2 November 2001
Source:
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?gao-02-139
(140 pp., 2.6MB)
GAO Staff Study
October 2001
[Excerpt]
Appendix II [of 20]
Joseph Coates is president of Coates and Jarret, a futurist research firm. Since 1979, the firm has consulted with 45 Fortune 500 companies, numerous smaller companies, trade and professional organizations, and all levels of governments. He is the former head of exploratory research at the Office of Technology Assessment and program manager of the National Science Foundation’s Research Applied to National Needs program. Mr. Coates has authored over 300 articles, papers, and chapters and is co-author of 2025: Scenarios of U.S. Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology. He holds degrees from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Pennsylvania and an honorary doctorate from Claremont Graduate School.
Looking to the Future Requires Challenging Assumptions
Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here. I’ve always admired the work of GAO. Some people think it has a heavy hand, but weight is necessary if you are to see whether the law and expectations are being met. I’m going to talk about some of the things shaping the future of the infrastructure. But before doing that, let me answer a question that should be on your minds. Why bother? Bright, intelligent, well-informed people could very well feel that they’re smart enough to be ready to engage the future as it unfolds. The problem with that reasoning is that it doesn’t work. There is an infinite history of failure of that strategy.
The point of looking into the future is not to tell you what will happen or what may, might, or could happen. That’s at best an instrumentality. The primary purpose in looking to the future is to help you to understand what your assumptions are about the future. Remember, the higher you go in the organizational pyramid, the more socially and culturally isolated you are, and the less likely it is that anyone will seriously challenge you. You’re going to persevere in the mind-set that brought you successfully to the top.
In other words, you are going to be continually looking backward and attempting to reproduce your historic experience. The purpose of looking into the future is to help jar you into becoming acutely aware of your assumptions. I’m seeking disagreement, not agreement. I’m hoping to evoke from you, “That couldn’t be. No way. What a nutty idea,” because if you think twice about that, you’ll realize that you can’t attack a concept about the future without revealing some of your own assumptions. It’s those assumptions that are worth thinking about.
Demographic Trends Will Affect the Nation’s Future Infrastructure Needs
Let me pick a few themes here. You will recognize that current and historic practices have led to rigidity; to narrow interests influencing infrastructure; to indifference to future outcomes; and to a generally chaotic, limited, and partial planning for the future of infrastructure. That’s GAO’s problem to overcome if it is going to be more successful than it’s been in the past in influencing the future. Let me suggest some of the things affecting the future of transportation and information. The first thing to consider is that population growth is clearly in our future. We’re the only rapidly growing advanced nation. That’s fundamentally good news for the economy. It means more clients, more prosperity. It also means more voters. At the same time, it means new distributions of population and new interest groups. All these changes have to be integrated into transportation and information technology infrastructure planning because infrastructure has a minimum lifetime of 50 or 60 years. If you’re only looking out with a decade’s perspective, you’re going to miss the boat. That’s the only form of transportation I’ll mention.
The second thing to consider is that information technology is now highly active in business-to-consumer and business-to-business trading, bargaining, buying, and selling. The consequence of that has to be a large increase in the movement of goods in relatively small packages around the country—in other words, an explosion in logistics. Those logistics are largely going to move through the transportation networks.
The third thing to consider is the growth of tourism and travel. This will rise if we make a reasonable assumption of 1-1/2- or 2-percent annual growth in the Gross Domestic Product. You may be more optimistic about that. I don’t want to be extreme. If this growth occurs, over decades, more people will have more discretionary money. More discretionary money all around the world means the same thing. It means more mechanized, motorized transportation—particularly outside of the United States, as we already have a lot of it. Second, it means more meat in the diet. Third, it means more travel. Global and domestic prosperity imply these three increases.
We have a consistent history of federal and local government neglect of infrastructure. Why do American highways fall apart in 5 years, yet the ones in Germany last forever? It’s a simple matter of the failure to do two things that are right down GAO’s alley. One is to enforce the conditions for the construction of highways, and the second, which is not part of the federal package but can be mandated, is to be sure that local ordinances are enforced. You could, before they patched it up a few years ago, go down the Washington-Baltimore Parkway and feel exactly where the trucks’ turnoffs were, because at those points the road ceased to be a shambles and you had fairly smooth travel. That situation shows absolute administrative and technological incompetence. That’s the story of transportation infrastructure across the United States.
Deregulation is another source of problems. I can’t think of a single example of deregulation leading to an overall net public gain. Try to fly somewhere and the airlines will say, “Technical problem. Had to cancel the flight.” They are only canceling because they have an under-filled aircraft. What are they doing? They lie to you. They cheat. They mislead you. And what is GAO doing about it? Nothing. There is no significant independent government analysis of the abuse of consumers by the airlines.
I’m thinking of writing an article entitled “Hallelujah! Let’s Welcome Back Regulation.” Look at what deregulation has done to whatever your favorite sector is. Look at our local telephone company, Verizon. It’s probably the most disgraceful telecommunications organization in the United States. Where is government looking at the lousy service that is routine in telecommunications? Telephone companies used to have information services. They used to have telephone books. In the last 2 weeks, I’ve called for information at Verizon three times. Twice, they didn’t have the number, and they’d never heard of what I was looking for. Decay, rot, and bad service are coming out of deregulation, and we the people and our representatives in the Congress need to know why. The Congress can’t correct the problem unless it knows it exists and why. The primary reason those things happen is that there’s a failure to treat law and regulation as social technologies. We know how to deal with physical technology in terms of anticipating future consequences, but the Congress has been extremely reluctant to acknowledge that legislation is social technology, and its side effects and consequences can be simulated, worked out, and anticipated. A couple of exercises along this line by GAO could be a great eye-opener for the Congress.
Priorities are set by interest groups in the United States, and, consequently, present practices are not linked to what could be. Present practices are limited by what those special interest groups want or will tolerate. It doesn’t make any difference whether they are liberal or conservative. It doesn’t make any difference whether they are concerned with the environment or higher sales of energy. The narrow interest groups dominate what goes on on Capitol Hill. GAO has the opportunity to be an alternative, leveling, even-handed voice, the voice that gives pros and cons on the concepts in the legislative mill.
Changing Land-use Patterns Affect Transportation Needs
Land-use patterns are promoting the polycentric city. Twenty-five years ago, you could map Calcutta onto Chicago or Chicago onto Calcutta. That’s how universal the internal logic of city structure was. Not today. Today, what you have is exemplified by what’s going on here in Washington, with four or five centers of business, even such things as Tyson’s Corner, which I believe was a car dealership that grew into a business center. You have Rosslyn. You have Columbia. You have Alexandria and Arlington. You have places growing up that have all of the functions of the central business district, except the cultural and governmental functions.
Effectively, that means that all of the traditional infrastructure, which was built in and out of the central business district, now has to be restructured into a more spaghetti-like pattern. Another factor to consider, which doesn’t seem to enter into planning as much as it should, are the trade-offs between airplanes and car or rail. Some recent research shows that people prefer to drive up to about 325 miles. What does that mean for strategies for light rail, new forms of transportation, short-hop aircraft, and so on? One needs to understand why people have their preferences and how to deal with them. In general, one needs to expand the context for thinking about infrastructure.
I learned just the other day that there’s a plan under way to build a new airport for Philadelphia. The land is available. It just happens to be 40 miles away from anyplace anyone wants to be. Is there not some alternative to that kind of madness? Look what’s happened in Denver. The Denver airport is an absolutely beautiful-horrible place to go. Nobody and nothing is out there, and, yet, somebody figured it would be a good thing to move an airport that was 15 minutes from downtown Denver to someplace that happens to be a fair fraction of a day’s work in travel. When is systemic thinking going to occur in the design and building of the infrastructure? Promoting systems thinking should be GAO’s mission.
GAO Should Examine Broad Infrastructure Issues
GAO needs to look back at maybe five previous examples of infrastructure that had overruns and examine in detail why those overruns existed—not in terms of what the Congress voted on, but in terms of what the Congress knew before it voted or what it could have known before it voted. Then GAO needs to transfer that lesson back into future consequence analysis and feedback. I’m not suggesting this is an easy thing to do, but unless we do it, every bit of the infrastructure in the United States will have shocking overruns during the next decade or two. We’re talking about overruns that will have 12 or 13 digits, that may run to a trillion dollars. This situation provides a fantastic opportunity for GAO to do good.
Public policy in the Congress is focusing on the short run, the local, and the pork barrel. Pork barrel has to become a clear, positive, overt element in GAO’s evaluation and planning. Denial doesn’t do good for anyone. You folks have to learn how to cope in a positive way with pork barrel. It doesn’t have to be everybody’s pork, every time. It only has to be fairly distributed and for the common good.
Let me make one last point. The most critical thing that information technology is doing is making it practical, and now mandatory, to deal with the total system that one is concerned with. One can no longer say, oh, yes, we know all about the system and then ignore most of the factors influencing it. Information technology makes it practical and necessary to consider all of the components of whatever infrastructure system you’re concerned with. I hope that GAO will lead the way by both precept and practice in doing that as it explores for itself and others the infrastructure’s purpose.
Thank you.