What should our nation's transportation system look like by the middle of the century? What should we do to make sure we reach that goal?

Those and other visionary questions were at the heart of an examination of national transportation policy conducted last year by the Federal Transportation Advisory Group, a council that met under the auspices of the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Earlier this year, the group, whose members were drawn from academia, government, and the transportation industry, sent President Bush a report that included wide-ranging proposals for addressing the U.S. transportation system's most pressing needs.

The report, titled Vision 2050: An Integrated National Transportation System, calls on Bush to take the lead in establishing transportation priorities. In a cover letter to the president, group chairman Robert E. Spitzer, a Boeing executive, wrote, "The nation's economic strength and our quality of life depend on it."

The advisory group recommends as a first step that Bush form a bipartisan commission to help define a national transportation strategy. The sole shipper on the panel, Looman F. Stingo, senior vice president of logistics for Holnam Inc., supports that idea. "We need a national transportation policy like never before," he says.

In its report, the group suggests that the nation must move quickly to prevent already serious problems from becoming worse. The United States may have one of the best and most efficient transportation systems in the world, the report notes, but parts of that system are already in gridlock. And, it says, both freight- and passenger-transportation demand will double within 20 years and triple within 50 years—yet few increases in capacity are currently planned. "Innovative solutions are required now, in order to meet this anticipated demand while achieving other national policy goals," the report asserts. "Delay will result in continued deterioration, increasing congestion, and rising costs."

The report prescribes a transportation vision that aims high. That vision foresees:

• An integrated national transportation system that can economically move anyone and anything anywhere, anytime, on time;
• A transportation system without fatalities or injuries; and
• A transportation system that is not dependent on foreign energy and is compatible with the
• environment.

The report lays out 10 broad policy initiatives that it argues are needed in order to deal with an impending capacity crisis and move toward an integrated transportation system. The group also calls for establishing the aforementioned bipartisan commission to help define a national transportation strategy by next January and for the creation of a permanent Federal Advisory Committee that would provide guidance on national transportation policy issues to the secretary of transportation.

In addition, the report recommends the formation of a public-private sector organization that would help define and maintain a transportation-system architecture. Other recommendations focus on workforce issues, research, infrastructure, collaborative efforts within the transportation community, and removing legal and regulatory barriers to transportation innovation. (The full report is available on the Internet at scitech.dot.gov.)

The Vision 2050 report represents the beginning of what its authors hope will be a major policy initiative. But drawing the public's attention to transportation issues may be difficult. Stingo says, "I think the biggest problem a lot of us have, is how to get the message out about this industry and some of our problems and how it affects [peoples'] daily lives."