yeah welcome to the series that takes you tothe heart of america and reveal the inner workings of our country as youhave never seen them before I'm you'll quan I've worked in manydifferent fields from law to government to business I've even one the reality show survivorbut in every part of my life I've been fascinated by the same things systemsand networks we're going to go on quite a journey coast-to-coast across this sprawling land to discover the habits the rhythms and the secrets that you only notice when you step back and see the big picture interchanges oddly elegant in the next hour aerial photography and satellite tracking will reveal how America's transportation systems make us the most mobile people on earth we built the vast networks of roadsrails and airwaves and an army of workers keep the wheels turning hey let's like the bus driver but it'sgetting harder and harder to keep all these systems running well i think thefreeways will get so slow where a lot of people just decide it's not worth thegrief many of them are aging designed at a time when America was far less crowded you have a disruption at one place and it ripples all the way across country itdoes have a ripple effect but even as he struggled to keep up every day our systems miraculously managed to get us where we need to go this is a story of 310 million Americanson the move this is America revealed yeah America revealed is made possible by theCorporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you thank you monday morning just before dawn but this isn't the night sky this is America this is us each of these points of light represents 7,500 people they create brilliant constellations that span the continent from the faint glow of small towns to the blaze of cities like Chicago and NewYork to connect these dots we built four million miles of roads 200,000 miles ofrails 5,000 airports the largest transportation network in history but keeping it all moving that'sAmerica's challenge in the 21st century and nowhere does that challenge loom larger than in New York City it's the perfect example of a powerful but agingtransportation network that moves millions even while straining undertheir weight take the island of Manhattan 23 square miles home to 1.6 million people every weekday morning is population nearly doubles swelling withan army of commuters these people are essential to the life of the citygetting all of them onto this tiny island in only a few hours is a dailyadventure that teeters on the edge of chaos and it's about to begin at 630amI'm coming in on the red-eye from LA to JFK International Airport and I've got plenty of company reported the path of every plane landing in New York's threemajor airports in a 24-hour period a flight comes and goes every 24 secondsthat's more than 3,500 flights a day I 7am thousands of yellow cabs arepicking up their first fears of the day at the airports and heading for men handthis taxi is one in 50,000 vehicles that will leave its way through New York'snecklace of bridges and tunnels in the next power just below these bridges morethan a hundred thousand people are traveling to and from the island by boat these are the traces of those vesselsdarting around New York's rivers and harbor including one fleet which aloneCarrie 65,000 commuters a day staten island ferry yeah as thousands descend on the island byhere road and water even more arrive by rail long island railroad trains carrysuburban commuters into Manhattan every two to four minutes along with packtrains from New Jersey and amtrak trains they all converge at America's busiestcommuter hub New York's penn station while only a few blocks away trains from the north stream intoanother bustling train station grand central terminal but getting people on to Manhattan isjust half the battle now they have to deal with this the streets run yellow with taxiscompeting with thousands of trucks and cars and bus routes crisscross theisland adding another layer to the traffic I'm not surprised the word gridlockoriginated here it's ATM and it looks like nobody'sgoing anywhere but beneath the streets it's a differentstory i'm talking about the subway every daythis system carries over 5 million passengers citywide without it traffic would overwhelm Manhattan streets and the city couldn't function but the subway has had an even biggerimpact than that starting in the early nineteen hundreds when the first track was laid to build a transportation system in America whole cities and townswill spring up around it the subway system is a prime example it determinedhow New York City took shape and dictate the patterns of its inhabitants liveslook beneath this forest of midtown Manhattan skyscrapers multiple subwaylines converge here funneling in hard-working commuters from the city'souter boroughs like Queens this is a snapshot of what Queens looklike in 1917 when subway construction was just getting started and here iswhat it looks like today a busy vibrant borough the subway made Queens possible but how 100 years ago to combat overcrowding andlower Manhattan tenements New York expanded its fledgling subway system tothe sparsely populated outer boroughs critics call them the tracks to nowhere but New Yorkers soon got onboard lured by the promise of open land just a shortride from their jobs by the nineteen-twenties these lineswere carrying more passengers than they could handle the city plan to add over100 miles of new track but first the Depression hit then World War two yeah today we're stuck with the same basicwheels that were out of date in the nineteen thirties and the number ofpassengers keeps going up with every passing decade it's a pattern will seeall over the country enormous but aging system was working hard harder to keepup with the growth to help create it's ten a.m. in the morning commute iswinding down the city has survived another rush hour and millions have madeit to their destinations New York's public transit system may be old andcrowded but without it this teeming metropolis would come to a screechinghalt the same is true across the country are public transportation systems arewhat keep the nation moving there's one system that carries a whopping 26million Americans every day more than any other form of public transport there it is there it is again the humble school bus what's up guys good morning and come tokingman arizona to meet a guy who keeps one of these yellow Marvel's moving here rush hour is just beginning for manystudents in this desert community buses are the only way to get to school around the country kids rely on a half-million member army of transportation expertsthe nations school bus drivers here let's make the bus driver when these kids are on the bus they're my kids and I'll mess and Idon't take that lightly you have to be the mother the father themediator the nurse the cool uncle like how many miles you drive every dayon average all do about a hundred sixty-five miles a day and that's a fewthat's just me this is mike's bus it's just one of kingdoms 53 buses replanted gps devices on them and found that they driveone-and-a-half million miles every year to every corner of the school districtan area the size of Delaware that's repeated nationwide in thousands ofschool districts large and small tho system quite like this anywhere in theworld here in the US if you can't get there on foot you canget a ride to your local school even if it's not that local so you guys arereally kind of like the lifeblood of the system right i mean without you thesekids wouldn't even be able to get an education no they wouldn't be able to get theschool now we keep pumping the kids in so they can get educated our school buses worked amazingly wellwhich is good considering how much we rely on them but there are othertransportation networks out there that face big challenges including the systemthat first connected the country from coast to coast and made modern Americapossible the railroads to create a nation wide web of tracksthe federal government launched one of the most ambitious and expensiveinfrastructure projects in human history and for nearly a hundred year'sAmerica's railways were the fastest and most popular way to travel but notanymore to get a glimpse of what keeps our trains going and what slows themdown I've come to the rail hub of the UnitedStates Chicago more trains pass through this city thanany other because in the eighteen hundreds Chicago's politicians lobby tomake sure all national rail lines and here that created jobs but also logisticalnightmares today there are three different systemshere with different needs all fighting for space on one set of tracks commutertrains making local pickups amtrak trains traveling longer distances withfewer stops but those two passenger networks are dominated by the biggestslowest network of all yeah free our economy depends on goods carried byrail from coast to coast we have the world's most efficient andprofitable trade system moving nearly ten times as much as $MONEY euro it's so successful that free companiesowned most of America's tracks and many of our freight trains pass through onesmall section of Chicago's freight yards 27 miles of track behind me will moveabout 1.75 million free cars each year but this phenomenal success has come ata price the system isn't nearly as good atmoving something else people so what is it about the freight system that gets inour way this is Jack strength is using a remotecontrol to push that train of a man-made he'll be call the double hump shippingcompanies built this hill so that men like Jack can process all the freecoming through this yard and reassemble cars according to destination thenetwork we depend on to ship our goods depends on Jack his remote control and asurprisingly simple process known as pumping pumping is exactly a slang wordfor classifying the cars sorting kind of like a postal facility but instead ofsorting mail your starting these kinds of time freight cars exactly after Jackpushes the cars up the hill area called she separates them by hand a century oldtechnique called pin pulling this bar up her give me a signal so they want tomake the cut and then jackets gravity drag each cardown the other side of the hump to its outbound track these cars carry chemicals bound forVirginia lumber on the way to michigan sugar for a cookie factory in st. Louisand they all have to wait their turn in line at the double hump everything thatmoves through America loose through these yards exactly a lot of times youcan tell how the economy is running out here just by what's coming into the yarditself all across the country people and freehave to share the same tracks seeing these mile long slow moving freighttrains heading out of Chicago to the long-distance rail network i canunderstand why passenger travel suffers 2010 the federal government pledged$MONEY billion dollars towards a potential solution the construction ofnew and upgraded tracks for speedier passenger rail system but that's onlyfifteen percent of the plans 53 billion dollar price tag even if all that funding comes throughmost long-distance travelers will probably still choose a different way toget from here to there one that's newer and much faster 17 this is the scene at houston's georgebush intercontinental airport air travel more than any other mode of moderntransportation has bridged our continent and sped up our lives and every yearmore and more of us are taking to the skies this is flight data for the 50,000planes i will carry almost 2 million passengers today it shows how r airways connect everycorner of the country from sleepy rural area strips to major hubs like chicago'so'hare international airport where on this day a plane is taking off orlanding every 34 seconds that's nearly a million flights each year the fast system has created a completelynew way of life people flowing through these airports are just occasionalpassengers there are new breed of road warrior who often fly thousands of milesevery week one of those very frequent flyers is international insurancesalesman deanery i'm doing final no I never checked bags morning how are you thank you a typical trip in miami tampa tampaHouston Houston vegas vegas to houston houston the Dallas of dallas to tokyotokyo to hong kong macau as possible account shanghai shanghai at tokyo tokyoto LA to dallas dallas the Tampa that was 11 days Dean spend a lot of time in the air sowe can maintain face-to-face contact with his clients around the world what are some of the inside secrets ofthe trade that people like you know that other people don't oh gosh I mean there's so many of themit's on every subject you know how you pack is a key one you know how you gothrough the security line it's all about logistics for the most part all thetricks and what do you do when something goes wrong you want to you anticipate itstarted to snow i've looked at weather.com or whatever so you startmaking backup reservations sometimes I'll have two or three reservations at atime have to be offensive vs defensive that's the secret of a real Road Warrior it's not just road warriors like Deanzigzagging through our skies air travel is so common today that our Airways arefilled with all kinds of travelers some of them more unusual than others here are three regular passenger flightsone passenger on each flight is traveling in cargo brought aboard in aspecial box called an air trade baggage compartments of commercial airlines arethe most common way to ship dead bodies long distances everyday 50 are shippedfrom one state alone florida it's a retirement Mecca but whenthose golden years come to an end many deceased retirees are flown home forburial these passengers on the other hand are very much alive but they'reunder armed guard and they wear handcuffs as well as seatbelts they're traveling courtesy of theJustice Department which runs its own airline flying prisoners too distantcourt hearings or Penitentiary's and reporting some illegal aliens out of thecountry with so many people flying for one reason or another our skies are thebusiest in the world but they weren't always so crowded i'm heading to mcdonald past Montana tovisit a relic of our earliest days of flight transportation wise this place isdefinitely off the grid not fun feel like I'm standing on top ofthe world pretty much are we on top continental divide the call montana bigsky country and it does look pretty empty up here but this 90-foot tower holds a clue to how we learn to navigate are crowded skies microorganism with the Montana Department of Transportation aeronautics division so I wouldn't bethings that basically do the give you a visual reference when you're flying atnight so these literally are kind of like lighthouses in the sky yes the story of this air beacon datesback to the birth of commercial air travel in the nineteen-twenties aviationcompanies were eager to fly cross-country but they had no way tonavigate the night portion of the 30 hour trip so they invented one paying farmers tolight bonfires in their fields creating a path of flames to guide pilots throughthe night soon replaced the bonfires with anetwork of 1500 gasps beacons coming in nicely 25 me way Ben by the 1960s modern radar was replacing the gas beacons except in Montana where the peaks of the Rockies block radarsignals leaving pilots to rely on the old beacons so they wouldn't crash intothe mountains to this day my continues to tend the beacons and make surethey're in good working order the heck of a client it's a long one isn't so this is whatthe pilots actually see this lamp is focused in the middle of this 24 inchmirror and as it's turning around you get sharp flashes you're you'reapproaching the beacon when you see the beacon it looks like it's flashingthat's because it's turning around you only get them for a second even though every other state has longsince abandoned the beacons we still live with their legacy many of the firstradar towers were built along this network of gas beacons which means thatif you take a commercial flight today and fly along one of the early skywaysyour path will look like a zigzag that traces the lines that sprang up frombonfire to bonfire and then become a beacon from bonfire to beacon to radarwe've made progress but as our skies got busier we needed away to handle the traffic enter the federal aviationadministration faa which maintains our complex flight management system today here's how it works each airport control tower guides eachplane to take off then a regional control center keeps tabs on it until itreaches 10,000 feet where the flight enters one of the 21 enroute centersacross the country and watching over the entire system are the people in thisstate-of-the-art bunker in Northern Virginia people like flight managerDebra Griffith air traffic control system commands and places of minutes ya feel like a minute movie wargames orsomething now what are all those lights up on thatscreen those are flights those would be active lights in the system right nowhow many planes we look at during the peak portion of the day were five to sixthousand flights active it's Tuesday afternoon just an ordinary day forDeborah was sort of a traffic cop of the skies morning everybody this is the perfectwith you for the 1215 planning telecon we're going to start with New Yorkhaving the gusty winds morning York morning thank you we are on a 33 loveevery two hours Deborah Leeds what could be the biggestconference call in the world thousands of passengers lives are on the lineabout west to Southern California track on you consider any more informationright now just don't get it with the rbr the world feeling this every majorairline airport shipping company the Secret Service NASA and the militarylistening for updates to the national flight plan to terminal history of ourceilings in this ok that will conclude this cell phonewill be back with you at fourteen fifteen command centers out thank you assoon as she hangs up Deborah begins juggling this networks limited air spaceto keep traffic flowing down San Francisco Board can actually putceilings in there for hours this morning alright she reroutes planes around sanfrancisco's fog and ground others so they won't get caught in a bottleneckcaused by strong winds over New York right now going down to the next fourhours see how their rules so it's kinda like a butterfly effectwhere you have a destruction in one place in it ripples all the way acrosscountry it does have a ripple effect it doesbecause New York is slow down its gonna historically slow down the other marketsaround it because those those airplanes go in and out of New York and go to FortWorth and to houston and remember sentence kogda Cleveland all theseflights depend on Deborah's ability to manage America's airspace she's good at it and the system workswell most of the time but the problem with this system is that it's based onradar aging technology that requires air traffic controllers to leave largesafety margins between each plane which means fewer planes can take to the skywith our Airways nearing maximum capacity the FAA needs a game changer if the air becomes a montana recallAviation's past you can get a taste of our future by heading to an even moreisolated part of the country this is rush are in Juneau Alaska only tenpercent of this state is accessible by Road show up here every day commutingdepends on pilots like Sam right wow this totally beats my own computer welcome to my office it may be beautiful but over the past 20years one-third of all commuter plane crashesin the United States happened in Alaska and sand flies these treacherous skies everyday and what exactly is your job my job is to pick people and great male UPSFedEx from juno which is the Jetport to all the smaller communities aroundSoutheast Alaska what are some of the more common and uncommon things that youtransported well very very very very pregnant women taking the hospital fordelivery i'm taking a piss you off because everyone that's a serious thingto me knock on wood I've made it every timewolves we carry pools and carry affairs carried a really pissed-off Wolverine iswinter the Wolverine was going to finish soda or someplace to be bred and hedidn't know that so he was spot-on so you really are sort of like theconnective tissue that allows these outlying communities to interact on adaily basis with rest of the world that's true we look at ourselves morelike a little air road system how hard is it to fly around here is it is achallenging well today's like a gorgeous day rightyou can see 480 miles hundred miles after some days we can only see twomiles in Alaska as a montana rows of mountains block radar signals and thesnow and fog can quickly roll in from the ocean forcing pilots to fly blindamong the glaciers so pilots like Sam are using a newsatellite-based gps system which unlike radar can reach every corner of theirairspace so basically this shows you everything that's in your immediatevicinity right absolutely if you make a turn toward somethinghigher than you that will turn red it will say hey this is red this is nota good idea in Alaska the accident rate for planes that have been equipped withGPS has dropped by almost fifty percent and this system that keeps Salmonspassengers safe is beginning to have a much wider impact gps is a backbone of anew FAA plan called next-gen designed to completely overhaul air traffic controlair alaska was one of the first airlines to test this new technology their pilots like Mike Adams welcome to one of the most advantageous features about the next-gen program ability now to navigate or directly these blue symbols representground-based navigation aids that prior times we would have been flying a zigzag line between those as we go from station to station now with GPS navigation wecan fly directly from way . away . as you see here and that allows us toshorten our route distance create a more direct flight and that in turn freeze-upair space for other craft occupy hence increasing capacity the estimated costfor next-gen as high as much as a hundred and sixty billion dollars but itwill allow the FAA dy 1.3 billion passengers a year by 2031 twice as manyas I can handle today so far I've been traveling mostly onplanes and trains all packed full of people the most Americans prefer theirpersonal space so getting from A to B usually means one thing cars that's definitely true in dallashere like most of the country Americans take driving for granted return the key and go while driving feelof like individual choice it's only possible because of our system ofhighways which is one of the busiest and most sophisticated pieces of infrastructure in the world and we have grown so dependent on the freedom and mobility of the open road collectively driving three trillion miles every yearat today the health of our country depends on the health of our highways so specialists like traffic analyst GregJordan work behind the scenes to help improve the flow of traffic like that beauty interchanges oddly elegant know it'skind of like some sort of geometric shapes an aerial perspective will giveyou an insight that is sometimes very hard to get on the ground he's right from the sky I can see where cars are bottlenecking and where they're moving along at a nice clip local transportation planners fromNew York to California value Greg's expertise he provides data so they can see for themselves where they need to invest in roads where they need to build new onesor widen them or increase Highway Patrol and are you actually getting that data well it's it's mainly time-lapsephotography looking at the snapshots greg has taken over time which strikes me is not just the roads themselves but the number of housing development shugging the highways this is a new development if this is in Louisvilleit's right near the newly completed state highway 121 so these communities are only possible because of that freeway the freeway is the lifebloodpeople like to say if you build it they will come and into a degree that's trueof coming out with you build it that encourages people this is what more and more of ourcountry looks like today a tapestry of suburban neighborhoods woven together byquiet streets and bordered by dizzy highways when the federal governmentstarted building these interstate highways more than 50 years ago theywere intended to strengthen connections between far-flung cities but they endedup totally reshaping local communities this is what the sleepy town ofarlington texas look like in 1950 and this is what happens when interstate 30connected to nearby dallas and fort work highway stretching north from DallasLord people out to the cheap land and open space of Arlington and othersuburbs like this one colleague and these suburbs gave birth to a wholenew meaning of life this is a suburban dream the cul-de-sacbig houses surrounded by green logs on a street with no through traffic butliving here comes at a cost to understand that cost we used GPS totrack the cars of everyone living on this tiny cul-de-sac for a week each color represents one of the fivefamilies that pink car is phil thompson heading to work their Savior ue drivingher son's to school her husband Kip in the red car is on his way to the airportfor a business trip our car culture is so common now that weforget how different it is from the rhythms of urban american life just ahalf-century ago modern suburbs promote a landscape where most things areaccessible only by car so the suburban residents spend much of their timebehind the wheel they drive to get coffee thank you to dotheir banking buy groceries in fact the dr fifty percent more than their parentsdid I probably put on maybe a hundred miles a day easily 25,000 30,000 miles ayear but basically the assumption is that if you're gonna live in thisneighborhood you have to have a car that's exactlyright the way they design colleyville and in our community is this it's offthe beaten path you have to drive 10 or 15 minutes before you get to a majorroad and all this driving means our families walk a whole lot less walkingis definitely more recreational I walk the dogs in the neighborhood to themailbox and back now the other walking i do is going to be from parking garagesto appointments when I go to customer meetings between the rental car agencyand and the gates of the airport's most of us don't mind all this driving butthere's a problem as suburban life evolves and our daily destinationschange our road system can't adapt fast enough look at our five families they rarelyventure into the city of dallas all week our highways were designed to get peoplefrom the suburbs two jobs and stores in the central business districts butnowadays most people live work and shop in the suburbs and the smaller secondaryroads are jammed on top of that since we built our highway system the populationhas doubled and the number of cars on the road has more than tripled thatmeans more people stuck in traffic on roads that weren't designed to get themwhere they want to go at the end of the week after collectively navigating over600 miles of suburban thoroughfares our family's return to the cul-de-sac thereare the Johnsons last ones in yeah meanwhile few miles away roadconstruction crews are just beginning the workday the dallas-fort Worth area planners are trying to reduce congestion by building the way out in the problem this place is home to more roadconstruction than anywhere else in the country but it won't be long before thisfreeway attracts more people creating more traffic and driving demand for evenmore roads it's kind of an infinite construction loop some places are taking a different approach i'm heading to one of the nation'sfastest-growing cities and one of his most popular destinations Las Vegas eachyear the city of 2 million has to move a rotating cast of 36 million visitors through its streets today the national finals rodeo iscoming to town which means extra traffic pushingalready crowded streets to their limit instead of building new roads as they doin dallas Nevada's transportation specialists are using technology to makethe most of the ones they have we're taking into a place that we call thefishbowl jacobs know is one of Nevada's transportation experts wow this is impressive you know itreally looks like we got some real rocket science going on her and weactually do it's a very complex system of hardware and software that we canmonitor everything that's going on in the major intersections in the majortraffic points in the las vegas valley and are these active 24 hours a day to24-hour town gotta monitor traffic 24 hours a day for all this rocket science the most powerful tool is a device weoften take for granted the old reliable traffic light or doing something thatmost other places in this country haven't tried that's adaptive trafficsignal control if we get a lot of traffic on one particular direction orin one particular quarter we need to make changes on the fly so we candistribute the traffic more efficiently that's really a big brother-typeapproach hundreds of cameras feed real-timetraffic data to the fishbowl where staff can adjust 1250 traffic signals to keepthe roads moving so you're not adding capacity by building new roads you're just making the existing systemsmarter that's correct we can get about twenty percentadditional capacity by implementing systems like this and for oneone-hundredth of the cost of a freeway or a roadway expansion and it's not onlycameras monitoring the action as a Saturday night rush art begins i'mheading out to the field with one of Nevada's road managers chuckles islandto see how he solves problems on the frontline we do have some traffic backedup over there tens of thousands of rodeo fans are ontheir way to the stadium it to get all those cowboys and cowgirls tothe stadium Chuck needs to make sure that each one of the city's busyintersections gets just the right amount of what she calls green time I am alittle concerned about Spencer why that's a pretty long line of traffic so we're gonna do about that and whatwe're seeing is a lot of empty road way out here huh we're going to steal a little bring time try and get over here that's reallyinteresting way to think about it I I never thought of traffic that way butyou're actually thinking of green time as like a scarce resource a finiteresource and you're trying to allocate it in the most efficient way possible that's exactly what heaven what we need is at Paradise Chuck callsa fishbowl to order up a new light pattern mount one paradise let's try and hold that one green aslong as we can get it i'll be downloading in just a second just no wayyou can get everybody green it's not going to have so the best we can do isif you do have to stop here i want to get you as many lights down the streetas I can before I have to stop you again light by light intersection byintersection Chuck stays one step ahead of grid log and get everyone to therodeo ladies and gentlemen are ready around inthis area lights cowboy out what up a little with him come on the party's over and i'm leaving LasVegas and who do I see at the airport but that veteran road warrior deaneryyou all doing here passing through what are you doing here I'm flying back home i'm going to usethat I got a flight in about half an hour higher good about Dean like most ofus depends on a transportation systemthat's being pushed to its limits and those limits are put to the test everyday on the streets of my last stop Los Angeles when it comes to our transportation triumphs and failures it's the ultimate example la has morecars than any other county in America 12 million of them it's a vast fleet that can move us toevery corner of the county also 12 million reasons why you might not getthere in time unlike Las Vegas la doesn't have roadsmart enough to move all this traffic and unlike Dallas there's no room hereto build new freeways it's one more system limited by plansmade in another era a hundred years ago most people in Los Angeles traveled bystreetcar and they had the largest urban rail network in the world then in thenineteen forties the city abandoned streetcars and began an unprecedentedfreeway building frenzy this set of aerial surveys shows how freeways weredesigned to cut through neighborhoods that prompted activist to fight back andblock construction of new roads as a result la was left with the worst ofboth worlds devastated neighborhoods and an incomplete freeway system thisoriginal freeway plan promised an additional fifteen hundred miles of roadand here's what was actually built just 918 extra miles and the city has had todeal with that shortfall every driver in la experiences 64 hours of delays on average every year nearly three entire days spent stuck in traffic d miles per hour which is certain we're looking at down below as the i-5freeway where their inching along it probably three miles per hour rightlisten let me just take a break here I've got a report coming up from the station but once again we want to tell you about that singular it up on the to Commander Tucker street is a city's last radio traffic reporter who still pilots a helicopter to hunt down bottlenecks and so far the east by 210 freeway was backed up to the 118 you know I've been up here doing a traffic watch over Los Angeles for 27 years have you seen a lot of changes in traffic of course thetraffic is worse a lot more volume rush hour starts earlier last longer it starts out at some of the freewayscoming in from the east at 5am Wow and it probably goes until about 8pm socalling you at rush hour is sort of a misnomer more like rest day yeah eventhe word Russian i think is appropriate for some reason here in SouthernCalifornia computers are really independent souls and they they reallylike having that freedom but also I think that an automobile is kind of a statement about them and who they are do they think they are you can find their identity really what do you think's going to happen over time well I think the freeways will get so slow where a lot of people just decide it's not worth the grief and the stress so hopefully they will start a bracing mass transit a revival of its mass transit system might be Elias best hope to keep the city moving so the city is now investing in a dozen projects like this one you're looking at an old street car route that was paved over years ago and now it's being reclaimed for a new lightrail line infrastructures cycle of life but these projects are big and expensive and it's hard to imagine the people of Los Angeles giving up their deep-rooted car culture la's and the tangle of roads and freeways another system at the breaking point like many other transportation networks there are plenty of ideas on how to fix this but the question is will we at every stage of our history we have answered the challenge of how to connect the country and move a nation today we're at another crossroads technology offers new solutions but to improve our system will need to invest a lot ofmoney and change old habits this week as a nation will drive 60 billion miles traffic will make three million of us late for work 22,000 free cars will pass through the double hump on the way to every corner of the country so the only averaged 10 miles per hour deanery will earn another 5,000 frequentflyer miles and you'll have a lot of company in the air one quarter of allthe flights in the world will take off or land in the United States and in the process airlines will lose 45 thousand pieces of luggage the largest transportation network onearth has its weak spots and it's definitely showing its age but we've managed to keep it up and running and for the most part it still gets us where we want to go as for me my journey across the country is about to end right where it started i'm heading back to New York on the redI'm just one more American on the move America revealed is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS stationfrom reader's like you thank you