When U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx drops in at the Googleplex on Monday to unveil a 30-year plan to fix America’s roads and rails, some of the visions he’ll be discussing might sound right out of … 1977.
That’s when one of Foxx’s predecessors, then-Transportation Secretary William Coleman, published his own 30-year blueprint for what U.S. transportation ought to look like leading up to the 21st century.
Among the prescient but premature ideas was for a “true ‘auto-mobile'” that would only need human input to choose a route.
“By 2000, the driverless car may become a viable possibility,” said the 1977 document, called , “but in the short- and medium-range future the personal car will continue to be supplemented by either ride-sharing or some variant of the taxi/dial-a-ride approach.”
Some variants, indeed.
Coleman didn’t have any time to implement his policy map. It was published just days before Jimmy Carter’s presidential inauguration, and Coleman was one of Gerald Ford’s outgoing Cabinet members.
But the idea of a 30-year blueprint has been revived by Foxx, a former Charlotte mayor appointed last year to be the Obama administration’s transportation chief.
Foxx will join Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to talk about the plan at the Internet company’s Mountain View headquarters on Monday afternoon. Why Foxx chose Google for the event is unclear, but the company’s intention to get its self-driving car prototypes ready to carry passengers by the end of this decade likely has at least something to do with it.
Says Foxx’s press release ahead of the event: “Thirty years from now, America will be home to 70 million more people, many in cities in the South and West, transforming the way we move people and goods. Twenty-nine billion more tons of freight will need to cross the country as we simultaneously imagine and adapt to the promise of new technologies and innovation. America is changing, and our transportation system must get ahead of that change or be overwhelmed by it.”
Above: U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx spoke during an interview with the Associated Press in January 2014. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
