestry of other trips we make on behalf of all the other activities in our lives.”
Singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore at the Old Town School of Folk Music this fall spacily musing on the recent arrival of traffic jams to Austin, Texas, when he pauses for a moment and predicts:
“In the future, I think the whole world is going to be a traffic jam.”
David Zavattero, deputy for operations of the Chicago Area Transportation Study, which is involved in Intelligent Transportation Systems:
In the next seven or eight years “we will see customized traffic information that will allow you to plug in your origin and destination and some notions of routes you’d like to travel and it will give you information back about the fastest way to get there. You’ll get that information through an Internet-like device or a text pager or something like a radio in your car. It will give you current travel conditions on a real time basis as well as some other alternative so you can make a choice about which route or mode of transportation to take.”
The Internet will also tell you “when the next bus will arrive before you even leave your building. Or look to active transportation signs and displays that will tell us when the next bus is coming. So if I am getting off a Metra train and looking for a connection, it will tell me when the next bus will come so I can get a newspaper or a cup of coffee and I can read a book. This way people can have more certainty about transit and better use their own time.”
Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of “Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century”:
“In 2020, computer chips will cost a penny. So millions of them will be embedded in the highway, and in San Diego, which I mention in my book, there’s already an experiment to monitor traffic flow via chips in the highway.” With computer chips providing a constant snapshot of traffic flow, Kaku says, a commuter could consult his wristwatch (which would be connected to the Internet) each morning to avoid any bottlenecks on the roads.
“Beyond 2050, you start to get into a little bit of science fiction. Some people talk about levitating trains. I have my doubts because of cost.” But planes are another matter, Kaku says, noting that aeronautic research is already underway that might one day allow commuters to fly from New York to Tokyo in an hour or less, making overseas meetings and even overseas offices more practical. Using new materials and technology, such craft would take off and land like an airplane, but zoom through space like a rocket.
“It takes 30 minutes to circle the earth in orbit,” Kaku says. “Most of that (projected) hour is taking off and landing. . . . The actual transit is very, very fast.”
Finally, because some people think we will one day commute between planets, we spoke with James Lovell, former astronaut and Apollo 13 commander, on space travel:
“If you look at the past from the year 1900 to 2000, the automobile came into being and we certainly have progressed a lot, but it’s still an automobile and basically has four wheels and an engine. The airplane was born in 1904 and it’s come a long way, but, basically, it’s still an airplane.
More Top Picks Best Cable Modems
“I would suspect space will be the same thing for us. We’ve come an awful long way and we’ll go a lot further, but we’re not going to leave our solar system by the end of the next century. We’ll still be confined to it in the foreseeable future unless there’s a tremendous breakthrough in propulsion that I don’t see right now.
“Space travel, for the next 20 years or so as I know it, will be concentrated on international space stations around Earth using shuttles to get there. We’ll be starting to study a manned Mars mission certainly and all the problems that will be involved with that. There will be a consortium of countries and they will have hurdles to overcome, especially the problem of radiation because that’s the real unknown.
“There are several companies now working on cheap but reliable boosters to put people into space as a tourism industry. So, if you’re looking at space travel for the average person who can afford it, that would be the next thing.”