The Faster Future Commute

FACT: THE NORTHEAST CORRIDOR IS THE MOST CONGESTED transportation region in the nation. How long did it take you to get to work this morning? Sub-question: How much did it cost? The price tag of commuting might be more than you think.

A data firm called Inrix last year compiled a global traffic scorecard that placed the Washington area as the sixth worst in the world — the world — for traffic congestion. The study found that our region is even worse than Istanbul, a city that can at least blame geography — it bridges two continents, after all — for some of its woes.

It also found that $2.9 billion each year is spent here on fuel that’s wasted by idling cars, or on more invisible costs that are passed on to consumers for, say, trucks that have to sit in traffic instead of quickly delivering their goods to retailers and other businesses. That’s $1,700 annual for every driver on the road in this area. And that’s just counting the wasted money. The actual costs of driving or hopping a train or bus aren’t factored in.

And, about those trains: Some 2,200 trains carrying 750,000 passengers traverse the 457 miles of rail lines that comprise the Northeast Corridor each day. That just so happens to be the most congested rail line in the country. But, then, you already knew that. The question is: Can anything be done about it?

Future Forward

The Opportunity A new but proven transportation technology and a very old transportation technology — applied in a new way locally — could relieve a significant amount of stress on local roads and rails and, better yet, speed the commute for thousands of people. That is, if enough people line up behind these technologies.

The Northeast MAGLEV

THE PROMISE / A magnetic train that goes from DC to New York in one hour and DC to Baltimore in 15 minutes. Yes, really. THE TESTING / MAGLEV train technology has been testing in Japan since 1998 along a line called Chuo Shinkansen. The train line began accepting revenue service in 2014 and the train is expected to get fully up to speed — 375 miles per hour at maximum — in the next two years. HOW IT WORKS / The MAGLEV doesn’t run on rails. It hovers above superconducting magnets. The magnets are contained within a U-shaped guideway and the guideway would be built either on top of a viaduct towering aboveground or inside a below-ground tunnel. “This is a train that will never run at grade,” says Jeff Hirschberg, the vice chairman of Baltimore-Washington Rapid Rail, the main organization behind the development of the Northeast MAGLEV. “It is literally impossible to derail, because there are no rails.”

WILL IT WORK HERE? / That’s the $27.8 million question. Hirschberg’s group has already gotten that much in federal funding for an environmental impact study for a MAGLEV line that would run either along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway or alongside portions of Amtrak’s current Northeast Corridor lines. Initial plans are to run the train only between Washington and Baltimore. That would cost another $22 billion and would involve buying land and getting operational support from multiple jurisdictions. But Hirschberg says he is confident that, because the MAGLEV is a proven technology, with years of safe operation in Japan, the study will proceed smoothly and construction will commence in 2019. If so, the line could be carrying 15,000 people per day and transforming two cities into one by 2024. THE HEAVY HITTERS / The Northeast MAGLEV has an advisory panel that suggests it means business. Included among the members are former governors Ed Rendell, Christine Todd Whitman, and George Pataki, as well as Under Armour founder Kevin Plank and former senator Tom Daschle.

AND WHAT ABOUT THAT HYPERLOOP? / Elon Musk’s proposed underground, vacuum-powered transportation tunnel has gotten local approval in Maryland for early-stage testing. It’s also gotten plenty of headlines. But Hirschberg isn’t concerned about the potential hightech competition. “I’m all for studying new technologies,” he says. “But we’re confident about what we are doing. Our infrastructure is broken and we can fix it. And MAGLEV is ready, willing, and able to do that.”

Commuting by Boat

THE PROMISE / A system of water taxis and ferries that would connect to ground transportation and move potentially millions of people in a fraction of the time it takes to drive. Michael Winstanley, principal with Michael Winstanley, Architects & Planners in Alexandria, has proposed a framework plan for this system that calls for building 31 different landing sites along DC’s waterways, including major potential hubs at Poplar Point, near the new DC United Stadium, or Buzzard Point, near Nationals Park.

THE TESTING / Winstanley’s plan has only had a few test runs between a couple of points to gauge the timing. But the results are impressive. “We did a test run between the Joint Base Anacostia–Bolling and the Pentagon,” Winstanley says. “It took us 12 minutes to get from one point to the other. There were brass on the boat telling us they sometimes have to allow two hours on the road to make sure they are not late traveling between those two places.”

TYING INTO WATER TAXIS AND MORE / Water taxis operated by the Potomac Riverboat Co. are already running between Alexandria, National Harbor, Georgetown, Nationals Park, and the new DC Wharf. Winstanley thinks if those services are expanded and connected with commuter ferries, “some of the traffic congestion related to tourism would be relieved because the very act of getting on a boat is a tourist attraction in and of itself.” But the real connections that must be made are to bus lines and other ground transportation so commuters can easily go from the boats to the buses to their offices. “We can’t set up a water transportation network by itself and think it is going to survive,” he says. “We have to tie it into existing land-based transportation.”

THE BIG CHALLENGES AHEAD / “There is a lot of work to go,” Winstanley says. “This is a very complex situation with four different jurisdictions involved — Maryland, Virginia, Washington, DC, and the federal government. But we think we have a very robust plan.”

WHAT COMES NOW / “The objective is to get people saying, ‘This is really cool. We have to find a way to get this done,’ Winstanley says. “And then we need to start talking to people to make that happen. Everyone knows that transportation in this region is a challenge. We might as well look at how we can use the waterways. They’re just sitting there waiting for us.”

The proposed Northeast MAGLEV train could reach 375 miles per hour. It runs within a guideway, hovering above, and being propelled by superconducting magnets and electromagnetic coils.

Future Forward

Robots on the Ground & in the Sky

CAN AMAZON GET STUFF TO YOU FASTER, EVEN IN CONGESTED WASHINGTON?

1 Entrance and Drop Off 2 Reception Lobby

3 Premium Restaurant 4 Active Entertainment Center

5 Performance Retail Boutique 6 Premium Health Club 7 Branded Spa

8 Child Watch 9 Offices 10 Pool House Seating 11 Field House Seating

12 Climbing and Bouldering Wall 13 Ice House Seating

LIFT WEIGHTS & WAIT IN TRAFFIC LESS

A huge new sports and wellness complex puts the whole fit family under one roof

WHAT IS IT? The St. James, a 20-acre fitness destination in Springfield, Virginia, that has 430,000 square feet under its roof and potentially as many as 2 million visitors per year. The facility will have two ice rinks, six batting cages, a turf field for soccer, four basketball courts that can be converted into nine volleyball courts, a pool, seven golf simulators, a gymnastics training center, climbing walls, a 50,000-squarefoot cardio, strength, and agility center, a spa, a sports medicine center, and a 6,000-square-foot indoor water park with zip lines, trampolines, and a restaurant. Among other things. Membership starts at $150 for an individual or $250 for a family.

WHY HERE? “There is a lack of supply for quality competition facilities in this area,” says Kendrick Ashton, a co-founder and managing partner of The St.

James Group. “You can’t just get on a basketball court whenever you want or get on a soccer field. Traditional providers of those assets — local governments — no longer have the resources to invest in them. We solve that issue and we do it by providing facilities that are of a very high quality and offer a hospitality experience. You can get a cup of coffee, Wi-Fi, childcare, and the fitness facilities.”

THE OPPORTUNITY: Not only could the facility keep you out of the car since the soccer players and the gymnasts in the family could potentially share the destination, Ashton and his co-founder, Craig Dixon, believe the St. James in the Washington region could be the first in a series of franchises. That makes it a business opportunity, too. Ashton and Dixon are already working with venture capital firms, hoping to expand their fitness palace to 20 cities nationally.

Robots do a lot of the thinking at Amazon. The company uses artificial intelligence to help decide, as your two-day Prime order is placed, which of Amazon’s hundreds of fulfillment centers has your product, and which of its hundreds of sort centers your product can be sent to before it is passed off to a third-party shipper, and then to you. Robots also do a lot of the lugging of packages as the 50 million products available for shipping — enough to fill 350 big box Walmart stores — are moved around in Amazon’s fulfillment process. And more robots may be on the way. The company is exploring use of automated vehicles that will do the driving for them, as well as drones that will take to the air to get packages under 5 pounds — that’s 85 percent of everything Amazon ships in two days or less — directly to customers. But if Amazon is going to get autonomous vehicles on the roads or drones in the skies of crowded Washington (or anywhere else in the country, for that matter), it will have to clear one big local roadblock first: The federal government. And that might take a while. “One thing I always tell policymakers,” says Blair Anderson, the Washington-based director of transportation public policy for Amazon, “is they need to consider the speed at which this technology develops. It often takes 6 to 8 years to approve new transportation regulations. With the way things are moving today, the technology may be obsolete before the regulations are in place.”

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