What is transportation mojo, and have we, as Americans, lost ours?

The first cars were not built in the U.S., but Henry Ford brought the concept of the assembly line to worldwide prominence in the service of the automobile. In so doing, he made automobiles cheap, affordable and ubiquitous. That’s one example of transportation mojo, albeit and old one. Today it would seem China is the place to look for the same transportation zeal for which America was once famous.

In the next two years China plans to double the size of its high speed system, increasing track length from 3,000 miles to 6,000 miles. Within 10 years they hope to have constructed the first Maglev train that can travel at speeds greater than 600 miles per hour. In Beijing construction is about to get underway on a straddling bus system that will carry passengers above traffic so that cars and trucks can drive underneath without having to stop. Dear friends, China has got mojo by the bucket.

EMBARQ founder Lee Schipper called the straddling bus “a joke,” on TheCityFix. His colleague, Dario Hidalgo, picked it apart on more technical grounds saying that it seems to be “at a very preliminary concept stage with too many issues to solve from the engineering standpoint.” Is that a diplomatic way of saying the plan is a pie in the sky?

Feasible or not, it certainly does not lack imagination or audacity.

So where is America in the midst of all this? We’re squabbling over the best way to build the first segments of our intercity high speed rail lines and inching up fuel efficiency on our fleet of more than 250 million passenger cars.

Somewhere between grade school daydreams and the drafting table are legitimate solutions that can make a real difference in the way people and things move. No one ever solved big problems by thinking small, and even then, not without a healthy dose of mojo. So has America lost its transportation mojo?

“It’s difficult to generalize across all areas of transportation as to whether we have lost our mojo,” said Michael Meyer, director of the Georgia Transportation Institute and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech.

Meyer said that in the area of alternative fuels, and vehicle technology we’re doing quite well, so it’s not fair to compare the U.S. to China, a high-growth economy where much of this infrastructure never existed. The breakneck pace at which development is taking place further reflects the pent up demand.

“In other areas such as willingness to keep the investment in the transportation system we’ve had for the past 50 years, both highway and transit, I think we’re losing a lot,” said Meyer.

Apples to Apples?

Futurist Mathias Crawford also believes it is important to keep in mind the platform on which innovation is taking place before passing judgement on American’s willingness to innovate.

“China is really interesting because there is this huge gap between really forward-looking stuff and the fact that these innovations are really, really unevenly distributed,” he said.

Crawford, who has spent time in China, and is a research manager at the Institute For The Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank and policy advisory center with more than 40 years of predicting trends in health care, technology, and global business.

“I think there is a distinct difference between innovations in the US, where they tend to be around things like, ‘how can we optimize the number of people traveling by cars?’ and places where the whole notion of single occupancy vehicles is relatively novel, so questions of public transportation have been much more acute,” said Crawford.

While it’s hard to compare the excitement that comes with building something new and daring, versus maintaining something tried and true, Meyer still thinks we’re asleep at the wheel.

“Even with that distinction and that difference, I would say that what we have seen in the United States over the last 10 years or so is transportation losing its perception of importance with regard to the nation’s economy,” said Meyer. While there are lots of culprits, such as a car culture and global recession, Meyer lays much of the blame at the feet of the federal government.

Funding Sources Matter

The federal government has the deepest transportation pockets in this country and sets the terms by which all projects receive funding. So great is the influence of federal cash over transportation planning that local entities build to federal standards even when no DC money is involved at the outset. If the state or local government wants to belly up to the bar later, the feds will require that all improvements conform to federal standards. Better, then, to follow federal protocol from the outset.

That said, our government is broke and as of January 2010 China held more than $843 billion in US federal debt. What money we do have to fund transportation construction projects, as well as infrastructure maintenance is apportioned according to very specific guidelines, which leads to “stove piping,” said to Jason Tai, a D.C. based transportation consultant at Chambers, Conlon & Hartwell.

How federal transportation dollars are spent from the Death and Taxes at Wallstats.com

“Outside of the box thinking types of projects probably are a little more difficult, because they don’t fall within the easily categorized ‘traditional’ transportation projects,” said Tai. In the U.S. ‘traditional’ means roads, transit and trains-with the lion’s share going to fund highway construction.

Meyers said, “I think that in many cases–in transportation in particular–we immediately are faced with constraints on budget and when that happens, people immediately take steps back, saying, ‘We can’t afford this, We can’t afford it, therefor we’re not going to do it,’ where in other countries they’re more willing to experiment.”

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