Future of American Transportation Policy - Essay Example

Transport is very important for any society to flourish, and in advanced countries like America, the demand for automated or motorized mobility has evolved and increased significantly since the 1970's. Due to the fact that the transport sector is highly dependent on carbon fuels, it is expected to account for a large portion greenhouse gas emitted into the air in developed countries like the U.S.A. in the future, and contribute greatly to global climate change. However, about 70% of world population lives in developing regions, where per capita travel demand is currently low.

Future trends in mobility-both passenger and freight-in these regions will be of critical importance for the world's fuel supply and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the 21st century. Many previous studies dealing with travel demand have tended to focus on a very detailed level and short time horizon, and are therefore of limited use for examining the long-term issues outlined above. This paper will also analyse the future demand for motorized transportation. Since the 1980's, when the Just-In-Time (JIT) practices were popularised, the companies have strived to decrease inventory levels and increase overall production costs.

The JIT programs have had a good effect on service and production processes, and this success has also caused some changes in the transportation industry. Since Transport is often an activity that is induced either by production activities or by socio-cultural functions, it can be assessed within these categories, and it can also be assessed as a separate system. The demand for transport involves more than moving people and freight across certain distances; it also has to do with speed.

For example, looking through history, the amount of time that people are willing to devote to travelling seems to be rather constant, across various world regions, and these days, the distances covered continue to increase, while the total amount of time spent on these distances remains constant, because of increased speed brought about by switching to faster means of transport. In all honesty, most people in the richer countries of the world would agree that we do enjoy our transportation systems.

Our transport systems enable us to travel exactly when we want to, usually from door to door, whether we want to travel alone or with our family and friends, and we want to travel with our baggage or not. We get our goods delivered routinely by the freight distribution network, which supports our lifestyle, and satisfies our delivery needs, so why should we worry about the future of the transportation network and how the energy that drives our transportation might possibly be affecting our environment The reason is that the size of these transportation systems, and their seemingly relentless growth cannot be overlooked.

These systems consume fuels that are petroleum-based, like gasoline and diesel, on a very large scale. During combustion, the carbon that these fuels contain is oxidized to the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, due to the fact that they are used so massively, the amount of carbon dioxide that gets