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yeah
welcome to the series that takes you to the heart of america and reveal the
inner workings of our country as you have never seen them before
I'm you'll quan I've worked in many different fields from law to government
to business
I've even one the reality show survivor but in every part of my life I've been
fascinated by the same things systems and networks we're going to go on quite
a journey coast-to-coast across this sprawling land to discover the habits
the rhythms and the secrets that you only notice when you step back and see
the big picture interchanges oddly elegant in the next hour
aerial photography and satellite tracking will reveal how America's
transportation systems make us the most mobile people on earth
we built the vast networks of roads rails and airwaves and an army of
workers keep the wheels turning
hey let's like the bus driver but it's getting harder and harder to keep all
these systems running well i think the freeways will get so slow where a lot of
people just decide it's not worth the grief many of them are aging designed at
a time when America was far less crowded you have a disruption at one place and
it ripples all the way across country it does have a ripple effect but even as he
struggled to keep up every day our systems miraculously managed to get us
where we need to go
this is a story of 310 million Americans on the move
this is America revealed
yeah
America revealed is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you
thank you
monday morning just before dawn
but this isn't the night sky
this is America this is us
each of these points of light represents 7,500 people they create brilliant
constellations that span the continent from the faint glow of small towns to
the blaze of cities like Chicago and New York to connect these dots we built four
million miles of roads 200,000 miles of rails 5,000 airports the largest
transportation network in history
but keeping it all moving that's America's challenge in the 21st century
and nowhere does that challenge loom larger than in New York City it's the
perfect example of a powerful but aging transportation network that moves
millions even while straining under their weight take the island of
Manhattan 23 square miles home to 1.6 million people every weekday morning is
population nearly doubles swelling with an army of commuters these people are
essential to the life of the city getting all of them onto this tiny
island in only a few hours is a daily adventure that teeters on the edge of
chaos and it's about to begin at 630am I'm coming in on the red-eye from LA to
JFK International Airport and I've got plenty of company reported the path of
every plane landing in New York's three major airports in a 24-hour period a
flight comes and goes every 24 seconds that's more than 3,500 flights a day
I 7am thousands of yellow cabs are picking up their first fears of the day
at the airports and heading for men hand this taxi is one in 50,000 vehicles that
will leave its way through New York's necklace of bridges and tunnels in the
next power just below these bridges more than a hundred thousand people are
traveling to and from the island by boat
these are the traces of those vessels darting around New York's rivers and
harbor including one fleet which alone Carrie 65,000 commuters a day
staten island ferry
yeah
as thousands descend on the island by here road and water even more arrive by
rail
long island railroad trains carry suburban commuters into Manhattan every
two to four minutes along with pack trains from New Jersey and amtrak trains
they all converge at America's busiest commuter hub New York's penn station
while only a few blocks away
trains from the north stream into another bustling train station grand
central terminal
but getting people on to Manhattan is just half the battle
now they have to deal with this
the streets run yellow with taxis competing with thousands of trucks and
cars and bus routes crisscross the island adding another layer to the
traffic
I'm not surprised the word gridlock originated here
it's ATM and it looks like nobody's going anywhere
but beneath the streets it's a different story
i'm talking about the subway every day this system carries over 5 million
passengers citywide without it
traffic would overwhelm Manhattan streets and the city couldn't function
but the subway has had an even bigger impact than that starting in the early
nineteen hundreds when the first track was laid to build a transportation
system in America whole cities and towns will spring up around it the subway
system is a prime example it determined how New York City took shape and dictate
the patterns of its inhabitants lives look beneath this forest of midtown
Manhattan skyscrapers multiple subway lines converge here funneling in
hard-working commuters from the city's outer boroughs like Queens
this is a snapshot of what Queens look like in 1917 when subway construction
was just getting started and here is what it looks like today a busy vibrant
borough the subway made Queens possible
but how
100 years ago to combat overcrowding and lower Manhattan tenements New York
expanded its fledgling subway system to the sparsely populated outer boroughs
critics call them the tracks to nowhere but New Yorkers soon got onboard lured
by the promise of open land just a short ride from their jobs
by the nineteen-twenties these lines were carrying more passengers than they
could handle the city plan to add over 100 miles of new track but first the
Depression hit then World War two
yeah
today we're stuck with the same basic wheels that were out of date in the
nineteen thirties and the number of passengers keeps going up with every
passing decade it's a pattern will see all over the country enormous but aging
system was working hard harder to keep up with the growth to help create it's
ten a.m. in the morning commute is winding down the city has survived
another rush hour and millions have made it to their destinations New York's
public transit system may be old and crowded but without it this teeming
metropolis would come to a screeching halt the same is true across the country
are public transportation systems are what keep the nation moving there's one
system that carries a whopping 26 million Americans every day more than
any other form of public transport
there it is
there it is again the humble school bus
what's up guys good morning and come to kingman arizona to meet a guy who keeps
one of these yellow Marvel's moving here
rush hour is just beginning for many students in this desert community buses
are the only way to get to school around the country kids rely on a half-million
member army of transportation experts the nations school bus drivers here
let's make the bus driver when these kids are on the bus
they're my kids and I'll mess and I don't take that lightly
you have to be the mother the father the mediator the nurse the cool uncle
like how many miles you drive every day on average all do about a hundred
sixty-five miles a day and that's a few that's just me
this is mike's bus it's just one of kingdoms 53 buses replanted gps devices
on them and found that they drive one-and-a-half million miles every year
to every corner of the school district an area the size of Delaware that's
repeated nationwide in thousands of school districts large and small tho
system quite like this anywhere in the world here in the US
if you can't get there on foot you can get a ride to your local school even if
it's not that local so you guys are really kind of like the lifeblood of the
system right i mean without you these kids wouldn't even be able to get an
education
no they wouldn't be able to get the school now we keep pumping the kids in
so they can get educated
our school buses worked amazingly well which is good considering how much we
rely on them but there are other transportation networks out there that
face big challenges including the system that first connected the country from
coast to coast and made modern America possible
the railroads
to create a nation wide web of tracks the federal government launched one of
the most ambitious and expensive infrastructure projects in human history
and for nearly a hundred year's America's railways were the fastest and
most popular way to travel but not anymore to get a glimpse of what keeps
our trains going and what slows them down
I've come to the rail hub of the United States Chicago
more trains pass through this city than any other because in the eighteen
hundreds Chicago's politicians lobby to make sure all national rail lines and
here
that created jobs but also logistical nightmares
today there are three different systems here with different needs all fighting
for space on one set of tracks commuter trains making local pickups amtrak
trains traveling longer distances with fewer stops but those two passenger
networks are dominated by the biggest slowest network of all
yeah
free
our economy depends on goods carried by rail from coast to coast
we have the world's most efficient and profitable trade system moving nearly
ten times as much as $MONEY euro
it's so successful that free companies owned most of America's tracks and many
of our freight trains pass through one small section of Chicago's freight yards
27 miles of track behind me will move about 1.75 million free cars each year
but this phenomenal success has come at a price
the system isn't nearly as good at moving something else people so what is
it about the freight system that gets in our way
this is Jack strength is using a remote control to push that train of a man-made
he'll be call the double hump shipping companies built this hill so that men
like Jack can process all the free coming through this yard and reassemble
cars according to destination the network we depend on to ship our goods
depends on Jack his remote control and a surprisingly simple process known as
pumping pumping is exactly a slang word for classifying the cars sorting kind of
like a postal facility but instead of sorting mail your starting these kinds
of time freight cars exactly after Jack pushes the cars up the hill area called
she separates them by hand a century old technique called pin pulling this bar up
her give me a signal so they want to make the cut
and then jackets gravity drag each car down the other side of the hump to its
outbound track
these cars carry chemicals bound for Virginia lumber on the way to michigan
sugar for a cookie factory in st. Louis and they all have to wait their turn in
line at the double hump everything that moves through America loose through
these yards exactly a lot of times you can tell how the economy is running out
here just by what's coming into the yard itself
all across the country people and free have to share the same tracks seeing
these mile long slow moving freight trains heading out of Chicago to the
long-distance rail network i can understand why passenger travel suffers
2010 the federal government pledged $MONEY billion dollars towards a
potential solution the construction of new and upgraded tracks for speedier
passenger rail system but that's only fifteen percent of the plans 53 billion
dollar price tag
even if all that funding comes through most long-distance travelers will
probably still choose a different way to get from here to there one that's newer
and much faster
17
this is the scene at houston's george bush intercontinental airport air travel
more than any other mode of modern transportation has bridged our continent
and sped up our lives and every year more and more of us are taking to the
skies
this is flight data for the 50,000 planes i will carry almost 2 million
passengers today
it shows how r airways connect every corner of the country from sleepy rural
area strips to major hubs like chicago's o'hare international airport where on
this day a plane is taking off or landing every 34 seconds that's nearly a
million flights each year
the fast system has created a completely new way of life people flowing through
these airports are just occasional passengers there are new breed of road
warrior who often fly thousands of miles every week one of those very frequent
flyers is international insurance salesman deanery i'm doing final no I
never checked bags
morning how are you thank you
a typical trip in miami tampa tampa Houston Houston vegas vegas to houston
houston the Dallas of dallas to tokyo tokyo to hong kong macau as possible
account shanghai shanghai at tokyo tokyo to LA to dallas dallas the Tampa that
was 11 days
Dean spend a lot of time in the air so we can maintain face-to-face contact
with his clients around the world
what are some of the inside secrets of the trade that people like you know that
other people don't
oh gosh I mean there's so many of them it's on every subject you know how you
pack is a key one you know how you go through the security line it's all about
logistics for the most part all the tricks and what do you do when something
goes wrong you want to you anticipate it started to snow i've looked at
weather.com or whatever so you start making backup reservations sometimes
I'll have two or three reservations at a time have to be offensive vs defensive
that's the secret of a real Road Warrior
it's not just road warriors like Dean zigzagging through our skies air travel
is so common today that our Airways are filled with all kinds of travelers some
of them more unusual than others
here are three regular passenger flights one passenger on each flight is
traveling in cargo brought aboard in a special box called an air trade baggage
compartments of commercial airlines are the most common way to ship dead bodies
long distances everyday 50 are shipped from one state alone
florida it's a retirement Mecca but when those golden years come to an end many
deceased retirees are flown home for burial these passengers on the other
hand are very much alive but they're under armed guard and they wear
handcuffs as well as seatbelts
they're traveling courtesy of the Justice Department which runs its own
airline flying prisoners too distant court hearings or Penitentiary's and
reporting some illegal aliens out of the country with so many people flying for
one reason or another our skies are the busiest in the world but they weren't
always so crowded
i'm heading to mcdonald past Montana to visit a relic of our earliest days of
flight
transportation wise this place is definitely off the grid
not fun feel like I'm standing on top of the world pretty much are we on top
continental divide the call montana big sky country and it does look pretty
empty up here but this 90-foot tower holds a clue to how we learn to navigate
are crowded skies microorganism with the Montana Department of Transportation
aeronautics division so I wouldn't be things that basically do the give you a
visual reference when you're flying at night so these literally are kind of
like lighthouses in the sky
yes the story of this air beacon dates back to the birth of commercial air
travel in the nineteen-twenties aviation companies were eager to fly
cross-country but they had no way to navigate the night portion of the 30
hour trip
so they invented one paying farmers to light bonfires in their fields creating
a path of flames to guide pilots through the night
soon replaced the bonfires with a network of 1500 gasps beacons coming in
nicely 25 me way Ben
by the 1960s modern radar was replacing the gas beacons except in Montana where
the peaks of the Rockies block radar signals leaving pilots to rely on the
old beacons so they wouldn't crash into the mountains to this day my continues
to tend the beacons and make sure they're in good working order the heck
of a client
it's a long one isn't so this is what the pilots actually see this lamp is
focused in the middle of this 24 inch mirror and as it's turning around you
get sharp flashes you're you're approaching the beacon when you see the
beacon it looks like it's flashing that's because it's turning around you
only get them for a second
even though every other state has long since abandoned the beacons we still
live with their legacy many of the first radar towers were built along this
network of gas beacons which means that if you take a commercial flight today
and fly along one of the early skyways your path will look like a zigzag that
traces the lines that sprang up from bonfire to bonfire and then become a
beacon from bonfire to beacon to radar we've made progress
but as our skies got busier we needed a way to handle the traffic
enter the federal aviation administration faa which maintains our
complex flight management system today
here's how it works
each airport control tower guides each plane to take off then a regional
control center keeps tabs on it until it reaches 10,000 feet where the flight
enters one of the 21 enroute centers across the country and watching over the
entire system are the people in this state-of-the-art bunker in Northern
Virginia people like flight manager Debra Griffith air traffic control
system commands and places of minutes
ya feel like a minute movie wargames or something
now what are all those lights up on that screen those are flights those would be
active lights in the system right now how many planes we look at during the
peak portion of the day were five to six thousand flights active it's Tuesday
afternoon just an ordinary day for Deborah was sort of a traffic cop of the
skies
morning everybody this is the perfect with you for the 1215 planning telecon
we're going to start with New York having the gusty winds morning York
morning thank you we are on a 33 love every two hours
Deborah Leeds what could be the biggest conference call in the world thousands
of passengers lives are on the line about west to Southern California track
on you consider any more information right now just don't get it with the rbr
the world feeling this every major airline airport shipping company the
Secret Service NASA and the military listening for updates to the national
flight plan to terminal history of our ceilings in this
ok that will conclude this cell phone will be back with you at fourteen
fifteen command centers out thank you as soon as she hangs up Deborah begins
juggling this networks limited air space to keep traffic flowing down San
Francisco Board can actually put ceilings in there for hours this morning
alright she reroutes planes around san francisco's fog and ground others so
they won't get caught in a bottleneck caused by strong winds over New York
right now going down to the next four hours see how their rules
so it's kinda like a butterfly effect where you have a destruction in one
place in it ripples all the way across country
it does have a ripple effect it does because New York is slow down its gonna
historically slow down the other markets around it because those those airplanes
go in and out of New York and go to Fort Worth and to houston and remember
sentence kogda Cleveland all these flights depend on Deborah's ability to
manage America's airspace
she's good at it and the system works well most of the time but the problem
with this system is that it's based on radar aging technology that requires air
traffic controllers to leave large safety margins between each plane which
means fewer planes can take to the sky with our Airways nearing maximum
capacity
the FAA needs a game changer
if the air becomes a montana recall Aviation's past you can get a taste of
our future by heading to an even more isolated part of the country this is
rush are in Juneau Alaska only ten percent of this state is accessible by
Road show up here every day commuting depends on pilots like Sam right
wow this totally beats my own computer
welcome to my office
it may be beautiful but over the past 20 years
one-third of all commuter plane crashes in the United States happened in Alaska
and sand flies these treacherous skies everyday and what exactly is your job my
job is to pick people and great male UPS FedEx from juno which is the Jetport to
all the smaller communities around Southeast Alaska what are some of the
more common and uncommon things that you transported well very very very very
pregnant women taking the hospital for delivery i'm taking a piss you off
because everyone that's a serious thing to me
knock on wood I've made it every time wolves we carry pools and carry affairs
carried a really pissed-off Wolverine is winter the Wolverine was going to finish
soda or someplace to be bred and he didn't know that so he was spot-on
so you really are sort of like the connective tissue that allows these
outlying communities to interact on a daily basis with rest of the world
that's true we look at ourselves more like a little air road system how hard
is it to fly around here is it is a challenging
well today's like a gorgeous day right you can see 480 miles hundred miles
after some days we can only see two miles in Alaska as a montana rows of
mountains block radar signals and the snow and fog can quickly roll in from
the ocean forcing pilots to fly blind among the glaciers
so pilots like Sam are using a new satellite-based gps system which unlike
radar can reach every corner of their airspace so basically this shows you
everything that's in your immediate vicinity right absolutely
if you make a turn toward something higher than you that will turn red
it will say hey this is red this is not a good idea in Alaska the accident rate
for planes that have been equipped with GPS has dropped by almost fifty percent
and this system that keeps Salmons passengers safe is beginning to have a
much wider impact gps is a backbone of a new FAA plan called next-gen designed to
completely overhaul air traffic control air alaska was one of the first airlines
to test this new technology their pilots like Mike Adams welcome to one of the
most advantageous features about the next-gen program ability now to navigate
or directly these blue symbols represent ground-based navigation aids that prior
times we would have been flying a zigzag line between those as we go from station
to station now with GPS navigation we can fly directly from way . away . as
you see here and that allows us to shorten our route distance create a more
direct flight and that in turn freeze-up air space for other craft occupy hence
increasing capacity the estimated cost for next-gen as high as much as a
hundred and sixty billion dollars but it will allow the FAA dy 1.3 billion
passengers a year by 2031 twice as many as I can handle today
so far I've been traveling mostly on planes and trains all packed full of
people the most Americans prefer their personal space so getting from A to B
usually means one thing
cars that's definitely true in dallas here like most of the country Americans
take driving for granted
return the key and go while driving feel of like individual choice it's only
possible because of our system of highways which is one of the busiest and
most sophisticated pieces of infrastructure in the world and we have
grown so dependent on the freedom and mobility of the open road collectively
driving three trillion miles every year at today the health of our country
depends on the health of our highways
so specialists like traffic analyst Greg Jordan work behind the scenes to help
improve the flow of traffic
like that beauty
interchanges oddly elegant know it's kind of like some sort of geometric
shapes an aerial perspective will give you an insight that is sometimes very
hard to get on the ground
he's right from the sky
I can see where cars are bottlenecking and where they're moving along at a nice
clip local transportation planners from New York to California value Greg's
expertise
he provides data so they can see for themselves where they need to invest in
roads where they need to build new ones or widen them or increase Highway Patrol
and are you actually getting that data
well it's it's mainly time-lapse photography looking at the snapshots
greg has taken over time which strikes me is not just the roads themselves but
the number of housing developments hugging the highways this is a new
development if this is in Louisville it's right near the newly completed
state highway 121 so these communities are only possible because of that
freeway the freeway is the lifeblood people like to say if you build it they
will come and into a degree that's true of coming out with you build it that
encourages people
this is what more and more of our country looks like today a tapestry of
suburban neighborhoods woven together by quiet streets and bordered by dizzy
highways when the federal government started building these interstate
highways more than 50 years ago they were intended to strengthen connections
between far-flung cities but they ended up totally reshaping local communities
this is what the sleepy town of arlington texas look like in 1950 and
this is what happens when interstate 30 connected to nearby dallas and fort work
highway stretching north from Dallas Lord people out to the cheap land and
open space of Arlington and other suburbs like this one colleague
and these suburbs gave birth to a whole new meaning of life
this is a suburban dream the cul-de-sac big houses surrounded by green logs on a
street with no through traffic but living here comes at a cost to
understand that cost we used GPS to track the cars of everyone living on
this tiny cul-de-sac for a week
each color represents one of the five families that pink car is phil thompson
heading to work their Savior ue driving her son's to school her husband Kip in
the red car is on his way to the airport for a business trip
our car culture is so common now that we forget how different it is from the
rhythms of urban american life just a half-century ago modern suburbs promote
a landscape where most things are accessible only by car so the suburban
residents spend much of their time behind the wheel
they drive to get coffee thank you to do their banking buy groceries in fact the
dr fifty percent more than their parents did I probably put on maybe a hundred
miles a day easily 25,000 30,000 miles a year but basically the assumption is
that if you're gonna live in this neighborhood
you have to have a car that's exactly right the way they design colleyville
and in our community is this it's off the beaten path you have to drive 10 or
15 minutes before you get to a major road and all this driving means our
families walk a whole lot less walking is definitely more recreational I walk
the dogs in the neighborhood to the mailbox and back now the other walking i
do is going to be from parking garages to appointments when I go to customer
meetings between the rental car agency and and the gates of the airport's most
of us don't mind all this driving but there's a problem as suburban life
evolves and our daily destinations change our road system can't adapt fast
enough
look at our five families they rarely venture into the city of dallas all week
our highways were designed to get people from the suburbs two jobs and stores in
the central business districts but nowadays most people live work and shop
in the suburbs and the smaller secondary roads are jammed on top of that since we
built our highway system the population has doubled and the number of cars on
the road has more than tripled that means more people stuck in traffic on
roads that weren't designed to get them where they want to go at the end of the
week after collectively navigating over 600 miles of suburban thoroughfares our
family's return to the cul-de-sac there are the Johnsons last ones in
yeah
meanwhile few miles away road construction crews are just beginning
the workday the dallas-fort Worth area planners are trying to reduce congestion
by building the way out in the problem
this place is home to more road construction than anywhere else in the
country but it won't be long before this freeway attracts more people creating
more traffic and driving demand for even more roads it's kind of an infinite
construction loop
some places are taking a different approach
i'm heading to one of the nation's fastest-growing cities and one of his
most popular destinations Las Vegas each year the city of 2 million has to move a
rotating cast of 36 million visitors through its streets
today the national finals rodeo is coming to town
which means extra traffic pushing already crowded streets to their limit
instead of building new roads as they do in dallas Nevada's transportation
specialists are using technology to make the most of the ones they have we're
taking into a place that we call the fishbowl jacobs know is one of Nevada's
transportation experts
wow this is impressive you know it really looks like we got some real
rocket science going on her and we actually do it's a very complex system
of hardware and software that we can monitor everything that's going on in
the major intersections in the major traffic points in the las vegas valley
and are these active 24 hours a day to 24-hour town gotta monitor traffic 24
hours a day for all this rocket science
the most powerful tool is a device we often take for granted the old reliable
traffic light or doing something that most other places in this country
haven't tried that's adaptive traffic signal control if we get a lot of
traffic on one particular direction or in one particular quarter we need to
make changes on the fly so we can distribute the traffic more efficiently
that's really a big brother-type approach
hundreds of cameras feed real-time traffic data to the fishbowl where staff
can adjust 1250 traffic signals to keep the roads moving so you're not adding
capacity by building new roads
you're just making the existing system smarter that's correct
we can get about twenty percent additional capacity by implementing
systems like this and for one one-hundredth of the cost of a freeway
or a roadway expansion and it's not only cameras monitoring the action as a
Saturday night rush art begins i'm heading out to the field with one of
Nevada's road managers chuckles island to see how he solves problems on the
frontline we do have some traffic backed up over there
tens of thousands of rodeo fans are on their way to the stadium it
to get all those cowboys and cowgirls to the stadium Chuck needs to make sure
that each one of the city's busy intersections gets just the right amount
of what she calls green time I am a little concerned about Spencer why
that's a pretty long line of traffic
so we're gonna do about that and what we're seeing is a lot of empty road way
out here huh
we're going to steal a little bring time
try and get over here that's really interesting way to think about it I I
never thought of traffic that way but you're actually thinking of green time
as like a scarce resource a finite resource and you're trying to allocate
it in the most efficient way possible
that's exactly what heaven
what we need is at Paradise Chuck calls a fishbowl to order up a new light
pattern mount one paradise
let's try and hold that one green as long as we can get it i'll be
downloading in just a second just no way you can get everybody green it's not
going to have so the best we can do is if you do have to stop here i want to
get you as many lights down the street as I can before I have to stop you again
light by light intersection by intersection Chuck stays one step ahead
of grid log and get everyone to the rodeo
ladies and gentlemen are ready around in this area lights cowboy
out what up a little with him come on
the party's over and i'm leaving Las Vegas and who do I see at the airport
but that veteran road warrior deanery you all doing here passing through what
are you doing here
I'm flying back home i'm going to use that I got a flight in about half an
hour higher good about Dean like most of us
depends on a transportation system that's being pushed to its limits and
those limits are put to the test every day on the streets of my last stop
Los Angeles when it comes to our transportation triumphs and failures
it's the ultimate example la has more cars than any other county in America 12
million of them
it's a vast fleet that can move us to every corner of the county also 12
million reasons why you might not get there in time
unlike Las Vegas la doesn't have road smart enough to move all this traffic
and unlike Dallas there's no room here to build new freeways
it's one more system limited by plans made in another era a hundred years ago
most people in Los Angeles traveled by streetcar and they had the largest urban
rail network in the world then in the nineteen forties the city abandoned
streetcars and began an unprecedented freeway building frenzy this set of
aerial surveys shows how freeways were designed to cut through neighborhoods
that prompted activist to fight back and block construction of new roads as a
result la was left with the worst of both worlds devastated neighborhoods and
an incomplete freeway system this original freeway plan promised an
additional fifteen hundred miles of road and here's what was actually built just
918 extra miles and the city has had to deal with that shortfall
every driver in la experiences 64 hours of delays on average every year nearly
three entire days spent stuck in traffic
d miles per hour which is certain
we're looking at down below as the i-5 freeway where their inching along it
probably three miles per hour right listen let me just take a break here
I've got a report coming up from the station but once again we want to tell
you about that singular it up on the to Commander Tucker street is a city's last
radio traffic reporter who still pilots a helicopter to hunt down bottlenecks
and so far the east by 210 freeway was backed up to the 118 you know I've been
up here doing a traffic watch over Los Angeles for 27 years have you seen a lot
of changes in traffic of course the traffic is worse a lot more volume rush
hour starts earlier last longer
it starts out at some of the freeways coming in from the east at 5am Wow
and it probably goes until about 8pm so calling you at rush hour is sort of a
misnomer more like rest day yeah even the word Russian i think is appropriate
for some reason here in Southern California computers are really
independent souls and they they really like having that freedom but also I
think that an automobile is kind of a statement about them and who they are do
they think they are you can find their identity really what do you think's
going to happen over time
well I think the freeways will get so slow where a lot of people just decide
it's not worth the grief and the stress so hopefully they will start a bracing
mass transit
a revival of its mass transit system might be Elias best hope to keep the
city moving so the city is now investing in a dozen projects like this one
you're looking at an old streetcar route that was paved over years ago and now
it's being reclaimed for a new light rail line
infrastructures cycle of life but these projects are big and expensive and it's
hard to imagine the people of Los Angeles giving up their deep-rooted car
culture la's and the tangle of roads and freeways another system at the breaking
point
like many other transportation networks there are plenty of ideas on how to fix
this but the question is will we at every stage of our history we have
answered the challenge of how to connect the country and move a nation today
we're at another crossroads technology offers new solutions but to improve our
system will need to invest a lot of money and change old habits this week as
a nation will drive 60 billion miles
traffic will make three million of us late for work 22,000 free cars will pass
through the double hump on the way to every corner of the country so the only
averaged 10 miles per hour
deanery will earn another 5,000 frequent flyer miles and you'll have a lot of
company in the air one quarter of all the flights in the world will take off
or land in the United States and in the process airlines will lose 45 thousand
pieces of luggage
the largest transportation network on earth has its weak spots and it's
definitely showing its age but we've managed to keep it up and running and
for the most part it still gets us where we want to go
as for me my journey across the country is about to end right where it started
i'm heading back to New York on the red I'm
just one more American on the move
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