Business and transportation industry leaders today joined Transportation for America for a briefing on Capitol Hill to underscore the potential of a reformed, multi-year transportation bill to boost the economy and create lasting jobs across the country. Business leaders from Siemens, IBM and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents more than 300 major companies in the Silicon Valley including Yahoo!, Microsoft and AT&T, highlighted the power of new and innovative policies to revolutionize the transportation sector, make our country more economically competitive for the 21st century and provide working Americans the affordable options they need to get to their jobs every day.

“The systemic nature of urban transportation is also the key to its solution. We need to stop focusing only on pieces of the problem: adding a new bridge, widening a road, putting up signs, establishing commuter lanes, encouraging carpooling or deploying traffic copters. Instead, we need to look at relationships across the entire system—and all [...]

If we’re serious about reducing CO2 emissions, with nearly a third (28%) of our greenhouse gas emissions coming from the transportation sector, the question won’t be should we try to get cuts from transportation, but rather, what cuts can we get from transportation?’ A new report released Wednesday morning studies that question in depth and demonstrates how we can clean the atmosphere while also reducing our oil dependency, expanding our options for living and getting around and making transportation more affordable overall.

When filmmakers envision the future of our transportation system, they often seem to come up with one enduring image — millions of layers of flying cars breezing effortlessly through impossibly dense cities, surrounded by mile-high skyscrapers. There’s a good chance the future may not look quite so, well, futuristic. But that doesn’t mean that advanced computer technology — namely, wireless networks known as Intelligent Transportation Systems that feed through our transportation infrastructure — won’t have a huge role to play in helping move people and goods safer, more efficiently, and with less pollution in the 21st Century.