The roads must roll

Sunday, July 20, 2003 - by Peter Golden

In the long ago precincts of my youth there is a memory of a story, at once mundane yet inspiring. Time has dimmed the author's name, but the title is still as bright and accessible in my mind as the image of a warrior's shield on the wall: "The Roads Must Roll," it was called.

Along with a score of other fables it inhabited a science fiction compendium that was my constant companion in the days when cars had fins and a Coke cost a dime.

As stories go it was no big deal. As best I can recall some guys in the far future have a tough job: to see to it that a sector in an automated transportation system, a series of massive people-movers running in parallel, with each one slightly faster than the other, stays up and running.

At the time, this was in the early 1950s; the idea of making the road itself move rather than having cars move on the road made so much sense—it was a kind of quantum leap of logic—that I can remember the thrill of recognition even now.

In those days my Dad drove a teal blue Hudson Hornet with a turned-up rear end. Much has changed in the half century that has passed since then, but not the basic configuration of the car and roadway: Plunk an internal combustion engine in the middle of a steel chassis, bolt on four wheels and a "streamlined" body, add seats, place all of same on a strip of macadam and drive, baby, drive!

But to what end? In the pre-Mass Pike, Central Artery, Route 128 and Interstate Highway System of the early 1950s, traffic moved slowly around Greater Boston. Given the passage of 50 years, the addition of more powerful engines, safety devices and the aforementioned highways—and traffic still moves slowly around Greater Boston.

In the interim, the punch card sorter, mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer and worldwide distributed computing environment (the Internet) have succeeded each other with ever-increasing speed and we can process information at 2 billion bits per second, then flip a data file from Boston to Bombay in the blink of an eye.

But the roads roll no faster than in the past, especially at Oak Street and Wellesley Hills on Rte. 9, where it appears the last significant traffic modifications occurred under the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

Perhaps I am being unfair to the automotive and civil engineering professions and the state highway department. After all, with the opening of the Harbor Tunnel I can now travel from MetroWest to Logan Airport in well under 30 minutes. It's like someone slipped a hook under MetroWest and dragged it 10 miles east toward Boston.

Yet progress goes a-glimmering with the wink of the green eye signaling my SmartPass has been accepted. When I swing onto the Mass Pike at rush hour only to discover I have joined a benighted procession of commuters who will take half an hour to negotiate a stretch of road that at more accommodating hours can be traversed in 10 minutes, I curse progress.

And when I find myself, all promises to avoid it surrendered to compulsion, entering into the bloody maw of the Allston-Brighton Turnpike tolls, I sit in awe. Surely the lunatics who conceived this atrocity are also those who gave us the pedestrian crosswalk near the mouth of the Sumner Tunnel. Both spots top the annals of Boston traffic for lack of foresight and the fiendish cost they extract in lost time and sanity from those who dare to venture within.

But I digress, and the roads must roll! Surely the Big Dig is proof we can overcome the most daunting of urban quagmires and drive with aplomb through the gut of one of America's oldest and most congested cities. How ungrateful am I, and how unrealistic. How dare I compare our roads to our computing systems? Then again, when was the last time you inched down the Mass Pike only to discover that the limitations of the off ramp at Newton Corner have turned the toll road into a two-lane parking lot?

Bottom line? We're sort of behind the curve in the transportation department, having largely missed the notion of just what a car should really look like. Mating small, nimble, computer controllable and really fuel-efficient vehicles to roadways systems with the capacity to adjust to variable demand suddenly makes lots of sense.

Also needed is an appreciation for global warming in our energy policies and a political consensus that puts fusion right up there with the effort to cure cancer.

So beam me up, Scotty and lock the public debate on transportation into hyper drive. The roads must roll!

Peter Golden dreams of cruising the universe, then driving in a reasonable time from MetroWest to downtown Boston.

 
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