Freight volumes are expected to increase by more than 40% over the next 30 years, placing increased pressure on a highway system that already is at or past its designed capacity.
This is one of several points made by the final Beyond Traffic 2045 report released by U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
One of the key issues examined in Beyond Traffic 2045 is the cost of increasing traffic congestion. It finds that the average American driver in a city or a suburb will spend an entire work week sitting in traffic, the annual cost of congestion delays and lost fuel is $160 billion, and that truck congestion alone will cost $28 billion in wasted time and fuel this year.
The report finds that the U.S. transportation system, and the current planning and funding mechanisms, will not meet the demands presented by trends including population growth, climate change, and new technologies like driverless cars.
The report is studies the major trends that will shape our nation’s transportation system over the next thirty years, including population growth, increasing freight volume, transportation funding, and emerging technologies.
Questions and trends explored in Beyond Traffic 2045 include:
• How we move – America’s population is expected to grow by 70 million by 2045, and by 2050, three-quarters of Americans could live in eleven emerging megaregions – larger geographic clusters in spanning multiple cities and communities.
• How we move things – Freight volume is expected to increase by more than 40 percent, partly driven online shopping, adding extra demand to our transportation networks.
• How we move better – Automation and robotics will affect all modes of transportation, improving infrastructure maintenance and travel safety, and enabling the mainstream use of autonomous vehicles.
• How we align decisions and dollars – Federal gasoline-tax revenues have failed to keep up with our transportation needs and could decline further as vehicle fuel efficiency improves, and inflation further erodes purchasing power.
In his introduction to the report, Secretary Foxx outlines three strategies that need to be employed to ensure that America is able to meet the challenges of the next thirty years: take better care of our legacy transportation systems to keep our roads, bridges, and ports in good repair; fund and prioritize new projects based on future projections, not outdated models of how people moved in the past; and use technologies and better design approaches that will allow us to maximize the use of our old and new transportation assets.