by David A. Bell

Stuck in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, after a third cancelled flight in as many weeks, prompts some thoughts--and venting--on the history of transportation in the United States. Traditionally, transportation has been one of the best measures of technological, economic and social progress. The horse and buggy gives way to trains and subways and cars. Wooden sailing ships give way to metal, steam-powered ships. Airplanes appear on the scene, and develop into a key form of transportation. Unarguably, the period of greatest progress in American transportation history was the first three quarters of the twentieth century. During this time, we went from Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin at the Sea of Tranquility (it's hard to think of a more incredible technical advance than that--from elementary flight to the moon in just 66 years!). In the same period, the use of the automobile was generalized, and the interstate highway system was planned, built, and brought to maturity. Airline travel was developed and popularized. Modern airlines with their fleets of jumbos took shape. And the price of air travel fell--a process accelerated by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. But if, in retrospect, the high point of progress came around the 1970's, the story of the last thirty-odd years has been mostly one of decline. The old assumption that the twenty-first century would see commercial space travel ( e.g. 2001: A Space Odyssey) vanished a long time ago into the debacle of the space shuttle program, and the realization that at this point, there are very few good reasons to send humans into space except for sheer adventure. In comparison with the enormous changes of 1903-1970, airline fleets have barely evolved. True, they are considerably safer. They are also, as everyone knows, vastly more uncomfortable, less profitable, and less reliable. 9/11 only accelerated the trend towards ever-greater airline travel misery of the sort I'm experiencing at this very moment. Cars have also gotten safer, and more environment-friendly, but otherwise have not evolved substantially, even taking the SUV boom into consideration. And of course road congestion has grown exponentially, while new highway construction has gotten ever more controversial, expensive and slow. Just think of the Big Dig in Boston. In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, a new section of interstate highway just 14 miles long has taken literally decades of planning, study, and controversy just to get to ground-breaking this month, and will take many years to finish. And don't even mention the state of the American passenger railroad system, or the prospect of major new public transportation projects (which, in any case, are not well suited to suburban or exurban housing patterns). There's no single reason for this decline. Part of it has to do with technology maturing and hitting limits. Part of it has to do with a greater realization of the potential damage inflicted by certain technologies, both environmental and social (as in the cases of large, ugly highways cutting through old city centers). And part of it has to do with the United States failing to treat efficient transportation as a significant public good, and therefore not taking significant public action to maintain high levels of service-egregiously, in the case of the railroads. But whatever the reasons, we all spend more and more time stuck-on highways, on broken-down trains, in airports. Thank God for wi-fi.