**TESTIMONY BEFORE**

**THE**

**US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES**

**COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE**

**SUB-COMMITTEE ON HIGHWAYS AND TRANSIT**

**Surface Transportation System: Challenges for the Future**

**January 24, 2007**

**Alan E. Pisarski, Independent Consultant**

**6501 Waterway Drive**

**Falls Church, Va. 22044**

**703 941-4257**

**alanpisarski@alanpisarski.com**

Mr. Chairman and distinguished members: it is a great pleasure to appear
before this Committee once again to discuss with you the substantial
challenges the nation faces in transportation. I treasure the past
interactions I have had with this great body over the years.

The just past 50^th^ anniversary of the Interstate provided a valuable
opportunity for examination of the past triumphs of our transportation
system and to engage in much needed introspection about our approaches
to transportation issues today and our failure to live up to the kinds
of successes -- the kinds of vision -- exhibited by our predecessors. As
Chair of TRB's Transportation History Committee I studied, wrote and
spoke extensively about the forming of the Interstate -- first the
vision; then the plan; then the financial system. Make no mistake it was
at least a 20 year development process, with a depression and a World
War intervening.

Examining the great work done by the forerunners of the US Federal
Highway Administration makes a deep impression; and to read again the
words of President Roosevelt and Eisenhower is truly inspirational. (I
actually held in my hands the map on which President Roosevelt sketched
three blue lines across the nation and three North South and asked for
an analysis by the engineers.) They understood what was at stake --
nothing less than the nation's future. What does impress even more is
that the challenges they faced were so massive, so great, especially
given the limited resources they had at their disposal. By comparison
today our resources are far greater, and the challenges we face are far
more circumscribed. They would be astonished, I think, that we are
daunted by the present challenges, but daunted we are. Our surface
transportation system has declined continuously in its service to the
society and the economy.

Let me sketch out here the nature of the future challenges that will
face us over the next 25 years or so and the kinds of solutions that we
can envision now, that we can begin to work on now to successfully
address those challenges and to produce a vision of future
transportation consistent with those of our predecessors.

**[The Challenges]{.underline}**

If one tends to look at the surface systems from the freight perspective
then that perspective, to be serious, will be world-wide in its scope --
the global economy will dominate domestic freight transactions. A focus
on passenger travel would tend to be more domestic in its scope. That is
where my emphasis will be today.

The list below, succinctly lays out what I believe is the fundamental
background understanding about where we are and where we are going that
can guide our actions. What that list tells us is that we will be an
affluent but challenged society. Our population increase will be
substantial but our growth in economic output will be far greater so
that all of us will enjoy greater wealth. Such a society will demand
high quality transportation services to meet the high values of people's
time and the high values of their goods. We should plan for a society in
which the average value of time is on the order of \$50 an hour and the
average value of goods shipped is three times its present level.

This will be occurring in a period of the greatest demographic upheaval
the nation has faced for a hundred years. Only in the great immigration
wave of the 1900's is there a similar wrenching period. In addition to
dramatic immigration we will be facing the closing of the working years
of the baby boom generation. My work in preparing the Commuting in
America series, the first of which began in the mid-eighties,
culminating last November in the publication of Commuting in America
III, has evolved into the history of the working years of the baby
boomers -- the same people who challenged our grammar schools and high
schools in the fifties and sixties filled our transportation systems in
the seventies and eighties. Remember the Commuting in America series
could have been about the massive unemployed struggling to find work,
rather than the congestion created by the surge in affluent workers all
going to work at the same time. It was the great triumph of the American
economy that produced the jobs that generated the very positive
congestion. After all, *congestion is* *people with the means to act on
their economic and social interests getting in the way of others with
the means to act on theirs*!

The first of the baby-boomers will reach 65 around 2010 and the last of
them circa 2030. just as their advent challenged us to create the
opportunities for that massive surge in working age population in the
sixties, their departure from the working scene will lay down dramatic
challenges of a kind we have never had to face before.

More significantly, as this major component of our work force goes off
stage, our population will not automatically produce the new labor force
to fill those jobs. In this decade 2000-2010 we will add about 20
million persons of working age to our population but in the succeeding
two decades 2010-2030 we will in total produce about 12 million,
according to Census projections. The percentage of the population of
working age will drop from approximately 60% to 54%. Where then will the
workers come from to produce the affluent society I envision?

Employers will have to work very hard to hold the potential retirees in
work a little longer; to attract retired workers to new opportunities;
to attract even more women into the workforce; to attract underemployed
minorities and rural populations, and of course to use the potential
immigrant work force. The problem will be exacerbated by American
workers being attracted abroad to work in high-powered economies as
nations compete world-wide for skilled workers.

Government will have to play a key role here as well; assuring that laws
don't impede older workers from staying in the workforce, or women or
the other potential working groups from participating as fully as they
wish. Education and retraining will be critical. And transportation will
become a central concern providing the reach of job opportunities over
vast labor markets spread across the landscape.

FUNDAMENTAL SOCIO-ECONOMIC PREMISES FOR

AN AMERICAN VISION OF THE FUTURE

-   The nation will be facing perhaps the most dramatic changes in
    demography since the great immigration waves of the late 19^th^ and
    early 20^th^ centuries.

-   Population will grow at a stable rate according to the census
    interim projections at about 1% (3 million) per year.

-   Variability in population growth will largely be a function of
    immigration which can change with a stroke of a pen.

-   The dominant demographic reality will be the aging-out of the
    baby-boom generation, the first of whom reach 65 in 2010 and the
    last circa 2030.

-   This will have dramatic impacts on the numbers of people of working
    age and the ratio of working age population to those above and below
    that age (the dependence ratio)

-   The decline in the baby boom work force will create a sellers market
    in work services and force employers to be highly responsive to
    worker interests yielding greater flexibility in hours, days, weeks
    of work.

-   Employers will seek to attract workers from the retired, from even
    more women, from the underemployed minority and rural populations
    and, of course, immigrants.

-   National GDP will grow at roughly 3% per year based on education
    levels, technological change, productivity improvement, and
    population increase.

-   Population growing at 1% and national GDP growing at circa 3% means
    that GDP per capita will grow as dramatically as in the last 50
    years.

-   The affluence of the emerging society and the resulting immense
    value of time, will drive most decisions, including those related to
    transportation.

-   Increased value of goods will make similar demands on the freight
    side of the transportation system.

-   Both passengers and freight will demand and be able to pay for high
    quality, reliable, amenity-based, personalized transportation.

-   A large segment of society will have the time and resources for
    extensive recreation and leisure travel.

-   Globalization of everything will increase business and recreational
    tourism travel within, to and from the United States.

-   The increases in services as a share of GDP will permit more
    population to act on location preferences as workers and employers
    are less tied to resources and more attracted by amenities.

-   Multi-job households will complicate job and housing choices.

-   Areas of the country will compete for workers on the basis of
    life-style, climate, and ease of living reinforcing the shifts of
    population to the South and West.

-   Transportation and mobility will be one of the more important
    amenities on which competition is based.

It will be a footloose job structure with employers willing to go
wherever skilled workers are and those workers free to seek high amenity
attractive living arrangements. Never before will it have been so true
that Americans will be able to live where they want and work where they
want. Access to housing that people want will be the critical
interacting force with commuting and transportation activity in general.
Fitting people to the transportation system we choose to provide will be
a comic or tragic failure. We will have to accept consumer sovereignty
in transportation just as we do everywhere else in our nation. Cities,
metropolitan areas and states will compete for workers and the employers
they attract with amenities not the least of which will be effective
transportation.

Perhaps more important for future surface transportation than the size
of the expected population will be where that population locates in the
nation. Clearly, the ways in which future population will distribute
itself across the national landscape will be critical to transportation
demand and the services required to support that demand, with immense
implications for national productivity and societal well-being.

America is truly unique in the world with a large land area, a large
population, and a nation that is both technologically advanced and
wealthy. No other nation on earth combines these four attributes,
although several will approach it over the coming 50 years. These four
attributes will define largely how the population will be distributed in
the future. It will further define how the nation will serve its people,
how it will interact nationally and in the world economy.

At present, the US population can be roughly divided into four main
population groups

:

-   **Metropolitan Areas of more than a Million Population** -- In 1960
    America had 34 areas with populations over a million. There were 53
    such areas in 2005. It can be estimated that there will be at least
    60 such areas by 2020. At least 60% of the nation's population can
    be expected to be in these areas.

-   **Metropolitan Areas of more than Five Million Population --** In
    1960, of the areas over a million only New York, Philadelphia,
    Chicago and Los Angeles were over 5 million; in 2005 we reached 12
    such areas containing close to one-third of the US population. By
    2020 there could be an additional two or three such areas. These
    great areas will be the economic engines of the nation.

-   **Smaller Metropolitan areas under a million --** Many of these
    areas will grow toward the million mark while many will be absorbed
    into the expanding orbits of the major metros.

-   **Rural Areas:** From a population and transportation standpoint
    rural areas are separable into those rural counties
    soon-to-be-metropolitan; and that other group that is more truly
    rural in nature. The counties on the metropolitan fringes are often
    the location of rapid growth, housing development, and long
    commutes. Given the orientation to suburban job opportunities many
    of these areas have only a limited connection to the metropolitan
    center. They will be the sites of much of our future congestion.

There is substantial evidence from the last 100 years, and certainly
over the last 50, as to the almost inexorable nature of future trends.
Figure A below shows the fifty year growth trend of central cities and
suburbs, which together constitute metropolitan areas, and non-metro
(rural) areas. Effectively all of the nation's growth has occurred in
metropolitan suburbs where today more than half the national population
resides.

**Figure A Long Term Population Trend by Geographic Area**

![](media/image1.wmf){width="5.995833333333334in"
height="2.613888888888889in"}

Source: Commuting in America III, NAS, TRB

A large part of the "suburban" growth has in fact been rural growth on
the fringes of metropolitan areas which become incorporated into the
metropolitan area as they reach certain population and commuting
thresholds. More than 40 rural counties became metropolitan in the 2000
Census. Rural growth, focused on the metropolitan fringes has been
substantial -- As a result metro areas grow together and more square
miles of area will be incorporated into these metropolitan
agglomerations. This will continue for the foreseeable future as general
population migration continues from the metropolitan areas to the rural
fringes with households in search of residential amenities and
affordable housing. The results will be immense megalapolitan areas with
spans of a hundred miles. Importantly these areas will frequently grow
together and so the ability to delineate discrete areas will come close
to disappearing.

The retirement of the baby boom population and the consequent lack of
working age population will sharply affect the character of rural areas.
Part of it will be the need to provide access for underutilized rural
labor forces to reach suburban job opportunities. Additional important
changes will be the expansion and success of new retirement-based
communities in attractive areas with good weather; and the expansion of
amenity-based communities as work sites. About 800 of our nation's rural
counties, those oriented to recreation and retirement, enjoyed levels of
growth of 20% or higher in the nineties, more than double the non-metro
average rate and above the average metropolitan growth rate. This trend
could become a major factor in national population distribution in the
future as more baby boomers reach retirement. As a result, the US rural
population which is already better connected to the national economy
than ever via modern technologies such as the internet, cellular
technology and satellites will be even further integrated into the
society. It will be a high mobility rural population with high
percentages of income spent on transportation.

The central reality of future metropolitan areas will be the dominance
of the suburbs -- not merely in population, but in jobs and other
measures such as retail sales. The "Donut Metro" will result. Commuting
flows already reflect this, as shown in Figure B below, but will
increasingly follow this pattern as very different growth rates
continue.

-   the predominant national work "market" is suburb to suburb commuting
    -- increasing in dominance as metropolitan areas increase in scale;

-   the internal flows within central cities and within non-metro areas,
    are among the other major markets, tend to be among the low growth
    flows;

-   the "traditional commute" from suburbs to central city has exhibited
    limited growth, whereas;

-   the rapidly growing markets are from central cities out to jobs in
    the suburbs, had a greater share of growth than the traditional
    inbound commute in the nineties, and;

-   the flows from rural areas or from other metro areas into suburbs.

**Figure B Metropolitan Commuting Flows 2000**

**(in millions of commuters)**

![](media/image2.wmf){width="5.998611111111111in"
height="3.408333333333333in"}

Source: Commuting in America III, NAS, TRB

The growth markets will continue to be those difficult to serve by
carpooling and traditional radially-oriented transit. A major transit
emphasis then becomes providing access to jobs within the center city
and out to the suburbs for inner city populations particularly those who
are vehicle-less. General access to community services in both
metropolitan and rural areas will be an important focus. Longer distance
oriented commuter-rail-like services will benefit from the dispersed
population that continue to travel to those job and other activities
oriented to the center.

The worker dynamics operating in the new metropolitan complex will be
these:

[]{.mark}

-   It will be a sellers market for workers resulting from decline of
    persons of working age. Employers will go where skilled employees
    are or want to be. Much of this will center around universities and
    research centers. This, coupled with more affluent,
    amenities-seeking workers will abet the shift to the South and West.

-   Employers will be more forthcoming re flexibility regarding hours
    and days of work in order to retain/obtain workers.

-   Employers will shift to suburbs to be near workers, permitting
    workers to shift even farther out in search of rural amenities and
    lower cost housing. The attachment of minorities to the center city
    will be broken especially as their access to private vehicles
    continues to grow.

-   Both center cities and suburbs will move toward balance in jobs and
    workers (i.e. fewer jobs per worker in cities; more jobs per worker
    in suburbs) but this will not change the need to commute
    significantly due to persisting skills mix differences.

-   Increases in specialization in the labor force will mean that
    workers will need to be drawn from larger and larger worker pools
    over greater distances.

-   Multi-worker households, frequent job changes, housing preferences,
    and the general friction of changes in residence will generate very
    long work trips.

The extraordinary increases in commuters leaving their residence
counties to work will continue to expand with substantial shares of the
population crossing both metro and rural areas to reach their job sites.
The share of workers leaving their home county rose from less than 24%
in 1990 to 28% today. At present more than half of new workers leave
their home counties to work. This will not just affect commuting but
other travel purposes also, as doctors, restaurants, and recreation
activities become more specialized their market sheds will expand and
the average trip lengths to these attractions will increase.
Particularly the commuting and other interactions between rural and
metropolitan fringe areas will expand in importance.

The resulting pattern could be summarized as workers able to live where
they want and work where they want but where they will have to accept
the penalties associated with longer commutes.

The non-worker related dynamics will also be of great significance, not
the least of which will be:

-   The decline of the working age segment from approximately 60% of the
    population to about 54%, will give rise to a large dependent
    population.

-   In the fifties the surge in the dependent population consisted of
    the early school years baby-boomers, now it will be a product of
    their reaching 65.

-   As the first generation to have grown up with the auto retires,
    there will be dramatic increases in the numbers of those over 65
    with drivers licenses and vehicles, especially women.

-   For the first time in history we will have two generations of
    retired people.

-   The result will be a surge in tourism and recreation travel for
    those with disposable time and income.

-   The safety implications will be critical.

In summary the defining characteristics of America in this period will
be:

-   A highly dispersed, high-value, high-mobility, globally-engaged
    society is envisioned with sharp growth differences between regions
    and within metropolitan complexes.

-   Long distance travel (i.e. exceeding 100 miles) for both business
    and personal purposes will grow dramatically.

-   The critical interactions will be between skills-seeking employers
    in search of replacements for the retiring baby-boomer generation;
    and amenities- seeking workers and their families, taking place in a
    context of greater logistical freedom for both workers and employers
    to locate where they choose. Connecting distant workers with jobs
    will be a critical productivity function of transportation.

-   Massive metropolitan regions will result with approximately half the
    US population living in metropolitan areas of over 5 million; such
    delineations, however, have already become merely definitional
    artifacts. These agglomerations will be increasingly critical to
    national productivity and serving their transportation needs will be
    a major input to that productivity.

-   Continued "suburbanization" of people and jobs; and declines in the
    densities at which people live should be expected, leading to a
    blurring or, in some areas, complete eradication of metropolitan and
    non-metropolitan boundaries.

-   Within this metropolitan context it is possible that community nodes
    will evolve with a greater emphasis on walking for some local trips.
    A world dominated by the personal vehicle and walking could evolve.

-   Rural populations will be more critical to the nation's economy; and
    rural development will follow functional lines based on retirees and
    amenities seeking workers: focused around recreation/tourism
    retirement based areas; or specialized economic development
    features.

-   The transportation result will be high frequency trip-making, of
    increasing lengths to and from increasingly dispersed origins and
    destinations. Metropolitan core-oriented transit usage could rise,
    in an overall trip-making context that will be difficult or
    impossible for traditional transit or carpooling to serve and in
    which overall transit and carpooling shares of travel are likely to
    continue to decline. Greater competition will arise between air and
    auto travel for intermediate trips between the usual ranges of each,
    roughly 250 to 500 miles.

**[The Vision]{.underline}**

The tools employed to assess national investment needs for highway and
transit capacity tend to produce incremental adjustments based on
observed or expected growth in demand, but no roads on new rights-of-way
nor new facilities designed to stimulate or channel growth are
identified by existing modeling processes. The process fails us in
providing sweeping, visionary statements of goals and needs. The
Interstate System would not have been produced by a computer model. It
took a certain vision -- a sense of possibility -- a sense of what could
be -- in the 1930's to produce it. Perhaps it also took a period of hard
times to help envision a better world and its makeup. Today such an
envisioning process must begin with the Interstate and the rest of the
National Highway System as a starting point and then go on from there.

Many of the transportation implications derivable from the trends
described here have already been identified as part of the discussion,
but several need further delineation.

-   Immediate Action Opportunities -- there are immense immediate
    opportunities for improvement in the ways we operate and utilize our
    existing infrastructure that need to be realized and that can be
    employed in the very near term to wring the maximum thruput out of
    our existing systems. These are low cost operations and
    technological solutions applicable to both highways and transit that
    can address congestion on a very low cost-per-hours-of-delay-removed
    basis. In removing obstacles to improved traffic flow they also
    improve safety and the environment. In the near future the promise
    of new Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) initiatives can be
    added to the now more traditional ITS tools. We must deploy these to
    ease present problems and to demonstrate that everything we can do
    to serve the public has been done before resorting to immense
    infrastructure investments.

-   Community and Neighborhood Design -- There is nothing in the
    foregoing discussion that indicates that development must take the
    form of widely dispersed housing. There will be interest in and
    pressures for more clustered development that create walking
    opportunities. Given that much work will be addressed by those
    working at home or working on flexible schedules the opportunities
    will exist for more responsive patterns of development at the
    neighborhood level while at the same time the entire metropolitan
    area is more widely dispersed. Working at home will be the fastest
    growing "mode" to work, especially among the over 65 worker
    population.

-   Transportation and Productivity -- As employers and suppliers reach
    out farther and farther to obtain the needed skills and supporting
    goods and services they require, the ability to sustain the mobility
    of people and goods will be crucial to our economic effectiveness.
    Social and economic "Communities of Interaction" will grow,
    encompassing the entire nation that will be served by communications
    advancements but will further the needs for transportation as well.

-   Time and cost of travel -- Affluent societies, such as described
    here, tend to travel more frequently, at longer distances, and on
    modes more responsive to their needs for timely, rapid service. The
    further dispersal of the population will add to those demands.
    Designing for a society with a value of time of \$50 per hour in
    which households spend roughly 20% of their income on transportation
    would be a useful starting point from which to examine future needs.
    The same transportation system next year will be less acceptable to
    a society whose value of time has increased. The system will be
    judged more harshly in the future in these terms. The values of
    products moved in the freight system will also grow and will make
    similar demands on the system for timeliness and responsiveness. The
    traditional notion of neatly dividing passenger and freight travel
    between urban and intercity components will be strained as much of
    the new travel lies somewhere in between.

-   Safety -- The safety implications of these changes will be immense.
    A high mobility society, that is aging and that is increasingly
    operating over deficient rural roads, will be a major national
    challenge. There are substantial opportunities for changes that can
    ameliorate these effects -- some technological, some in facility
    design but also in land use arrangements that will welcome more
    walking in safe surroundings with limited interactions with
    vehicles.

-   Long Distance Intercity Travel -- Only brief reference has been made
    here to the prospective growth in long distance intercity (and
    international) travel. Tourism, including both leisure and business
    travel, has grown dramatically throughout the world and particularly
    in the US, and will play a substantial future role in defining
    transportation needs. The pace of international markets and the
    orientation to visitations of an affluent society with increasing
    amounts of discretionary time and incomes suggests continued
    dramatic growth. A large part of this activity will involve family
    connections and second home travel. The advent of new light, low
    cost jet aircraft and eventually the Vertical Take-Off and Landing
    (VTOL) aircraft will make inroads into the land based auto-oriented
    travel markets in the less than 300 mile ranges. The American Travel
    Survey of 1995 indicated that about 25% of travel occurred in trips
    over 100 miles and about half of those trips under 500 miles were in
    personal vehicles for both work and recreation/leisure activities.
    It is this market that can be expected to expand dramatically and
    that will require innovative response.

-   Congestion and Capacity Needs -- the immense national backlog of
    needed capacity improvements and reconstruction is the critical
    factor for the immediate future. Given the relatively benign growth
    rate levels and the substantial affluence of the society future
    needs can be met once the present backlogs of capacity, maintenance
    and reconstruction in highways and transit are overcome. Among the
    responses to the patterns identified here are the following:

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-   An expanded Interstate system reaching more areas;

-   Increased rings of beltways around our metropolitan areas supporting
    greater circumferential travel, and increased by-pass opportunities;

-   Improved access to the city center including commuter railroad-like
    facilities;

-   Improved rural two lane roads for safety and mobility;

-   Improved local circulation services in urban and rural areas that
    focus on integrating the lower income populations into the
    productive society;

-   Expanded safety and operations enhancements for more effective and
    safer use of existing facilities.

A number of kinds of new system constructs could be envisioned. Those
discussed below are divided into two parts: Nationally Networked
Facilities and Nationally Pervasive Facilities.

[NATIONALLY NETWORKED FACILITIES]{.underline}

-   The Interstate System is the centerpiece of our national surface
    transportation capability. it must be preserved and extended.

-   Additions to the Interstate/National Highway System are needed
    whether based on socio-political connectivity criteria or on
    economic development grounds. Such additions might be subjected to
    geographic coverage tests, a redundancy test (a key national
    security concern in the past which has all but been forgotten in
    recent years), as well as a capacity test. A simple criterion might
    be that all areas of over 50,000 population should be connected to
    the national system, or every county seat, or no population center
    should be more than 20 miles from such a facility. New routes based
    on NAFTA corridors would be an example.

-   A National Parkway System might be envisioned, with simplified, less
    expensive features, predicated on a light-vehicles-only design
    criterion. Such facilities developed with scenic and aesthetic
    values in mind could provide connectivity between areas without
    threatening local abutting land uses. The Taconic State Parkways in
    New York and some of the National Park Service Parkways, are
    examples. Such a system would provide an alternative for those
    drivers fearful of large trucks and would provide needed capacity
    with low cost design features. It could be conceived as a toll-based
    system with travelers willing to pay tolls to avoid truck conflicts
    and gain a pleasant travel experience.

-   A National Truck Freight Network has been suggested on a number of
    occasions in the past. Such a network would be designed specifically
    for trucks with all the extra cost features that entails. It could
    include the option of permitting larger vehicles perhaps especially
    designed for such a facility. There may be rewards in finally
    separating cars from trucks in major corridors. We should be happy
    to build the roads that the truckers need and they should be happy
    to pay for them.

-   NATIONAL PERVASIVE FACILITIES \-- Facilities that are extensively
    distributed around the country but not particularly designed to be
    connected in any way.

-   Metropolitan HOV/HOT lanes have been proposed frequently in
    different venues. What would be different here would be realization
    that these should designed as systems throughout a metropolitan area
    and should be pervasive nationally (in the 60 areas expected to be
    over a million by 2020, for example). The massive orientation to
    carpooling of our immigrant populations is noteworthy.

-   Similarly, TOT (Truck Only Toll) facilities have been proposed in
    several areas. Most typically proposed as special solutions to
    bottleneck situations rather than as a complete TOT network.

-   One of the dramatically changing factors in America metropolitan
    travel is the huge scale of our major metropolitan areas. There are
    now 12 areas over five million in population with a third of the
    nation's population. In these and other metropolitan areas the
    burgeoning suburb to suburb and exurb travel patterns define the
    need for beltway expansions as a new tool to respond to development
    needs. Areas may need to consider two and three beltways as part of
    an effective system based on hub and spoke concepts.

-   Heavy focus of rail transit services will be on access to the center
    in those areas over 5 million. This will not be a rapidly growing
    market. More low cost options, Bus Rail Transit, and jitney/van type
    systems (carpool/transit hybrids) keyed to the dispersed demands of
    the new era, will need to developed.

-   The very weak systems of social services transport in both urban and
    rural areas needs national recognition and attention.

-   The pathetic nature of our data collection programs and analytical
    capabilities demands Congressional focus. We are effectively naked
    with respect to our ability to understand and interpret national
    patterns and trends. Our future decision-making must be keyed to
    performance-based reporting systems. If our future decisions are to
    be founded on sound understanding of our rapidly changing society
    and grounded in effective performance-based, economic justification
    it will have to be supported by far superior data and analytical
    capabilities than now exist. The costs are trivial contrasted to the
    cost of ignorance.

**[Closing]{.underline}**

I see a very positive future for America and for American
transportation. One in which the problems are more operable than they
were in the past and our financial and other tools are better equipped
to address the challenges. The major provisos are that the nation must
first recognize the immense importance of mobility in realizing its
ambitions for the people as individuals, as a society and as a
challenged nation in the world; and we must then be willing to act with
the abundant political, technological, intellectual and financial
resources at our disposal to respond to those challenges.

Alan E. Pisarski