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[quote user="V.Payne"] What is so interesting about the AAF play is the bet being placed on the ultimate financial health of certain American cities and future increased land values. I do wonder a bit about whether such high assumed land values might be a bit to much to be financially efficient for the residents. Of course this is in contrast to the extreme devaluation of land in American cities following the intentional dispersing effect of the subsidized interstate road program just as the article describes a waste land of parking lots. But where will everything end up? Right now we are searching for the balance point in land values as we cannot practically disperse anymore and are heading toward land bound highway corridors such as I-4 in Orlando. I wrote about the history of the assumptions behind the 1930-1960's land planning and how everything might work out in the future based on the travel demand model used in the I-4 managed toll lanes project on the Strongtowns group. Some of you might find such interesting, along with their critques of modern road engineering, as the project planners are essentially projecting the <a href="http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/1/21/keeping-the-ball-in-the-air.html#.U7yRTLEfw0I">"free" general purpose interstate lanes</a> will essentially become gridlocked at all times of the day. [/quote] Your article contains some interesting thoughts and prognosis-es. Having read it twice, two or three thoughts come to mind. As Peter Schwartz pointed out in The Art of the Long View, predicting the future is a dicey exercise. Instead of trying to predict a single outcome, Schwartz, who was a corporate planner for Shell Oil Company, used scenario planning to come up with three or four plausible future outcomes. His methodology, which was taken from military planners, has been adopted by many corporate planners. Nuclear power was supposed to be the wave of the future for the electric power industry. My company had planned to build five nuclear power plants for north Texas.  As it turned out, for a variety of reasons, only one of the plants was built. Conditions that had favored nuclear power turned sour, and one plant was enough for us. It is unlikely that we will see any more nuclear power plants in the U.S. in the near future. Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) has sunk more than $6 billion into the longest light rail project in the southwest. The planners envisioned heaps of people using it to get to work, play, etc. People would leave their cars at home and pile onto the trains. They would even take the train to the symphony, opined one writer in the Dallas Morning News. It has not happened, as highlighted in a recent article in the Dallas Morning News. Only 1.8 per cent of the people in the Metroplex use the light rail trains. I had pegged it at approximately three percent, and I was astounded to learn that it is 1.8 per cent.  In Dallas, at least, people are just not willing to get out of their cars; at least not in significant numbers. You may be right about highway congestion and the willingness of people to pay tolls to avoid the mess caused by congestion.  You may be right about people being more willing to ride a train. But what happens to congestion, for example, if self driving, automated personal vehicles are developed and deployed in massive numbers 25 or so years from now?  Never happen?   I am reading a book on how Jimmy Doolittle solved the problem of how to fly a plane on instruments. He achieved the break through in 1929.  Never happen said most of his contemporaries, Charles Lindbergh being an exception. It did.
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