“Safe travels” is a waste of words. That’s a variation of what Matthew Rees wrote in 2023 for RealClearMarkets. Nothing could be safer than air travel, so why the dated, backward-looking quip about flying safely? Why indeed.
Except that a cessation of a line politely delivered arguably speaks to risks in transportation that await. So confident have we become about transport that we’re not thinking enough about what could imperil it, but also what could improve it. And it’s not just air travel that rates more thought.
That’s why the bipartisan letter from eight previous Department of Transportation secretaries to Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell is encouraging. As the Senate takes up surface transportation reauthorization, the former secretaries are urging Cruz and Cantwell to maintain “America’s longstanding tradition of improving transportation safety through innovation, evidence, and sound public policy.” Yes, precisely.
Consider the transportation of market goods. It’s useful to think about alongside the happy truth that Americans are producing more than ever. Better yet, production will logically skyrocket amid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that will figuratively add trillions of skilled, mechanized hands to production. Despite this, the Surface Transportation Bill (STB) is largely focused on easing the path to bigger, heavier trucks necessary to move growing amounts of production around the U.S.
To all this, some will reasonably comment that with trucking the source of over three quarters of the shipment of market goods around the U.S., it’s necessary to make the legislative and regulatory focus all about enhancing to ability of the trucking industry to do more. Implied in this thinking is that we’ve always done things this way, so why change?
Except that stasis in commerce is invariably the path to obsolescence, or worse. Remember, these are large automobiles moving voluminous market goods. Translated, the traffic death count related to this movement is not insignificant.
Worse, the reauthorization takes place in concert with a Railway Safety Act that hamstrings rail and the efforts of the industry to shoulder some of the undeniable growth of product shipment. In other words, while legislators and regulators are pursuing the laudatory introduction of driverless trucks, they’re demanding two human crew members to operate freight trains even though the death count from rail transport is nearly non-existent, and even though the fixed nature of rail means increased shipment by rail wouldn’t add to the burden facing U.S. roads and highways.
Furthermore, transportation is not just about the shipment of goods. Implied in growing amounts of production is that Americans will not just be acquiring more goods, they’ll also be flying and driving a great deal more. The economic growth implications of AI ensure quite a lot of both.
Crucial here is that AI reached the U.S. (and the world) in late November of 2022 by surprise, only for its arrival to force not just a reevaluation across industries of how they were doing things, but also a gradual transformation of operations and hiring that continues to this day. The previous truth is what requires acknowledgement from Washington.
It’s not enough for Cruz, Cantwell, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and regulators more broadly to internalize the meaninglessness of “safe travels” as an excuse to maintain the status quo. Instead, they should acknowledge that what’s taken American commerce by surprise has the potential to not just rewrite how humans and market goods get around, but also how safely they do it.
In short, the fact that “safe travels” is presently excess is a triumph. Let’s build on the triumph by opening transport up to new ideas that will make what’s great, spectacular.