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Beyond Traffic 2045 Reimagining Transportation: Technology, Disruptive Innovation, and the Future 

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This report summarizes key findings from the Beyond Traffic 2045 Reimagining Transportation thought leadership speaker series held at Volpe, 

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Contents 

Imagining Our Transportation Future .......................................................................................................... i
 

Advancing the Conversation Beyond Traffic ............................................................................................... ii
 

Innovation and Decision Making
 

Andrew McAfee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology .................................................................... 1
 

Ken Gabriel, Draper............................................................................................................................... 2
 

Safety and Mobility 

Surface Transportation 

Chris Urmson, Google ........................................................................................................................... 4
 

Anthony Townsend, New York University Rudin Center ....................................................................... 5
 

Harry Lightsey, General Motors ............................................................................................................ 7
 

Donald Fisher, Volpe ............................................................................................................................. 8
 

Air Transportation 

Edward Bolton, Federal Aviation Administration ...............................................................................10
 

John Cavolowsky, National Aeronautics and Space Administration....................................................11



Sustainability 

John Heywood, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.....................................................................13
 

How Volpe's Thought Leadership Engages Stakeholders .........................................................................15
 

For More Information ................................................................................................................................16
 
------------

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond Traffic 2045: Reimagining Transportation
 

Final Report
 

“Beyond Traffic is more than a document. We want it to be part of a 

national conversation about transportation, and the choices we need to make in the 21st

century. This Volpe speaker series is a valuable part of that conversation.”
 

Anthony R. Foxx 

U.S. Secretary of Transportation 

------------

Imagining Our Transportation Future 

Transportation innovation is happening at an unprecedented pace. We’re seeing advances in 

communication, connected automation, data, navigation, robotics, and smart cities that just a few years 

ago would have seemed like pure science fiction. 

We’re entering a transportation landscape rich with possibility, and full of challenges. The next 10 years 

could bring more change to transportation and to the transportation workforce than we saw over the 

past century. A nation on the move must be a nation that is looking forward. 

In 2015, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony R. Foxx released Beyond Traffic 2045: Trends and 

Choices, a comprehensive report on the major forces impacting our nation’s transportation systems. 

The report frames critical policy questions by identifying trends that are shaping our transportation 

future. 

We’re poised to see major changes in car ownership, freight movement, population growth patterns, 

urbanization, vehicle miles traveled, and transportation-focused technologies. We’re going to face 

significant challenges related to aging infrastructure, energy use, highway safety, network congestion, 

rising greenhouse gas emissions, and more powerful weather events. 

The U.S. must always have a safe, reliable transportation system that can compete globally, but that 

won’t be possible unless we answer some big questions. How do we build and pay for infrastructure 

and capacity needs? How can we do a better job maintaining infrastructure? What strategies can we 

use to reduce emissions? How can technology enhance safety and efficiency? How do we ensure our 

transportation system connects people to economic opportunities? 

i 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Beyond Traffic, Secretary Foxx has identified the trends that will shape transportation in the U.S., 

and the challenges our nation will face. We can also now begin to understand the technologies that will 

help us meet those challenges. 

Beyond Traffic 2045: Reimagining Transportation, a Volpe thought leadership speaker series, advances 

the conversation that Secretary Foxx’s Beyond Traffic report started. This speaker series brought 

together top thinkers in business, technology, and transportation research to offer their perspectives on 

our transportation future. 

Advancing the Conversation Beyond Traffic 

Our U.S. transportation 

system can be safer, more 

efficient, resilient and 

environmentally sustainable, 

but long-term success 

demands new approaches. 

-Gregory D. Winfree

Volpe’s thought leadership speaker series, Beyond Traffic 2045: 

Reimagining Transportation, kicked off in fall 2015 with 

introductions from Secretary Foxx and Assistant Secretary for 

Research and Technology Gregory D. Winfree. They discussed 

obstacles to safe and efficient transportation, and how innovation 

may make tomorrow’s transportation networks almost 

unrecognizable. 

“Beyond Traffic highlights some big challenges we face as a

country,” Secretary Foxx said. “Of course, our infrastructure is aging 

and struggling to meet current demand. And in the next 30 years 

our country will have 70 million more people competing for the use 

of our roads, transit and rail networks, and airports, putting even 

more pressure on an already constrained system.” 

Advances in automation, navigation, communication, and robotics 

coupled with a surge in transportation data will dramatically change 

how we move and deliver goods and services, Winfree added. 

Throughout the series, distinguished experts explored the emerging 

technologies and disruptive innovations that will shape the next 30 

years of transportation in the U.S. The underlying theme for each 

speaker was that innovations lead to tangible benefits only when we 

understand new technologies and how to use them. 

Building off that underlying theme, the series addressed: 

• Innovation and Decision Making.

How we benefit from transportation breakthroughs will be determined by how well we plan for,

invest in, regulate, and monitor new technologies.

• Safety and Mobility.

Breakthroughs in automation, communication, and data collection will lead to significant

improvements in traveler safety and system efficiency.

ii 
 

• Sustainability.

Emerging research, strategies, and technologies can reduce the risks of climate change.

These are issues critical to the future of transportation in a nation moving beyond traffic. 

iii 
 

Distinguished Experts 

Innovation and Decision Making 

Andrew McAfee, Ph.D.



Massachusetts Institute of Technology



Ken Gabriel, Ph.D.



Draper



Safety and Mobility 

Surface Transportation 

Chris Urmson, Ph.D.



Google



Anthony Townsend, Ph.D.



Rudin Center, New York University



Harry Lightsey 

General Motors 

Donald Fisher, Ph.D.



Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center



Air Transportation 

Edward Bolton



Federal Aviation Administration



John Cavolowsky, Ph.D.



National Aeronautics and Space Administration



Sustainability 

John Heywood, Ph.D.



Massachusetts Institute of Technology


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Innovation and Decision Making
 

Andrew McAfee 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity 

in a Time of Brilliant Transportation 

There is a coming war to assist or 

replace human decision making. This 

is a war we will see play out not just 

in the transportation sector. I can’t 

think of any corner of the economy 

that is going to be immune from this 

very deep question: Will technology 

assist and augment us, or will it take 

over things we are very used to 

doing ourselves? 

-Andrew McAfee

Along the ever-upward curve of Moore’s Law, computing 

power is at an inflection point where the curve is going to 

start to bend a lot, according to McAfee. 

With extraordinary computing power poised to let machines 

perform fundamentally human tasks—such as driving a car— 

we are entering what McAfee calls, “a second machine age,” 

in which, “key building blocks are already in place for digital 

technologies to be as important and transformational to 

society and the economy as the steam engine.”1 

So far, though, there isn’t a computer that can think for 

itself. Will technology ultimately assist and augment us, or 

will it take over things we are used to doing for ourselves? 

The answer is clear for McAfee: machines are much better at 

complex tasks than we perhaps ever thought they would be, 

but people still have an edge in common sense and 

creativity. How we strike a balance between tasks and 

inspiration will depend on whether we accept our 

limitations. 

Humans are better than machines at pattern recognition and 

understanding context, but we also have a number of biases 

and glitches that hamper good decisions, McAfee said. 

Decisions need to be based on sound data and not gut 

reactions, because data-driven decisions lead to demonstrably better outcomes. Or, as McAfee put it 

during his talk: trust the geeks, flee the HiPPOs—the highest paid person’s opinions—which tend to 

favor gut reactions over quantitative analysis. 

The goal is not to replace humans with machines, or to limit machines from doing what they can do 

better than humans—it’s about finding the right mix. 

1 Erik Brynjolfssson, Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant 

Technologies, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. 

Innovation and Decision Making 1 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the inflection point, the trendline of growth in advanced technologies is heading in the right 

direction and societal benefits are increasing significantly, McAfee said. However, he concluded that 

while the second machine age is making the pie of societal and economic benefits larger, how that pie 

will be divided is still a very open question. 

“It is the choices we make as communities and as a society that will determine things like how wealthy 

we are as a group, the things we have access to, and how we share the bounty that’s coming,” McAfee 

said. 

Dr. Andrew McAfee is co-founder of the Initiative on the Digital Economy at the Massachusetts
 

Institute of Technology, and with Erik Brynjolfsson is author of The Second Machine Age: Work,
 

Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
 

Kaigham (Ken) Gabriel 

Draper 

Innovation...It’s More Than a Buzz Word 

If you’re going to have a significant 

impact on the 32,000 people killed 

every year in accidents, it’s not 

going to happen from a technology 

roadmap. If you want to do 

something that is going to make a 

significant impact, it’s going to go 

through something that defies this 

process. 

-Ken Gabriel

Innovation is not a linear process with defined outcomes 

achieved through a single path, Gabriel said. How an 

innovation comes about can be as unique as the innovation 

itself. Teams of creative and dynamic researchers rarely 

reach breakthrough innovations and solutions by executing a 

preplanned roadmap. 

Teams that do achieve breakthroughs have three key things

in common, Gabriel said. First, innovative teams have the 

best employees, or “jumpers,” who may come from other 

organizations or industries and are attracted by the chance 

to work on big, bold projects. 

Second, innovative teams are independent from 

organizational constraints and micro-oversight, giving them 

the intellectual room to uproot common knowledge. 

Third, they don’t sit on their hands. A competing linear 

model that is at least 20 years out of date assumes that we 

should follow a prescribed roadmap to achieve innovation, 

Gabriel said. Because it is so prescriptive, team leaders 

working within this model rarely encourage ideas that run 

counter to accepted wisdom. 

Innovation and Decision Making 2 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Gabriel provided details on successful innovation from his experience as deputy director of Google’s 

Advanced Technology and Projects Group (ATAP). At ATAP, Gabriel had only about a half-dozen 

employees on staff, but partnered with more than 40 organizations in academia and in the public and 

private sector. This collaboration with companies big and small across four continents gave ATAP staff 

the flexibility to drive toward the next big thing. 

“If we had had to hire that capability into Google, hiring 400 people and getting them facilities and 

equipment, we would still be pulling that project together,” Gabriel said. “That’s a really important part 

of getting these things done: not doing it all yourself, but to drive and manage it yourself.” 

Dr. Ken Gabriel is President and CEO of Draper. Previously, he was deputy director of Google’s



Advanced Technology and Projects Group, and a senior official at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research 

Projects Agency.



Innovation and Decision Making 3 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation
 

Chris Urmson 

Google 

Realizing Self-Driving Vehicles 

A driver’s brain processes an enormous amount of 

information every second. Drivers make the best decisions 

they can, based on all that input. Urmson explained that 

people, when they have their eyes on the road, are indeed 

good at recognizing and adapting to unusual situations. 

For instance, if a driver approaches orange cones 

surrounding a road crew using jackhammers, he knows that 

it’s time to switch lanes. Self-driving cars need to have 

enough information—enough driving experience through 

real-world and simulation testing—to do the same, he said. 

To mimic this innate human capability, Urmson said Google 

equips its automated cars with detailed maps and sensors, to 

detect unusual patterns and understand the unexpected. 

Just like human drivers, Google’s self-driving car will come 

across situations it has never seen before: a bird that flies 

right in front of a windshield, a bicycle built for a half-dozen 

people, cars crossing lanes without warning, and vehicle 

doors suddenly opening into traffic. 

“What our software has to be able to do is be able to say, 

‘This is not normal. This is what we call an anomaly,’” 

Urmson said. “And, just give [the anomaly] a little more 

space.” 

The one saving grace we have is that 

94 percent of accidents are caused 

by human error. We have an 

opportunity through building 

software and systems that are going 

to pay attention 100 percent of the 

time, and are going to be able to 

respond quickly, to try and reduce 

accident rates. 

-Chris Urmson

Google’s self-driving car program does its real-world testing 

on the roads of Mountain View, California. Its cars travel more than 10,000 miles every week. In 

addition to road tests, the program includes extensive computer simulations, with more than 3 million 

miles of simulation testing daily, Urmson said. 

As part of the simulation program, the Google team focused on testing unexpected scenarios for 

roadway events. The team thought up abnormal situations—such as a pedestrian holding a giant rubber 

ball crossing in front of a self-driving car—to test the car’s ability to recognize unexpected events. 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 4 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urmson emphasized that fatalities can be reduced dramatically in a world where self-driving cars are the 

norm. But, he added that there is still the human element to consider. Just because a technology is 

plausible does not mean it will be broadly accepted. Roads full of self-driving cars will only become a 

reality if there is a wholesale rethinking of what it means to drive. 

“The idea is that you’ll get in [self-driving cars], tell them where you want to go, they’ll take you there 

and then get out,” Urmson said. “You effectively are moving people from being the helmsman to the 

captain of the ship, which we think is empowering.” 

Dr. Chris Urmson is director of the self-driving car program at Google. 

Anthony Townsend 

Rudin Center, New York University 

Re-programming Mobility 2030:
 

Scenarios of Digital Transformation in Metropolitan America
 

In major cities there are a range of players coming together 

to address challenges—like congestion, highway bottlenecks, 

and inadequate public transit—using programmable Our method is based on an inductive 

mobility, Townsend said. Congestion pricing, on-demand method that assumes pretty much 

ridesharing services, and usage-surge pricing are all examples any story that you can tell about the 

of innovations that can pick up where political will leaves off. future falls into one of these four 

archetypes. The purpose of these Drawing on Re-Programming Mobility, a report Townsend 

scenarios is to get people out of wrote with colleagues at New York University’s Rudin Center, 

what we saw as one-dimensional he identified four broad scenarios for the nation’s 

narratives for the future. transportation future: growth, collapse, constraint, and 

transformation. He identified the chain of policy choices and 

investment decisions that are likely to culminate in each of -Anthony Townsend the four outcomes by 2045. 

For the growth scenario, Townsend described a trajectory of 

urban development that would involve persistent, 

exponential growth in the economy and technological 

innovation. This scenario would be represented by 

developments in a city like Atlanta. By 2028, Atlanta would 

respond to growing traffic congestion through more sprawl. 

The scenario envisions advanced technologies that make 

alternative energy the main source of power for electric vehicles on automated highways. Demand for 

transportation, however, would not decrease, transit would not increase, and the automobile would 

remain the dominant mode of transport. 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 5 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the collapse scenario, Townsend outlined a set of possibilities in which traffic conditions would 

significantly deteriorate, as represented in a city like Los Angeles. In Los Angeles in 2030, cheap 

automated cars make up more than one-third of the vehicle fleet, but the influx of vehicles and 

congestion is not paralleled by regulatory oversight and standards. Some cars are programmed to be 

aggressive, while others are passive. Instead of parking their cars, owners send them to drive in loops, 

exacerbating urban congestion. The Los Angeles surface transportation system collapses from too much 

innovation, and too little oversight. 

In the constraint scenario, there is a key resource that limits growth and leads to potentially unexpected 

innovations, Townsend said. Using New Jersey as his example, Townsend hypothesized that physical 

limitations mark the end of sprawl and the last major developable tract of land is sold in 2018. By 2029, 

New Jersey is a model of transit-oriented development. People live and work in dense clusters and get 

around by autonomous bus. Shared electric bike systems and automobile bans free up land that was 

used for parking for other development. 

Finally, in the transformation scenario, Townsend envisioned change driven by high-tech innovation, 

with Boston as his prototype. Boston in 2032 would be, “a tale of two cities: a city of stuff and a city of 

people,” Townsend said. Boston’s large student population is drawn to small modular apartments that 

can be moved around the city. Goods are brought to these apartments at the press of a button on a wall 

screen. Possessions are stored remotely, and the small apartments receive up to a dozen shipments 

daily. At night, a logistics network of automated vehicles springs to life to deliver goods. 

Townsend acknowledged that his scenarios are broad, but that they are designed to capture overarching 

visions with details that are not yet clarified. His intention for building these scenarios is to encourage 

the public and urban planners to examine the outcomes they find desirable and feasible for their 

networks. 

“[The transformation scenario] is one that I think people gravitate to,” Townsend said. “This is really the 

Silicon Valley narrative that allows us to grow even better with fewer externalities than before.” 

Dr. Anthony Townsend is a senior research fellow at New York University’s Rudin Center for
 

Transportation Policy & Management.
 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 6 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harry Lightsey 

General Motors 

Industry Disruption: How Connectivity is Redefining Personal Mobility 

Technological advances are not only poised to change how 

we move. With connected vehicles already making our 

traveling lives safer than ever before, they are poised to We’ve gone from an era of knowing 

change how we think about how we move, Lightsey said. The crashes were going to happen and 

focus is shifting from making cars safer during crashes to engineering and designing vehicles 

making cars that will avoid crashes entirely. to withstand the crashes. But we 

have a huge pivot in our industry Lightsey identified four foundational changes that are 

making the auto industry and consumers rethink what a now where we know the best crash 

is the one that doesn’t happen. So personal vehicle looks like, and how personal vehicles are 

we’re going from crash survival to operated. 

crash avoidance. 

The first change in automobile technology is the profusion of 

sensors, GPS location devices, and information and 

communications technologies embedded in every car. -Harry Lightsey 

Sensors enhance driver awareness of risks inside and outside 

the vehicle, “inching our cars along a continuum toward 

successful crash avoidance,” Lightsey said. 

The second change is around intelligence. Vehicles today are 

incredibly intelligent computing platforms, with dozens of 

electronic computers that help while driving. Smart cars are 

changing how we interact with our vehicles, with screen 

displays and Internet access right on the dashboard. 

The third change is that we are better connected. Sensors, 

smart computing platforms, and wireless communications 

are connecting vehicles to each other, to infrastructure, and 

to drivers and passengers. The move toward greater connectivity through wireless communication alone 

is accelerating at a great pace across the auto industry. More than 80 percent of cars by 2019 will be 

wirelessly connected in some way, Lightsey said. 

The final change is that a greater diversity of engines is transforming mobility and offering 

environmental sustainability. Greater power train diversity has enabled the electric and hybrid-electric 

cars that complement the current fleet of internal combustion vehicles. 

Lightsey predicted that the auto industry will be in a fundamentally different place in 10 years. Just as 

the telecom industry was upended by outside forces, Lightsey suggested that the automobile industry is 

undergoing foundational changes that may not come entirely from one of the major auto makers. 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 7 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“[In telecom] there was this guy from a different industry that said, ‘We can create an $800 phone that 

people will stand in line to get,’” Lightsey said. “And it happened. I think that’s the great thing about 

disruptive technology and technology transformation: it happens in ways that nobody expects.” 

Mr. Harry Lightsey is executive director of Global Connected Customer Experience for Public Policy at 

General Motors. 

Donald Fisher 

U.S. Department of Transportation 

Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center 

User and Machine: Secrets to a Harmonious Marriage 

After decades of declining road fatalities, during the first six months of 2015 there was a nationwide 

increase in traffic fatalities of 14 percent, and a 30 percent increase in traffic injuries, Fisher said. 

“Beyond Traffic 2045 has as an imperative that we do something about automobile safety,” he said. 

To understand how automation will impact traffic safety within the next 30 years, we’ll need to ask 

several key questions: 

• Where will the car of tomorrow fall on the automation spectrum?

• Will our vehicles be fully automated, where we as drivers are completely out of the loop?

• Or, will the car of the future act as a safety net, leaving drivers in control but applying the brakes

when we’re not paying full attention?

Looking at the present, at the growing use of in-vehicle screens, audio-visual guidance, and numerous 

mapping and routing devices, we’re already seeing a marriage between car and driver, Fisher said. With 

short-term traffic fatalities rising, the state of that marriage does not look very promising. 

Looking at automation innovations to come, Fisher said there needs to be a shared vision, common 

goals, and transparent communication between manufacturers and drivers. These parties must have 

similar goals if we’re going to have a future with cars that have various levels of advanced automation. 

Right now, whether a shared vision is possible is still an open question. 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 8 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We still want to remain in control of our car. A University of 

Michigan Transportation Research Institute study indicated 

that 43.8 percent of drivers didn’t want any autonomy,” There’s not just one marriage. There 

Fisher said. “It was only 15.6 percent who wanted full are going to be many, many, many 

autonomy. What do the manufacturers of the future want? marriages in the future. Marriages 

They want us out of the driver’s seat. The vision doesn’t between autonomous, semi- seem to be a shared one.” autonomous, and non-autonomous 

vehicles, along with marriages To arrive at a shared vision, drivers and manufacturers will 

between the driver, the pedestrian, need to acknowledge a few questions that will arise as 

and the bicyclist. autonomous vehicle technologies progress, including: 

•	 What are the liability issues at stake? 

-Donald Fisher 

•	 In a crash involving a self-driving vehicle, who is at
 

fault?
 

New technologies may dazzle, but they can also be harmful.
 

Some heads-up displays, windshield-mounted navigation
 

devices, and voice-recognition gadgets can create cognitive
 

distraction, Fisher said. Your eyes might be on the road, but 

you might still miss a child walking in front of your car.
 

To find the right match between automation and our
 

enhanced future well-being, safety, and convenience, Fisher
 

suggested that we envision several other scenarios.
 

Rather than a future in which the car is the chauffeur,
 

perhaps we should envision a future where the keys stay in our hands and the car serves as a lifeguard.
 

In that future, driver-assistance technologies will help drivers avoid crashes, or reduce their severity, but
 

drivers will still need to stay in control.
 

If there is one thing certain about the future, Fisher said, it is that it will be thoroughly unpredictable.
 

Dr. Donald Fisher is a principal technical advisor in Volpe’s Surface Transportation Human 

Factors division. He formerly served as head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial 

Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Safety and Mobility: Surface Transportation 9 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Safety and Mobility: Air Transportation
 

Edward Bolton 

Federal Aviation Administration 

Leveraging Opportunities: Modernizing Our National 

Airspace System in an Evolving Environment 

Today we have the largest 

controlled, safest, most diverse, 

most complex airspace on planet 

Earth. But it’s not a birthright. 

You’ve got to fight to keep it. We 

cannot handle the capacity that 

we’re going to have in 20 years 

doing what we’re doing today. 

-Edward Bolton

By 2030, air travel might not seem much different than it is

today. We’ll board a plane, go up to cruising altitude, and 

land at our destinations. The difference will be in what the 

average traveler doesn’t see: more efficient routes that use 

less fuel, and flights that are even safer than they are today. 

That’s because behind the scenes the Federal Aviation 

Administration’s NextGen program is already modernizing 

how pilots communicate with air traffic controllers, on the 

ground and in the air, Bolton said. 

Across the national airspace, cockpit systems will provide 

satellite-based global positioning data on position, route, and 

engine health and performance. Digitization is also changing 

how control towers and pilots communicate, moving from 

voice-based to text-based messages. With satellite systems 

and improved communication, air traffic controllers are 

shouldering less of the burden for air domain surveillance 

and aircraft separation. 

Built on a foundation of advanced avionics and satellitebased communications, by 2030 NextGen is expected to 

have generated $134 billion in benefits compared to $29 

billion in costs, Bolton said. NextGen is so transformational 

and will generate such significant benefits in safety and 

efficiency, that there’s only one historical comparison. 

“In 1919, a young army lieutenant colonel was part of a 

cross-country convoy. It took 62 days,” Bolton said. “Thirty-seven years later as president, Dwight 

Eisenhower was the father of the highway system. I would argue [NextGen] is the largest infrastructure 

transformation program this country has seen since the highway system.” 

Data sharing is another key benefit of the NextGen move to digital systems. NextGen already provides 

huge volumes of data not previously available to all players in aviation operations. Today about three 

dozen major airports already have the data-sharing platform that is the information backbone of 

NextGen, Bolton said. 

Safety and Mobility: Air Transportation 10 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bolton stressed that there are still significant challenges to rolling out NextGen technologies across the 

entire national airspace. These include funding challenges, cyber security challenges, and safety risks 

associated with the entry of new players, novel aircraft modes, air space congestion and airport capacity 

constraints. New flight patterns—vertical as well as horizontal—could also pose challenges, Bolton said, 

and unmanned aerial systems will require major regulatory efforts to ensure safety. 

But, known and unforeseen challenges are a given for a program as transformational as NextGen. Over 

the past decade the NextGen team has made progress by taking a measured approach, targeting bitesized goals to achieve project milestones, Bolton said. 

At the time of his talk, Mr. Edward Bolton was assistant administrator for the Federal Aviation 

Administration’s NextGen modernization program.
 

John Cavolowsky 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

NASA’s Strategy for Transformative Aeronautics 

In just a few years the world of global aeronautics will face major disruptive challenges driven by three 

megadrivers, Cavolowsky said. 

The first megadriver, accelerated demand for air travel, is spurred by economic growth in China and 

India, where urbanization and middle class growth are creating rapidly increasing demand for air travel. 

This growth will create intense wealth and population concentrations that will step up demand for rapid 

air and surface transportation, Cavolowsky said. 

“Air transportation continues to be a critical global capability,” Cavolowsky said. “An amazing statistic 

from the United Nations is that urbanization is occurring at a rate of seven Chicagoes a year.” 

Climate change is the next megadriver in transformative aeronautics. Through sustainable energy use 

and emissions controls, global demand for air travel must be met with new technologies that reduce 

emissions, Cavolowsky said. 

The third megadriver, new technologies and standards, has created a convergence with the potential to 

bring together nano-, bio-, and cognitive technologies, Cavolowsky said. 

This convergence is evident in advances in robotics, and in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used for 

transportation, commerce and manufacturing, Cavolowsky said. The automobile manufacturing 

industry, he said, is a driving force in technological convergences as it moves toward self-driving cars 

and on-demand transportation—and offers a framework to make on-demand aviation available to more 

people than ever before. 

Safety and Mobility: Air Transportation 11 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although UAVs are not yet an integral part of freight service, 

their emergence is a critical development that must be 

monitored, Cavolowsky said. He speculated that the day may 

not be far off when UAVs are delivering packages and 

inspecting infrastructure and agriculture. 

NASA will be a key player in making real the trillion-dollar 

potential of the unmanned aircraft industry, and will be 

looking to “provide an operational system where individual 

operators of these vehicles can subscribe to provide a 

proposed flight, to have that flight managed within a safe 

constraint to perform their business operations, whether 

public service or otherwise,” Cavolowsky said. 

Traffic management for unmanned aircraft will not look like 

traffic management for commercial aviation. Cavolowsky 

noted that NASA wants to provide an operational system for 

unmanned aircraft soon—but, “it has to be done safely.” 

Instead of rooms where human controllers monitor airspace, 

traffic management will be cloud-based with virtual 

perimeters based on the proposed path an aircraft will fly. By 

2019, NASA expects a traffic management prototype will 

allow unmanned aircraft to fly, even in dense urban areas. 

The lodestar for an aviation sector pursuing transformative 

aeronautics in the 21st century is to be inspired by an array 

of advanced automation partners who are working to make 

transportation safer and more efficient, Cavolowsky said. 

What we need to do from the 

aviation side is to really connect with 

the broader community, the ground 

automation capabilities. They’re 

developing standards for 

autonomous operations right now. 

How do we take advantage of that 

to leverage what they’re learning? 

-John Cavolowsky 

Dr. John Cavolowsky is director of NASA’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program. 

Safety and Mobility: Air Transportation 12 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sustainability
 

John Heywood 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Toward 2050: Options for Reducing Light-Vehicle 

Energy Use and GHG Emissions 

Fossil fuels are the primary way we power vehicles that get 

people and goods where they need to go—and the 

transportation sector is the second-biggest source of Transportation is special in its 

greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the U.S. energy needs in that the propulsion 

systems are almost all internal Heywood identified a blueprint that the transportation 

combustion engines today, and they sector can use to reduce GHGs: improve fuel consumption, 

fit what we want remarkably well. conserve energy, and transform the nation’s vehicle fleet. 

Except that their impacts are very 

To improve fuel consumption and reduce emissions, we’ll unattractive, and we’ve got to 

need new vehicle propulsion technologies and consumer change those impacts. 

markets that demand more electric and hybrid cars and light 

trucks. Heywood estimated that the use of current internal 

combustion systems may drop over the next three decades, -John Heywood 

from 90 percent of cars and light trucks on the road to 50 to 

60 percent, but that current alternatives to gasoline engines 

in themselves are not up to the task of drastically reducing 

GHGs. He noted that we’re making strides in changing engine 

design and manufacturing but that our progress is slow, and 

emission reductions will not be enough. 

Conserving energy will require changes in demand, Heywood 

said. We’ll have to drive less and reduce vehicle use, so that 

less fuel is used overall. Reducing demand is an untapped 

area, he noted. It would require rigorous transportation 

planning and investment that curbs urban sprawl, creates greater density so that people don’t have to 

drive far to work, and makes public transit more readily available. 

Transforming the nation’s vehicle fleet will rely on market-based pricing mechanisms that gradually 

move vehicles away from diesel-based engines and toward alternative fuels. These mechanisms could 

include a mix of market incentives that lower the price of alternative-fuel vehicles, and also introduce 

pricing penalties on GHG emissions through strategies such as emissions caps and higher fuel taxes, 

Heywood said. He cautioned that achieving significant impacts—with 25 to 30 percent of the national 

fleet equipped with engines that generate little or no GHGs—will be slow. 

“These [strategies] all need to be worked on intensely. I’m not saying number one is more important 

than number three,” Heywood said. “The challenge is that very few of us can focus on three things at 

Sustainability 13 
 

 

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once—seriously focus. We’ve got to seriously focus on three things, not every one of us, but in our 

thinking and planning, we have to focus on these three.” 

Dr. John Heywood is a professor of mechanical engineering and is Sun Jae Professor, Emeritus, at the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Sustainability 14 
 

 

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How Volpe’s Thought Leadership Engages Stakeholders 

Beyond Traffic 2045: Reimagining Transportation engaged a range of stakeholders in government, 

industry, academia, and non-profit organizations in an important dialogue on the future of 

transportation in the U.S. This series built on Volpe’s 2014-2015 thought leadership series, 

Transportation and the Economy. In addition to 1,200 seats filled and standing-room-only for many of 

the speakers there were more than 4,700 online registrations across both series. The graph below 

shows the number of audience members for both series by sector. 

Stakeholder Engagement 15 
 

 

 

 

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For More Information 

For more information on Volpe’s thought leadership programs, please contact: 

Ellen Bell 

Director, Strategic Initiatives for Research and Innovation 

Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center 

ellen.bell@dot.gov 

617-494-2491 

For feature stories, video highlights, speaker bios, and additional information from the Beyond Traffic 

2045: Reimagining Transportation speaker series, please visit: 

https://www.volpe.dot.gov/events/reimagining-transportation-speaker-series. 

For More Information 16 
U.S. Department of Transportation 

John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center 

55 Broadway 

Cambridge, MA 02142-1093 

617-494-2000 

www.volpe.dot.gov 

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