David Leonhardt complains today that planes, trains, and automobiles aren't any faster than they were half a century ago. Fair enough. That's true. But then he adds this about a typical person taking a cross-country flight:
They leave their homes several hours before their plane is scheduled to depart. Many sit in traffic on their way to the airport. Once they arrive, they park their cars and make their way through the terminal, waiting in a security line, taking off their shoes, removing laptops and liquids from their bags. When they finally get to the gate, they often wait again because their flight is delayed....A cross-country trip today typically takes more time than it did in the 1970s.
It's true that security lines have increased waiting time in airports significantly. That's a social decision entered into with our eyes open. But the rest of this is just wrong. Over the past two decades, anyway, traffic congestion and flight delays haven't changed much:
Then Leonhardt tries to explain why travel hasn't gotten any faster over the past 50 years or so:
Why has this happened? A central reason is that the United States, for all that we spend as a nation on transportation, has stopped meaningfully investing in it.
This makes no sense. Cars are no faster than they used to be, but that's not unique to America. It's true everywhere in the world. Ditto for airplanes and ditto for trains—though it's true that a few places have more bullet trains than us. But even Leonhardt admits this is mostly due to higher population densities.
As it happens, I agree with Leonhardt's larger point about government investment in R&D. We should do more of it. But it's silly to cherry pick transportation as an example of the perils of low R&D spending. Different times call for different investments, and our current era demands investment in things like health care, gene therapy, artificial intelligence, and communications. And guess what? Those areas have all been growing like gangbusters. The result, contrary to Leonhardt's gloomy implication, is that the US economy has been far more dynamic than any of its peer countries:
As a nation we have problems. The opioid epidemic has decimated life expectancies among the poor. US income inequality is the worst among large, rich countries. A national addiction to sugar has ravaged our health. Unions have withered. And our government is uniquely dysfunctional.
Nonetheless, taken as a whole the United States is hardly a nation in decline, as Leonhardt says. We are growing faster than our peer countries. We have more entrepreneurs. Our military is unsurpassed. Our infrastructure is mostly fine as long as you don't uncritically accept the word of the civil engineering lobby. Driverless cars are right around the corner. Our universities continue to be the best in the world. And contra Leonhardt, we also spend more on K-12 education than any large country:
I too would like a cheap, ballistic rocket-plane that gets me to New York in an hour. We aren't there yet. Neither is anyone else in the world. But that hardly points to national stagnation. It's just a problem that isn't ripe for a solution yet. In the meantime, the US and the world are progressing at almost breakneck speed in lots of other areas that matter a great deal more. You just need to take a fair look at things instead of letting your gloom about our lack of flying cars overpower your common sense.
The part about speed of travel is uniquely stupid. In transportation, energy use is proportional to the SQUARE of speed. When carbon emissions are arguably the thing we desperately need to reduce, making planes, trains, and automobiles FASTER is the last thing we need. Even if many of those things can run on renewable electricity, there is already going to be a huge increase in demand for electric power, so . . . again going FASTER is the last thing we need.
Oh, did I mention safety?
There was a supersonic airliner, the Concorde, which cut the trans-Atlantic flight time in half from conventional airplanes. Only a few were built and the Europeans eventually abandoned it. The U.S. could have built a similar plane but Boeing canceled the project. Some improvements just aren't worth it.
And that's because the sound barrier is a significant barrier in aviation. It takes a lot of energy to push past it, which means that your plane needs to have larger engines and weigh less. Plus, flight dynamics requires different control surfaces (such as Delta wings). So you end up with a narrowbody that doesn't carry a lot of people and isn't all that comfortable.
Plus, you have to make a decision about sonic booms near populated areas, and supersonic flight is generally at higher altitude where there is less air resistance, and there are concerns about damage to the Ozone layer from flying all the way up there.
So we obviously have the technology, but it's better for all sorts of reasons to just fly at Mach 0.85 instead.
True as far as it goes (except it is only air resistance that rises with the square of velocity, the other components have different maths).
But: energy use is also much greater with old equipment rather than new. Take railroads: Most commuter lines these days use insanely heavy cars (at the technology level of approx. the 1950s) driven by insanely noisy, stinky and sluggish diesel engines. Europe has electrified rail with low weight cars decades ago. Such modernization would result in significant CO2 reduction while still cutting down on travel times somewhat.
Or: "Bullet trains" have the potential to redirect traffic from the skies to the ground, again saving energy. Even the sorry excuse for a fast speed system on the Boston-Washington corridor proves that point. By targeted use of subsidies this effect could be enlarged.
I agree on the other hand hat making cars faster would be foolish; we should instead enforce speed limits (55 mph) across the country, a measure with little downside that would reduce CO2 output siginificantly.
My prediction would be that electric vehicles and self driving is eventually going to result in increased highway speed limits, and the public will demand it.
The 55mph speed limit is a great cautionary tale- it was very good policy both because of safety and energy concerns, but the public hated it, and in a democracy, if the public wants something badly enough, they win and the experts lose.
This is already happening behind the scenes.
An interesting (very little known) development in US rail is creating intelligent electrically powered rail cars that are kinda like a semi but running on rails, flat bed that can carry one (or maybe two stacked) containers.
This allows much smaller loads to run all over the rail system much more effectively, as oppose to cargo "trains", which are only cost-effective when they become miles long. There's still a lot to be negotiated about how to co-ordinate this scheme across all the different use cases, given the inevitable conflicts when I want to go left along the rails, and someone else wants to go right, but that is clearly technically doable.
This will (eventually...) probably permeate all the way down to passenger rail and light rail. But will probably be slower, messier, and more expensive than it should be due to all the usual complaints, most obviously about passenger cars without humans controlling them and the "loss of jobs".
The NYT article focuses on the time it takes to travel, it is Kevin who misrepresented the article and focused the discussion on speed.
Cars and trauns certainly have better acceleration, top speed and safety
measures than they did 40-50 years ago, so this misrepresentation doesnt even make much sense.
That's right. The overall travel time is a system problem. The problem isn't that the planes aren't flying fast enough. Even if they flew twice as fast, there would still be the issue of getting to the airport, getting through the terminal and then the reverse process at the other end of the flight.
“Driverless cars are right around the corner.”
Uh huh. Year after year, it’s always right around the corner.
And they will likely be fusion-powered.
They're not just around the corner. They've already arrived. I can remember Google-branded test models on El Camino seven or eight years ago (late at night). Now they're in limited but growing commercial service. We're still a ways away from "human drivers no longer needed" of course. Maybe even several decades until they're (we're) fully phased out. Who knows?
But yeah, driverless vehicles are in use.
I was in a Waymo. I think I had less anxiety riding public transportation.
This is generally true, and widely acknowledged by the relevant engineers.
ESSENTIALLY current self-driving cars are totally optimized for safety, and they mostly do this very well (as far as the stats say, definitely better than the average across all drivers; we don't yet have stats to say that they are better than the "best" drivers, ie leaving out new drivers, teenagers, drunks, very old drivers, etc).
But this emphasis on safety means that they drive in a way that's different from humans, and much more jerky. They aren't yet optimized to both be safe AND gradually reduce speed based on what they see up ahead.
A particular problem is cars parked on the side of the road. They constantly slow (rapidly) for those, and move to the side. In some sense, they are correct, in that it's possible any one of those parked cars could randomly just drive out into the street. And certainly there ARE drivers who do that...
But it feels awful and, like the above poster says, terrifying.
HOWEVER the self-driving cars are in a bind here. What is the alternative? They can drive like a human, and just assume those parked cars will be sensible, but you just know that at some point an idiot human driver will drive out into the traffic without looking, hit a self-driving car, claim it was the self-driving car's fault, and we'll see a media frenzy. A subsequent court case may settle the issue the other way, but by then the damage is done.
We get self-driving cars driving more defensively (which means more jerkily) than humans because we have forced on them a different burden of expectations and proof than on human drivers... You get what you demand...
That sounds like an Uber joke: "So, when are we getting going?" "Well, the app says our self driving car is just around the corner." Cut to self driving car trying to figure out how to get past some simple obstacle - construction, kid with a game console - just around the corner.
If the US isn't in decline how come I keep getting older, and things keep changing?
Huh? Huh?
Yeah!
Because it wasn't better back then, you were just younger.
There seems to be more petulant "where's my jetpack" nonsense than usual. I mean, editorial pages are full of cranky, entitled olds, so there's always a background level of this stuff. But there seems to be a lot more of this "woe is us, so mediocre, why won't anyone entertain me with new magical products and services" next to ads for cheap, commodified cell phones.
I think we need to stage an intervention with our pundit class.
We've fallen quite a bit behind in payment systems, too, but on the whole I agree with Kevin: the declinist narrative about America is off by quite a bit (though our political system is pretty fucking dysfunctional, so, it's not quite time to pop the champagne corks just yet).
A national addiction to sugar has ravaged our health.
Kevin: you're pretty good at examining data. Perhaps you can take a look at this in detail one of the days. Yglesias a few months back did a post suggesting obesity flows more from general calorie intake—we're eating more than ever—than it does from sugar or HFCS. According to him (if I recall his argument correctly) there's data associated with army recruits going back a long time—all the way back to the Civil War or so—suggesting Americans have been getting larger and heavier. Thus, people in the 1890s were heavier on average than those in the 1860s. By the 1920s they were heavier than in the 1890s. By the 1950s they were heavier than in the 1920s. And so on. He attributes it mostly to the relentless drop over the years in the real price of food. In other words, per Yglesias, the sugar scare (at least in terms of its effects on obesity) misses the plot, as does the "sedentary lifestyle" scare, because we shouldn't be looking for a culprit that turbocharged obesity it the postwar era—it goes back much further than that.
Not sure if I buy his thesis, but I thought it was interesting to ponder.
"Rather than just a case of too much sugar, could it be a case of too much food intake overall?"
(from a journal article from earlier this year)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9966020/
Interesting. Thanks. This is from section 2.3 of that paper:
I'm all for more R&D spending, but to more developed markets, you need to push things along. The light bulb standard helped drive innovation--though also rode one the coattails of the cell phone revolution. CAFE standards should have been raised higher and sooner. Ok--a proper carbon tax would have helped.
Exactly. You need spending, regulation and annoying articles about the impending "crisis" to help justify those first two and give the public an idea of what to expect in the future. If the article doesn't say "crisis", odds are it's on page 97 or five clicks deep, and maybe ten people will read it.
They started calling Broadway theater "the fabulous invalid" back in the late 19th century because live theatrical performance had been on the verge of death for as long as anyone could remember. By the 1930s "Is theater dead?" was standard cocktail party talk, a cliche. It still makes for good conversation.
Well, if we want to spend less time in traffic getting to airports and improved transportation overall, we could increase taxes to pay for those improvements.
Oh.. Never mind.
/s
"... is that the US economy has been far more dynamic than any of its peer countries:"
So why isn't China a peer country?
China is not a peer country because, even apart from the different legal environment and politics, it is a "greenfield" country. Most of the new infrastructure is not replacing older infrastructure, it's being built from scratch. There is no need to maintain compatibility with pre-existing rail-lines and highways, there are large areas near cities that can just be flattened and restructured, etc.
The issue is not the "morality" of whether this is good or not and all that; it's the simple fact that China (for now, not in fifty years) is solving a different, and much easier, problem than the US has to solve.
In the few parts of the US that are very new (Phoenix is an example) you can see the US running ahead unencumbered by these particular issues (though still with the US legal and political environment) and you do sometimes see China-like performance.
Yesterday: Pax Americana is over
Today: The US is not in decline
You may recall that "Pax Americana is over" was a Krugman claim to which KD argued "it never existed".
Krugman the other day said the middle class society he grew up in had been completely “destroyed”. I found that pretty striking as I had the feeling we are working our way back to it, albeit slowly.
I think Krugman was speaking in an economic sense - and it's true. We're becoming more stratified, not less.
If you read the Middletown books, sociological studies of Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s, 1930s and 1970s, you can get a sense of the changes. In the first two books, there was a distinct working class and a distinct business class, and they led very different lives. In the 1970s book, the big distinctions had vanished. Working class and business class led very similar lives. No one has written a sequel, but it's rather obvious that the working class and business class have diverged since.
I'm hoping we're working our way back towards a closer class alignment, so I'm happy to see alarmist "crisis" articles exorciating the status quo and encouraging a return to a more equitable economic situation.
The airports have made it a lot of fun to be waiting in them, though.
Ugh. Have you ever disembarked from an international flight at JFK. The wait, the ugly surroundings, the lines at Passport Control are horrible, especially compared to Western Europe. Just recently Heathrow in London--about 2 minutes with lots of good-natured help to get through. Much easier and nicer to get from airport to central city in many other places. And don't get me started about the highways in Queens and Brooklyn--crumbling BQE anyone? US infrastructure is a mess.
In July I arrived at SFO on a flight from Taipei—it couldn't have been any easier. It was so easy I was shocked, in fact. Took me all of 2-3 minutes (if that) to get through customs and immigration. The border people were even (gasp!) courteous and friendly.
I think it's a hit or miss thing (yes, and I've arrived via JFK, too, and don't have great memories). Most countries have a very limited number of airports that handle all their international flights. The US has more than 100. Not that this should be an excuse (they all should be up to snuff) but the sheer number of international airports makes it challenging to always provide international travellers with the highest level of service.
We fly puddle jumpers from Canada into our local international airport. You can see Canada from the terminal. The customs guy rides out to our plane on a bicycle.
I was in Italy, in Milan, during a devaluation of the lira. (It must have been a Wednesday. Tuesday was Prince Spaghetti Day.) I decided to buy a fancy suit and a fancy cashmere coat and some other stuff with my 40% off coupon, so to speak. I got pulled into a customs office where the guy went through my haul. He had a tariff book and weighed everything. The cashmere coat came in at 15 lbs. (I was young and strong back then.) He looked at the tariff. It was maybe $5 or $10 a pound for wool or cashmere. He wrote down 15 lbs at 25 cents a pound for "one cotton coat".
JFK: oh, my goodness, yes! The one time recently that I arrived on an international flight at JFK, it was total chaos. The hall was packed, no one knew where to go, and no one was there to help you except that they kept moving lines around for no apparent reason. Never to be repeated, if I can at all avoid it.
I have stood in line for an hour at Heathrow, too, which was not fun, but it was organized, calm, and as relatively pleasant as could be reasonably hoped for. You'd think there would be a lesson there.
It was always hell. I grew up in Queens, and back in the 1960s my family used to drive out the JFK and watch the arrivals at that very hall. There was a viewing gallery, so we could see customs agents inspecting people's underwear, poking around in their bags and, now and then, confiscating some parcel - usually alcohol filled chocolates - and dramatically throwing them in trash can. I suppose ancient Roman airports would release a lion in customs now and then. It was the dawn of the exciting jet age.
A few years later, we returned from Europe on Five Dollars a Day and joined the show below. We smuggled in a thermos full of plum brandy. I have no idea of why. Back then, you could bring in ten bottles of booze for each man, woman or child, all tax free. My parents didn't drink much, but we had lots of name brand booze in the house. When my father died, there were still lots of bottles left. That smuggled plum brandy. Well, we got home and left it on a window sill during our unpacking frenzy. The wind blew it off the sill and two stories down to the street below. So much for the wages of crime.
Did you go to some alternate universe Heathrow? Because the last time I was there it was an hour wait for Passport Control.
To the contrary, I think the cannonball run could be accomplished significantly faster today than 50 years ago. /S
and they'd be able to score more points too!
oh wait, that was Death Race 2000....nevermind.
Thanks to COVID19, that is absolutely the case!
Kevin's response is misleading.
He posts a few meaningless charts (this has become the theme of this blog lately, misleading and meaningless charts to confirm our priors!) that dont adress transportation times, accuses the author of cherry picking and then breezily dismisses transportation as something of a bygone era.
Having lived and worked in both Europe and the US, the US transportation infrastructure does seem to be pretty terrible. Transportation is really important and shouldnt be dismissed because its old-fashioned. Cars and trains are certainly much faster than they used to be, this may be hard for Kevin to recognize because there has been so little thought and investment by the US to allow Americans to realize these gains in their day to day life.
While its deceptive for Kevin to breezily dismiss transportation and list other areas of potential investment, its telling that Kevin makes no attempt to whip up a chart on actual investment by the US.
Kevins 1st education spending chart is the only useful piece of data that addresses the topic, but its important to note that this data appears to support the authors premise, not Kevins. The chart shows that the growth in US spending per student is less than the OECD average.
Bizarrely, Kevin dismisses the ides that the US isnt investing enough by showing us that the growth in per student spending is lower in the US than in other advanced nations. This is precisely the point of the article. Kevin is disputing the article by proving the premise of the article....
It takes about 2 hours to get from Paris to Lyon on TGV. For approximately the same distance, it takes 4 1/2 hours to get from Northampton MA to NYC--and the train is almost always running late.
What Kevin does here is compare public investment (in health, traffic, education etc.) with private investment (in all sorts of "promising" technologies including of course his favorite baby AI). Talk about apples and oranges. Our health system is famously less efficient and far more expensive than our peer countries for example.
Further he compares dollar amounts rather than their effects. We live in a world where the city of Paris builds a subway line for a fraction of the money that New York or any other US city end up spending. If you want to compare you have to figure in this bang for the buck factor that almost always comes down against us.
The California high speed line has problems with design. But the main problem with it is really the fact that we can't seem to get our act together as to effective project management as soon as the government is involved.
In short: America is not (yet) in decline. But it sure isn't leading in the fields that truly matter.
There's definitely a dichotomy between public and private in the US. I was in the States this past summer. To give one example, I spent some time in my hometown. Boston seemed positively awash in fancy new ways to spend money. Interesting new restaurants with cutting edge dining concepts. Glitzy new condo buildings everywhere. New hotels. New high rises. Sleekly modern 24 hour gyms. The roads seemed clogged with six figure cars (many of them were even EVs). Etc. But it took me nearly 40 minutes to travel from Kenmore to North Station on the utterly craptastic Green Line (a subway branch that commenced operations in 1897). This is no more than two miles. The Beijing Subway would have done it in seven or eight minutes. Similar vibe to Seattle, another city I spent some time in. Very clearly a modern boom town with more construction cranes than anyplace outside of Asia. And yet you couldn't get from downtown to the airport via transit without a massive delay (in order to board a bus) because the light rail line had been shut down for maintenance. This just doesn't happen in Asia.
Cars *are* faster today than they were 50 years ago, when you consider the whole package - brakes, tires, steering, handling, etc. Modern cars are more controllable and safer at high speed. The limiting factor is not the car but the driver. Reaction times, fine motor skills, and visual acuity of drivers haven't changed in 50 years, which is why the speed limits are more or less unchanged.
Yes.
Most new jets actually cruise at a slightly slower speed than the previous generation, in order to save fuel. But in the US, there hasn't been a fatal crash of a scheduled commercial flight since 2009, so that is certainly progress.
As mentioned above, taking an additional 20 minute of flight time is meaningless when your route to JFK has the bridges which both have construction and closed lanes for the last decade, and the Van Wyck Expressway, which has been under construction since Reagan was in office. Passport control at JFK Terminal 1 was also a fucking nightmare, which we escaped via Global Entry.
Your description of JFK passport control is more succinct than mine (see my earlier response to coral), and completely accurate.
The issue with increasing car speeds is the driver, not the car. We have cars that can exceed 250 mph easily, but not everyone can drive that fast. Adding some form of automation to cars to allow them to "train" on the highway can greatly improve speed and efficiency, but that requires really difficult problems to be solved.
Planes that go much faster require a lot more engineering, as they are then approaching the sound barrier. That gets expensive and challenging to build, fly and maintain. And the use of them is limited to very long flights.
Trains are a different matter. It is not R&D, it is buying the land to put the faster trains on. I would love to see highspeed trains doing the work of the flights that now go to the hub airports. Any flight that is less than an hour should be able to be done with a train, preferably a train that one can drive their car onto.
But the Car and Driver saying is true, if you have plenty of time, fly. If you are in a hurry, drive. Took daughter from West Michigan to Georgia coast for Spring Break. Flying would take about 14 hours from door to door. Driving took about 18. Train would take 2 days. Gas was less than one plane ticket, one way. Right now, if the drive is less than 12 hours, driving is faster than the door to door flight, and with more than one person, much cheaper.
There are two points I want to make.
1. The problem with speed of transportation is one of physical and practical limits. Our airplanes cannot go faster than about .9 Mach because of the sound barrier -- the breaking of which has both engineering (energy, materials) and environmental (global warming, sound pollution) issues. We don't have faster cars/flying cars because of the engineering limits to our highways (allowing faster speeds would require building vastly more highway space to allow for safety spacing between cars) and practical limits to having lots of small aircraft in the air (air traffic control, sound pollution, property rights for overflight).
2. We're rapidly making progress for a substitution of virtual travel for actual travel. The pandemic proved that solutions like Zoom can work passably well already for remote work and meeting. Technologies already in the pipeline will greatly expand this, and VR/AR will make at least brief sojourns into virtual spaces much more likely as a a sometimes full substitution for actually being there.
Other issues with "flying cars" are:
What happens when your "muffler" falls off the car? Over a playground.
People can't drive in 2 dimensions, and you want to add a third?
The energy required to lift the vehicle is significant (think the gas used by a plane vs a train).
So much for having a place that is out of the way.
Of course there are the engineering difficulties, but the difficulties with the human element are much worse. I think that we are about at the limits of how fast the general population can drive themselves, on the roads we currently have built. Driving at 100 mph requires real attention to well up ahead, 150 is much more so. That is beyond most people.
"
Why has this happened? A central reason is that the United States, for all that we spend as a nation on transportation, has stopped meaningfully investing in it.
"
Even a crackpot is occasionally correct, though pretty much all his details are incorrect.
What IS worse today compared to say 1970 is that flights to 2nd tier cities are a lot longer because you will probably go through a hub, not via direct flight. This hub-and-spokes scheme is also more fragile to delays cascading through the system.
Hub and spokes vs direct flight is a consequence of rationalization since 1970, resulting from different incentives (fewer various govt incentives/directives for direct flights vs 1970). The payoff is that flight IS substantially cheaper since 1970.
MOST of the negative consequences of modern life vs 1970 are indirectly consequences of a much larger population. Hubs and Spokes flight is not, but the crowded highway to get to the airport, the crowded airport itself, the inability to build new highways and airports, etc are such consequences. Of course if there's one thing 90% of the population is agreed upon, it's that we need even more people, and that even the slightest decline in population would be a catastrophe...
So, fsckwits, welcome to the world you created and continue to demand!
+1 Of course, while an ever increasing population may be bad for the environment and the standard of living of most people, it simultaneously increases the size of the market and the supply of labor. Thus advancing our nation's principle goal of making the rich as rich as possible.