Paving the way:
academics, government and industry convene at DU for transportation summit
June 10, 2009
Faced with increasing demand for goods, congested and crumbling roads and
bridges and railroads stretched to capacity, transportation leaders and policy
makers descended on the University of Denver in late May in the quest for a
sustainable transportation future.
“Beyond the Crossroads,” a two-day conference hosted by the National Center for
Intermodal Transportation was billed as what organizers hope will become an
annual discussion on transportation policy and regulation.
Any answers, said Joelle Anne Schmitz, must involve collaboration and
communication among three key players: academics, industry and government. All
three must have input to devise a workable solution, she said.
“2009 is quite obviously a seminal year for our transportation future,” Schmitz
said in her opening remarks. “Our unity is sustained by the free movement of
people, goods and thought, so in this large country of big ideas, transportation
remains as paramount as our own liberty.”
Schmitz, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for
Business and Government, said traffic congestion is costing taxpayers over $200
billion a year. Drivers are spending over 40 hours a year in traffic on roads
that have seen use increase 150 percent in the past 25 years while road
construction can no longer keep pace. A world of finite assets requires us
to consider alternative modes of transportation to alleviate congestion.
Problems may be traced back to the era prior to the 1970s when excessive
regulation had swung the system out of balance, she said. Subsequently the
transport sector afforded modern economics its most beneficial experiment, the
partial deregulation of highly capital intensive industries, which proved an
unparalleled success, now emulated internationally.
Government leaders crafting policy must balance industry needs with input from
academics to maintain a reasonable, sustainable solution, she said. The current
economic downturn may turn out to provide the motivation policymakers need to
consider new modalities and make important changes, she said.
”Absent the [economic] crisis, we may have foregone the enhanced opportunity to
reassess and proactively determine our transportation future", she said.
Noting the critical timeframe as the federal government mulls new surface
transportation authorizations this year, former U.S. Department of
Transportation deputy secretary Mortimer Downey agreed to the need for creative
out of the box thinking and said current fuel taxes cannot keep up with
transportation infrastructure demands.
Government policies, he said, haven’t kept pace with changing times. While the
period from 1894 to 1991 was all about building roads, the past 20 years have
seen new challenges, including climate change, a booming U.S. population and
emerging new “megaregions,” including the Colorado Front Range. New policies
must take into account new realities, he said.
“What we have now isn’t working. It’s not even working as well as it had in the
past,” he said. “We really have to address the fact that the future 50 years we
are designing this for are not a carbon copy of the past 50 years.”
The National Center for Intermodal Transportation hosted the conference with
the DU Intermodal Transportation Institute, the Mountain Plains Consortium, the
Nick J. Rahall Institute and the Mineta Transportation Institute. In coming
months, conference leaders will seek to build on the presentations, panel
discussions and consensus-building exercises and create a policy recommendation
for government agencies and committees looking for transportation solutions
through the publication and distribution of a white paper and a monograph
It’s time, Downey said, to build an “action agenda” for transportation.
“This is not business as usual,” he said.