Burton W. Marsh Distinguished Service Award: Make No Little Plans

The Burton W Marsh Distinguished Service Award recognizes an individual who has contributed to the advancement of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) over a period of years in an outstanding fashion. Burton W. "Marsh was "Mr. ITE. " He was a founder, past president and former executive secretary of ITE.

For more than 57 years, Burt was one of the most active ITE members. He provided sage and friendly counsel and always was willing to pitch in and do more than his fair share. He was a pioneer in urban traffic engineering and recognized early on the importance of traffic safety programs that incorporate the driver, vehicle and roadway elements.

Although often attributed to Winston Churchill, these words first were uttered by Daniel Burnham, an architect and urban planner. His foresight and planning were largely responsible for the rebuilding of Chicago, IL, USA, after the fire of 1871 and the advent of the modern skyscraper. Burnham, along with John Root, also planned the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Burton Wallace Marsh was born just six years after the Chicago World's Fair. Burt Marsh spent the next 90 years "making no little plans." At the age of 25, he founded a profession by becoming the first full-time urban traffic engineer in the United States. When he was just 31, Burt Marsh and 18 others founded a new professional society called the Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE). He served as the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) before he reached the age of 40. TRB honored him with its Roy W Crum Award for Distinguished Service in 1 954. He served as executive director of his beloved ITE from 1965 to 1970 and continued to provide sage counsel, advice and humor until his death in 1988.

Having served on the staffs of ITE and TRB for most of the last 30 years, I am honored and humbled to receive this award named in honor of Burt Marsh, "Mr. ITE." Looking back, I am proud to be part of a profession that, over the years, has made big plans to solve big problems and has implemented them. This makes me confident that our profession and ITE will be able to collectively meet the challenges that face us today and in the coming decades. These challenges are enormous.

BIG CHALLENGES LOOMING

Energy and Climate Change

These twin issues may be the biggest public policy challenges facing the transportation profession over the coming decades. Transportation is the only sector almost totally dependent on oil. Worldwide demand for oil is outstripping supply. Transportation in the United States consumes about 5 million more barrels of petroleum daily than are produced domestically.1 Prices are skyrocketing. Even more important, unlike the 1970s, this does not appear to be a short-term phenomenon. Forecasts of conventional petroleum resources indicate a peak of production between 2020 and 2050, before the inevitable decline.2

Even if it were possible to eventually produce enough oil to meet global demand, a continued reliance on fossil fuels will only hurt our ability to meet the challenge of climate change. With its reliance on petroleum, the transportation sector generates approximately 27 percent of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to global warming, second only to electricity generation. * More than 70 percent of these emissions are from road use, and these percentages are increasing.4 Scientists are estimating that GHG emissions must be reduced by 60 to 80 percent or more by die year 2050 to avoid catastrophic consequences in the second half of this century. Eleven states have already adopted GHG reduction targets in this range.5

It is becoming increasingly likely that a series of significant steps will be taken in the coming years to address energy and climate change issues. Those under consideration include implementing a carbon cap-and-trade policy and/or carbon tax; significantly increasing vehicle fuel efficiency and/or converting vehicle fleets to alternate fuels; changing vehicle designs; reducing vehicle miles of travel (VMT) through pricing and other means; changing land use patterns and urban form; making significant investments in public transit; and relying more on management and operations of existing transportation facilities.

Supplementing these long-term mitigation strategies will be steps to adapt transportation to the more immediate impacts of energy prices and climate change. Under almost any scenario, temperatures will increase in the coming decades. This is due to the GHGs already in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide [CO2] emissions have a life of 100 years), and the fact that we will continue to emit GHGs for many years to come. According to a recently released TRB report:6

* Climate change will affect every mode of transportation and every region in the United States, and the challenges to infrastructure providers will be new and often unfamiliar.

* Climate change will affect transportation primarily through increases in several types of weather and climate extremes, including intense precipitation events, intense hurricanes and higher temperatures.

* State and local governments and private infrastructure providers will need to incorporate adjustments for climate change into long-term capital improvement plans, facility designs, maintenance practices, operations and emergency response plans.

* Transportation providers will need to work more closely with weather forecasters and emergency planners and assume a greater role in evacuation planning and emergency response.

* Design standards will need to be reevaluated and new standards developed as progress is made in understanding future climate conditions and the options for addressing them.

* Transportation planners will need to consider climate change and its effects on infrastructure investments. Planning timeframes may need to extend beyond the next 20 or 30 years.

*The institutional arrangements for transportation planning and Operations will need to be changed to incorporate cross-jurisdictional and regional cooperation.

Over the past year, there have been actual reductions in VMT on highways. Is this a temporary reaction to rising fuel prices and the economy or a more permanent trend? Answers to this question will affect alternatives analyses; the underpinnings of planning models; design of transportation facilities; maintenance and preservation of aging infrastructure; and management and operations of surface transportation systems.

Congestion (Including Freight)

Burt Marsh once remarked that the best way for a prospective bride to measure her future husband's character was to ride with him through a traffic jam.7 Today, this would be an unending test of character.

Our best success stories in recent years have been predicated on reducing the rate of congestion growth. Meanwhile, congestion levels have continued to increase. Efforts to increase capacity, manage demand and better operate our systems have not kept pace with rising vehicle ownership, sprawling land Use patterns, increasing population and increases in freight movement spawned by globalization and justin-time delivery. The shifts from personal vehicles to transit over the past year have not made much of a dent in highway congestion but have led to overcrowded transit systems across the country.

Congestion is not limited to highways and transit systems. Our ports, waterways, rail and aviation systems also no longer have the capacity to meet existing and future demand. However, because 87 percent of passenger trips are made in private vehicles, highway congestion is most familiar. We need to make some bigger plans.8

Safety

In 1950, Bun Marsh warned that the drunken driver was becoming "death's chief handyman" in this country.9 On another occasion, he said that jaywalkers in New York City, NY, USA, play "hopscotch with death every day, but an amazing number win because they have developed the protective traits of cats and squirrels."

Despite our successful efforts to dramatically reduce motor vehicle death rates per 100 million vehicle miles over the years, the actual number of annual deaths has remained stubbornly high-more than 40,000 in the United States and 1 .2 million worldwide. This represents 95 percent of all transportation fatalities. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden have surpassed the United States in road safety for the first time. The successes of these nations are partly the result of strategies such as stricter laws on safety belt use, extensive crackdowns on alcohol- and drug-impaired driving, increased restrictions on teenage driving and automated enforcement of traffic signals and speed limits.10

As a society, we have been very cautious about pursing solutions to the world's problems that have even the slightest potential to increase the risk of personal injury or death. At the same time, our society has accepted existing transportation systems and policies that consistently result in millions of deaths and injuries each year.

It does not have to be that way. A number of developed countries have made dramatic reductions in the actual number of deaths and injuries by focusing on driver behavior. New technologies are becoming available every day that can significantly alter the vehicle-highway-driver safety experience. Big plans are needed to put these tools to work.

Financing

The U.S. federal highway trust fund is running out of money. Reduced travel, increases in fuel economy and rising prices for construction materials have created a perfect storm. Gas tax revenues will fall billions of dollars short of meeting planned transportation program levels this year. The federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has not been increased in more than a decade. Most state gas taxes have not been raised in many years.

It does not appear that elected officials will do so anytime in the foreseeable future. "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) has been supplemented with "Not In My Term of Office" (NIMTO). According to a TRB report, although fuel taxes can remain the primary funding source for U.S. highways for at least another decade, eventually replacing them with a system for metering road use and charging accordingly could benefit travelers and the public.11

As a result, agencies and legislatures are turning to innovative funding mechanisms. Tolling and pricing are being used in more locations to help manage congestion while generating additional revenues. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the form of leasing highways through long-term concession agreements are now being implemented in this country, generating much pro and con debate - and hyperbole.

Tolling, pricing and PPPs can play an important role in generating needed revenues. However, contrary to what some are claiming, these measures alone cannot be relied on to solve the problem. The number of facilities on which today's versions of tolling, pricing and PPPs are feasible is very limited. Demand for use of the facility needs to be high. Risks and rate of return need to be acceptable to investors. Leases of 75 to 100 years need to be seriously questioned.

ITE MEMBERS-MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Can the transportation profession and ITE members meet diese daunting challenges? I believe that we can, both collectively and as individuals.

Collectively, I believe our profession and ITE can develop and encourage plans and mindsets that are as big in scope as the problems we are facing. At the same time, we cannot put forth a separate plan to solve one problem that ignores or exasperates another.

No one person can claim to have the answers to these problems. The following are offered simply to demonstrate the types and scopes of big plans that we could collectively consider.

* Changing our basic vehicle technologies and fuels: Future generations of vehicles that do not rely on petroleum and do not emit GHGs, either directly or indirectly through the generation of electrical power. As long as we are redesigning our vehicles, why not include crash avoidance and vehicle/highway communications technologies as required safety equipment on vehicles?

* Automating major highways: Automated highway systems could significantly increase capacity, eliminate most crashes and incidents and combine high-speed transit routes with highway rights of way. This already has been successfully tested.

* Changing to a VMT tax: The gas tax originally was adopted as a surrogate for taxing actual VMT. A ubiquitous VMT tax could incorporate tolling and peak-period pricing policies for all roads under one umbrella system. This approach was suggested recendy by the National Surface Transportation Revenue Policy and Revenue Study Commission.12 Oregon already has demonstrated that such a system can work.13

* Emphasizing management and operations: In a paper presented at the TRB Annual Meeting in 2008, researchers from the University of California at Riverside concluded that, "While progress in vehicle efficiency improvements and carbon-neutral fuels is underway, innovative traffic operations improvements (i.e., mitigating congestion, reducing excessive speeds and smoothing traffic flow) can have a significant impact on vehicle CO2 emissions and this impact can be realized in the near-term."14

These ideas may or may not be the ultimate solutions, but they are examples of big ideas that have already been shown to be possible. If ideas like these can be pursued simultaneously, they can help make a significant contribution to solving the issues of energy, climate change, congestion, safety and financing, among others.

Finally, they are emblematic of the types of big ideas that will be necessary to attract new people to the transportation profession. Significant research will be necessary to lay the groundwork for implementing solutions in the coming years. Exciting research attracts excited students. Research opportunities for young prospective transportation professionals could be expected to include the relationships between transportation, energy and climate change; future travel behavior scenarios; demographics; new relationships between the driver, vehicle and infrastructure; personal privacy issues; collection and use of transportation data; new generations of transportation models; advanced technologies; evacuation planning and implementation; and many more.

The excitement is not just for the new and the young. Many of us were attracted to transportation because it is a profession where calculating a numerical answer to a problem is only the beginning. We must add political, social, economic and environmental considerations into the equation. We must work with elected officials, the media and the public to bring solutions to reality. All of these create uncertainties not commonly found in the engineering profession. This unpredictability helps makes it so exciting to be a transportation professional!

Over the years, ITE members, acting collectively through ITE, have had a significant influence on public policy. As individuals, we have each contributed to achieving important policy goals in our everyday work. As ITE members, we have worked collectively to share experiences and to develop guidance and standards. Working within these frameworks, our successes have been many.

They include establishing and implementing uniform systems of traffic control in the United States and around the world, saving countless lives and injuries by eliminating crashes before diey occur, keeping the United States moving despite material and gas rationing during World War II, accommodating huge increases in travel demand, applying advanced technologies, calming traffic in neighborhoods and accelerating the evolution of transportation agencies from a capital projects mindset to one of systems management and operations.

ITE, with its thoughtful development of positions and its balanced viewpoint, has become a respected voice in transportation policy-making. ITE's policy positions over the years have been carefully crafted to reflect the views of its members. It is important for each of us as ITE members to make our views known to the ITE leadership on major transportation issues.

Working individually and collectively through ITE, let's "make no little plans." Together, we have met significant challenges before, and we will do so again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is not an exaggeration or false modesty to point out that whatever success I may have had during my career has been due mainly to the thousands of dedicated members of the organizations I have worked for, particularly ITE and TRB. I have had the privilege of helping enable others who work everyday to make the world a better place through transportation. I owe so many people so much that it would be impossible to list them all here. I will just mention a few:

* Burton Marsh, for his vision in helping found ITE and for his guiding hand over the decades that followed. * David Bulman, my first supervisor at the New York State Department of Transportation, who taught me to "think outside the box" even before that term was invented.

* Tom Brahms, ITE's executive director, who taught me everything I know about volunteer associations. Most important, he showed me how much it meant to be an ITE member during his emotional acceptance of the Marsh Award in 1988.

* Robert Skinner, TRB's executive director, who taught me that it is possible for pne to be thoughtful and an agent for needed change at the same time.

* Rudolf and Pauline Norman, my parents, who taught me more than I could ever list here or anywhere.

* Henry Norman, my uncle, who along with my parents taught me that politics and public service can still be noble undertakings.

* Cara Heuser and Julie Norman, my daughters, who are now teaching me as much as I ever taught them.

* Joseph "Joey" Heuser, my two-yearold grandson, whose very existence reminds me how important it is for our generation to leave a world that will be worthy of his generation.

* Finally, Deborah Norman, my wife of 35 years. My partner in life, my counselor, my conscience and my best friend.

© 2008 Institute of Transportation Engineers Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.