By Joseph M. Giglio

As a typical American on the go, you don't care about the intricacies of every transportation mode. You don't even care what a "transportation mode" is. You just want to travel as quickly and inexpensively, and with as few hassles, as possible.

But that's exactly why the various transportation modes—roadways, rail lines, and aviation, among others—have to work together. Consider the travel choices of a New York City investment banker who has to be in downtown Cleveland for a Monday luncheon meeting with an important client.

She could leave her Upper West Side apartment Monday morning before breakfast, get a taxi at the corner, and go out to LaGuardia Airport (there is still no train service from Manhattan to LaGuardia). She has to try to leave early enough to have an adequate cushion against unpredictable delays—on the always-crowded highways in Queens, for instance. The last time she went to Cleveland, a trailer truck lost its brakes on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, demolished four automobiles, and stalled traffic for two hours. She missed her flight and had to postpone her trip to the next day.

Or she could fly to Cleveland Sunday evening and check into a downtown hotel. That's if her firm's bean counters will approve the added costs: a night at the hotel, plus dinner and breakfast. Not to mention reimbursing what she'll have to pay a babysitter to stay overnight with her daughter.

Is it any wonder she's increasingly tempted by a third alternative? Rent a car Sunday afternoon, and drive the

500 miles to Cleveland through the night and into the morning. She'll hit metro Cleveland during rush hour, contributing to the traffic congestion and the air pollution, and arrive worn out and bleary-eyed for her important meeting.

Today, with the economy dominated by service and light-manufacturing jobs, the timely arrival and departure of people and goods is more important than ever before. Yet less and less money is being devoted to maintaining, reconstructing, and adding capacity to our transportation system.

If we chose to, though, we could tackle the underfunding problem and revolutionize the way the transportation modes work together by thinking about transportation differently and using readily available technology in new ways.

A lot of funds are going to be required to preserve and enhance our roads and travel systems. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials estimates that, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, $5.3 trillion will be needed to slow the deterioration of highways and public transit systems, overcome the effects of past underinvestment, and keep pace with growing transportation demand. The current federal motor-vehicle fuel tax and appropriations from state and local government budgets will meet less than two-thirds of this total.

So what do we do? For starters, access to highways should no longer be free. Motorists should be charged reasonable tolls for using highways, apportioned on the basis of the miles they travel, the kind of vehicles they drive, the amount of pollution they generate, and the level of traffic demand that exists at the time they choose to travel.

Using current technology, highways could be retrofitted to collect these tolls without affecting traffic flow—no toll booths, land-hungry toll plazas, or long lines of cars. And—one important benefit—the tolls should be accompanied by money-back guarantees of smooth-flowing, well-maintained roads.

To bridge the transition to a fully user-supported highway network, the U.S. Congress could enact a temporary increase in the motor-vehicle fuel tax. The tax proceeds would fund the backlog of highway fixes and overdue capacity increases needed to get highways and public transportation into good repair. Then, as more miles of highway were retrofitted to generate toll revenue, the fuel tax could be phased out.

Hassle-free toll collection is only one of the improvements technology could offer the surface transportation system. It could also enable us to manage and integrate highways, public transportation, and goods movement in ways that promote safety, economic efficiency, environmental friendliness, and social benefits, to an extent we couldn't even dream about just a few years ago.

The most important—and most radical—change technology could allow is to convert a disconnected group of separate surface-transportation modes into a fully integrated "mobility" system that travelers perceive as seamless.

To create this connectedness, the national toll-supported highway network would have to be a major funding source for all surface transportation modes, not just the roadways. A state or a region would manage its transportation modes as a portfolio of assets, allocating resources among them, just as pharmaceutical companies and other multiproduct corporations manage their various product lines.

What would the new transportation vision look like? Imagine an investment banker climbing out of bed in her Central Park West apartment at six a.m. on a summer day in 2030.

Just like her mother used to do, she is scheduled to fly to Cleveland to settle the final details of a client's upcoming common-stock offering. But New York City is experiencing one of its rare hurricanes, and she's worried about how this is affecting LaGuardia's flight schedules.

She turns on her personal computer and surfs to a website called Mobility Manager, where her door-to-door itinerary to Cleveland and arrival-time requirements are on file, protected by a password. She clicks on the "Update" button and a second later gets the bad news she feared. All flights out of LaGuardia have been canceled until further notice.

Fortunately, the "Travel alternatives" button is already flashing green on her screen. She clicks on it, and the screen quickly changes to a proposed "best alternative" itinerary, complete with times. It appears as a series of steps:

Take the Eighth Avenue subway (a station is less than a block away) to Penn Station.

At Penn Station, board the next high-speed intercity train for a two-and-a-half-hour trip to Boston's South Station.

From South Station, take an express bus to Logan Airport, where all flights are operating normally.

At Logan, board a flight for Cleveland's Hopkins Airport, where a rental car and driver will meet her for the half-hour drive to the client's offices in suburban Bedford Heights.

She scans the information, then clicks the "Approve" button. A second later, the screen changes again. This time, it shows the steps with the word "Confirmed" next to each one. She prints out a copy of the itinerary for herself and forwards copies to her secretary and her client. She also attaches a note to the client asking that their meeting be pushed back two hours, saying she will confirm this in a little while by phone.

Then she logs off and prepares to get dressed, deciding she'll wait until after the Cleveland meeting is over to ask Mobility Manager about the fastest way to get home.

This kind of one-stop travel planning could be ours a little further up the road. Just think—one day, a last-minute travel package custom-tailored for you online with the click of a button could get you, your spouse, and your two-year-old from Boston to Topeka in time for a family dinner.

Even if it's snowing hard in most of the Midwest. And it's Christmas Eve.

Joseph M. Giglio, PHD'03, is executive professor for strategic management at the College of Business Administration. His latest book is Mobility: America's Transportation Mess and How to Fix It (Hudson Institute, 2005).