Travel in the U.S.: third world-ish?

Millions of Americans are getting ready to hit the road for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, which has put travel on my mind. My work  requires regular, if not frequent travel. About every quarter, I find myself on the road to all the familiar tech destinations — New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas…ocassionaly a trip to D.C. In my former life as a technology reporter, I travelled even more to industry events and such. And, prior to that, I did software training, which required even more travel to an even more ecclectic assortment of towns; I saw Atlanta and Minneapolis. Toledo, Ohio and Dayton. I’ve also travelled abroad for work – to Toronto and London and Dublin and Moscow and any number of other cities outside the U.S. One of the many things that travelling teaches you is the value of infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, rail, communications networks and the like. You come to appreciate them because, as a traveller, you greatly rely on them to get your job done. If you live in Boston and your job tells you that you have to be in a conference room in New York City at 9:00am Tuesday morning, a whole bunch of separate systems have to be working passably well for you to get there: planes and trains have to be in working order and the systems that allow them to depart and arrive more or less on time have to be functioning. Roads and bridges have to be in good repair and not choked with traffic that prevents you from moving along them at a good clip. Telecommunications networks to allow you to communicate with the outside world via phone or Internet while you’re in transit also help a lot and can allow you to continue being productive while you’re in motion. You get the idea. This kind of hard and soft infrastructure that supports commerce and enhances individual productivity is the kind of thing that, historically, has distinguished rich, first world countries like the U.S., Japan, and the countries of Western Europe from developing nations. And finding ways to do and build things bigger, better, faster is – after all – what made us great.

The U.S. - stuff's starting to break

There’s just one problem: when I travel about my home town of Boston and around the country these days, I get the distinct impression that I’m not exactly living in the first world anymore. I’m starting to feel that the days of “bigger, better, faster” are behind us — that, in a thousand, small ways, we’re slipping from that “first world” status and becoming something else. What it is, I don’t know. It all strikes me as “third worldish,” but that’s the perspective of someone who hasn’t really spent any time in the actual third world. Maybe its more of an ersatz first world? All the pieces are there: the airports and highways and rail lines. The Internet. It’s just that they’re old and decaying from lack of investment, or poorly integrated because the country hasn’t really thought creatively about issues like mass transit and public infrastructure for the last sixty years. Or, like the Internet, they’re locked behind pay walls because a decision has been made that allowing a few companies to make money off the service is better for society than making that service ubiquitious and affordable — like clean water or electricity.

The reality comes at you from a thousand directions:

• Its the five or ten delay notifications that get sent to my mobile phone by Boston’s MBTA every day notifying me of equipment problems or delays on the Red Line and Boston to Fitchburg train line – the two main routes I use to get to my job.
• It’s sitting in Boston’s South Station or New York City’s Pennsylvania Station this week — major transit hubs in the middle of two of the nation’s most important economic centers — and realizing that neither has public WiFi access that would allow me to continue working while I wait for my train.
• It’s bouncing down the tracks (literally) on the U.S.’s only high speed rail line, Amtrak’s Acela, which only runs at full speed for a fraction of the trip  and must crawl along the tracks at 20 or 30mph for long stretches. Acela’s vastly superior to the cattle car experience that commercial airlines offer these days, but it still takes three and a half hours to travel from Boston to New York. And when my six year old minivan can keep pace with our nation’s only “bullet train,” you know there’s a problem.
• It’s reading about the breakdown of the FAA’s aging computer system this week — the third since 2007 — which lost flight plans and caused countless delays and cancellations, which caused a ripple effect that pushed weary, disappointed travelers onto my evening Acela train up to Boston.
• It’s the five calls AT&T dropped on my trip from Boston to New York — perhaps the most densely populated corridor in the entire country.
• Its the five or so of my cell phone calls that get dropped for lack of coverage every day, even though I’m rarely further than 7 miles from Beacon Hill in dowtown Boston, a metropolis of 4 million people. I remember driving north of Boston a few years back with a former colleague of mine, a Brit who was a tech reporter in Tokyo. He noted all the billboards from Verizon  trumpeting how great their coverage was and how few dropped calls their customers had. He laughed at the notion, saying that in Japan, cell service was so ubiquitous and reliable that even implying that there were any gaps in your coverage would be laughable – -like Toyota marketing around how rarely its car airbags failed to deploy in an accident.
• It’s reading about how the Chinese government is throwing up new roads and bridges at an astonishing pace, while pieces of the Bay bridge drop into morning traffic in San Franciso and the Lake Champlain Bridge, an 80 year old bridge spanning the 120 mile long Lake Champlain and linking Vermont to New York State is closed in October after engineers discovered it was in danger of imminent collapse. That’s upended the entire economy of the region – - forcing farmers, residents and businesses owners to drive 100 miles out of their way to move goods.
• It’s reading about the $1 million per soldier we’ll spend this year to keep troops in Afghanistan or the worry that the government in Iraq lacks the will or expertise to maintain the new infrastructure that $53 billion in relief and reconstruction  money the U.S. government has poured into the country since the start of the war – hospitals, power plants and tranformers, roads. It all sounds good to me. Here in Massachusetts,  the State laying off social workers who help the poor and protect children in danger of abuse and the School Committee in my home town of Belmont (of which I’m a member) is weighing a deep budget shortfall that could result in deep cuts to services for lack of funds.

Infrastructure...good! Along the Erie Canal - 1908

It wasn’t always this way. From its first inception as a country, the states and our Federal government spent aggressively and creatively to improve the quality of life for its citizens. The Erie Canal, just one example, was one of the first major engineering projects in the country and a marvel of innovation when it opened in 1825 — 18 aqueducts  and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide. The canal turbocharged the entire economy of the region, enabling farmers and businesses to easily transfer freight to market (the original canal supported boats carrying 30 tons of freight, but the canal and locks were subsequently deepened and widened to support barges carrying up to ten times that amount.)

This is a rant, I know. And the fixes to this problem are big and complex and will take decades to realize. My home town of Boston is certainly no role model – we sank $15b into a poorly designed highway and leaky tunnel project that didn’t do a darned thing to alleviate traffic and has saddled the state with debt for a generation or more. It’s worth thinking about this Wednesday or Thursday, as you’re waiting in the airport terminal because  of a flight delay, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. We’d all like things to get better and faster (and greener). But will they? and how?

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Tags: Glory Days, travel, work