Engineering and Human Welfare Author:Simon Ramo Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Transportation Systems of the 21st Century: Breaking Gridlock ALAN S. BOYD The National Academy of Engineering may seem an unlikely venue from which to ex... more »plore transportation congestion. It is and it is not It may appear a strange forum in the sense that the basic solutions are social and political with economic consequences. But in fact, the National Academy of Engineering provides a proper forum in that engineering solutions for the types of congestion we know today are at hand or can be developed within the existing state of the art. CURRENT PROBLEM AREAS Traffic congestion is not new. Ancient Rome had ordinances to deal with the problem. In 1900 there were complaints about the average speed on the streets of New York City—just about eight miles an hour—only slightly better than the average speed of crosstown travel in New York today! No doubt countless other examples could be recounted, but the fact is that we and our ancestors have been coming to terms with congestion for a long, long time. If we consider what has been done to solve the problem or to manage it, the short answer is that we have merely shifted congestion to other areas and transportation systems, notably to suburbs and airports, and the air traffic control system! Automobile Congestion Efforts have been made to restrict certain types of traffic on city streets, e.g., to prohibit deliveries and pickups of merchandise during certain hours. This has not proved feasible. The opposite approach has been to restrict curb areas for sole use by trucks and delivery vans during business hours. Restrictions against parking cars on arterial streets during business hours has increased through-put capacity. Synchronized traffic lights have improved traffic movement In some cities, major streets now incl...« less