Dr. Stephen D. Van Beek says there’s a culture gap in the U.S. when it comes to transportation interests. In the vernacular of our time, it is an industry of silos, each with its own special interests. “When we’re talking about authority, it’s very difficult to come to a resolution because everybody has a different idea of what their roles and responsibilities are within the system. As long as you have that, I don’t know how you get over the finish line,” he says. Over the past century the nation has built a system of highways and airports, and to a lesser degree rail — each pretty much independent of the others. That, says Van Beek, is about to change, driven by the market forces of skyrocketing fuel prices and the global movement to reduce the carbon footprint of humans.
Dr. Van Beek is the president and CEO of the Eno Transportation Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank with the stated purpose of cultivating creative and visionary leadership for all sectors of transportation. It was founded in 1921 by William Phelps Eno, a pioneer in the field of traffic management in the U.S. and Europe.
Dr. Van Beek, who joined Eno in 2007, has experience with airports with Jacobs Consultancy and as the head of policy for Airports Council International-North America. He was previously a director for the U.S. DOT’s Office of Intermodalism and continues to teach with the Intermodal Transportation Institute at the University of Denver.
He recently discussed the changing face of U.S. transportation with AIRPORT BUSINESS. Following are edited excerpts of that discussion ...
AIRPORT BUSINESS: Tell us about the Eno Foundation and its role in future planning.
Van Beek: We do a lot on policy and run policy forums to try to frame the critical and emerging issues in transportation, and that’s multimodal. We do a lot with transit and with ports and maritime, and highways; they’ve done things with aviation in the past, but certainly getting me on board puts that policy more as a focus.
Secondly, we run a lot of professional development programs, mainly for people who are becoming transportation executives within public authorities.
We’re working on the production on an intermodal freight book that will be used by industry professionals and by classes in the U.S.
The best way to think of us is, rather than a foundation, what we really are is more like a think tank that also does a fair amount of professional development. We tend to be more neutral. A lot of our focus would be on problem-solving and training of issues. We don’t get too involved in advocacy.
Two policy forums this year of interest are climate change and transportation and one on surface transportation projects.
AB: It would appear the U.S. aviation industry is facing significant change, driven by new environmental demands being led by Europe.
Van Beek: Unlike a lot of issues, it’s one that by its very nature is global, national, and local. That makes it very tough.
If one is an airport operator today and one was to ask that airport operator, what are you doing about clean air and clean water as you build this new facility? The director would be able to tell you quite clearly what they were going to do, because there’s an environmental impact review process; you look at alternatives and eventually get into mitigating whatever harm that you’re doing.
Think of that same airport director with climate change. What do you advise him today?
Let’s say you’re adding a runway and are going to increase capacity; you’re therefore going to enable more greenhouse gas emissions. What is your role as an airport operator? How do you factor that into your decisionmaking going forward? It’s very unclear.
For an airport, unlike an airline, the only time you really have to deal with that issue is when you’re adding that capacity, because an airport doesn’t regulate the type of aircraft. Therefore, you have no ability to say, bring in one A-380 rather than four separate aircraft, each of which might emit more greenhouse emissions than would the A-380.
For international missions, we know that ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] has the international responsibility; nationally, that’s EPA and DOT; for local, you have very different processes.
AB: There’s also the rapidly changing airline environment that is causing airports to take pause. How do you see this affecting the airline/airport relationship?
Van Beek: I’d say, from the airports’ standpoint, I think airports are much more focused on what’s going to happen with consolidations and mergers and the net effect on their operations. The last two years have had three, four percent growth; we’re now getting into one percent total growth. You’re going to see a lot of domestic capacity removed, apparently, this year. As that happens it’s going to have a big impact, not only on communities that airports serve, but on airport finance.
It’s a very uncertain environment for airports, from a Denver that’s concerned about Frontier but does have United and Southwest, to a smaller airport that might be saying, as carriers pull out domestic capacity, we think we’ll be disproportionately hit by that.
Looking at airports/airlines, where there is congestion the airlines don’t want any congestion management. They want what is essentially a laissez-faire process; or they want worldwide scheduling guidelines on the one hand, but on the other hand they don’t want airports to have a PFC increase to build the capacity to mitigate the congestion.
I really think both sides are adjusting to their roles in this game still from deregulation. Airports are performing more roles than they used to; airlines less. That sort of rejiggering of relationships is trailing what’s been happening in the industry. So even something like rates & charges reform, which is designed to allow airports to have more flexibility, the airlines don’t want to see. The rules of rates and charges essentially pre-date deregulation.
We have a new world out there. It seems to me that airports and airlines need to be working together.
AB: In recent years we’ve heard more about the concept of regional planning for transportation, with limited results. Looking ahead, what’s the role for a regional approach?
Van Beek: I think it’s really critical for some regions, like Southern California where you know you’re not going to have enough pavement to accommodate demand. Given that, how do you better manage what you have? One of the strategies in selective places will be: What is the role of surface transportation in helping to knit together and perhaps act as an alternative to air travel, particularly where you have short-haul alternatives available?
We’ve thought of surface transportation to airports as the alternatives to the automobile. So we build light rail that is really designed for the most part in the U.S. to replace single-passenger automobile trips to the airport.
If we want to knit together airports and rail and surface communities and do it in terms of a regional plan, we’ll have to think of those intermodal links much differently than before. They’re going to have to be higher speed and operationally very reliable, like you have in Paris.
One could say we have that at Newark today because Amtrak and Continental are code-shared and you can single-ticket that; but it’s a very modest example. It’s something that New York has had to do because it is so capacity constrained on the airside and it’s very hard to do on the surface side.
As we go forward, the country is building much less infrastructure. We’re not building many new airports, or new highways. The question is, how are we going to fulfill mobility challenges of the future?
The intermodal solution has to be part of the picture.
It requires we change our way of thinking modally. We don’t do things intermodally very well in this country on the passenger side. We do them very well on the freight side.
AB: At a recent conference it was suggested that the triangle from San Francisco to Las Vegas to Southern California would be a good example where intermodal would work. Is that a good starting point?
Van Beek: You’re talking about a fairly long rail link between Oakland and Los Angeles. You’re going to have to get that very high-speed. California has a bond issue of I think $10-20 billion where they’re trying to get the first piece of funding for that available.
That’s what I almost call modal diversion — where you consciously want to move a particular market to a different mode of transportation. In order to do that, that service is going to have to be cost-competitive and have enough capacity.
The rail would cost $10 billion, but adding a 737 between a variety of Bay Area airports and Southern California airports would be a lot less. You have to ask, is that going to be a practical alternative? I think it’s challenging; I hope it works.
AB: What have been some of the barriers to regional planning?
Van Beek: The barrier is really two-fold. One is, because of the modal funding structure of the federal government, money tends to be dispersed not for the interest of passengers and shippers, but really for either the carriers or the providers of infrastructure. That is a different mentality. When you’re thinking intermodally, you’re not thinking of who hauls people, you’re thinking of the people you need to haul.
If you look at the metropolitan planning organizations’ structure, they tend to be dominated by surface interests. That has often made airports wary of entering their world; they feel out-gunned. I think the airport community needs to open a national dialog about the right ways to do regional planning, thinking about the price of fuel and the limits that we’ll have with climate change.
Fuel costs are internal to the decisionmaking; climate change is what economists call an externality. We’re going to have to find a way within transportation to internalize that.
AB: Much has been made of our reliance on cheap oil, SUVs, and low-cost airlines. The emerging market forces of the past year suggest dramatic change is coming.
Van Beek: Market forces and climate change will fuse together. The carriers on something like climate change have the incentives today because of the price of fuel to try to be as efficient as they can, not only from their own cost standpoint but also because of greenhouse gas emissions. If we get into a cap and trade system on climate change, you’re going to have an absolute limit in terms of what can be produced.
That’s going to be a very real challenge.
I think we’re going through a very dramatic transformation. We’re on the front end of it, and at the very time we’re going that way, you have this [economic] slowdown that is going to cause the mergers and consolidation on the major networks’ side. We’re going to have an industry dramatically different than the one we had before.
