The other day, the Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, came to the office where I have been an intern for the last 15 months. All of us, even the lowly interns, spent at least an hour or two preparing for the visit last week. We all gathered in the human factors lab. We discussed what to wear, what to say, how to stand, and who would demonstrate the simulators. I was selected for my “bright eyes, no glasses” to be the subject of a demonstration that detected eyes on the road. Everyone was told to arrive early. It began to feel like an elaborate surprise party – only jumping out of the dark would likely result in a few hours in Secret Service custody.

The highlight of the visit turned out to be the short town hall meeting that took place with the entire company. The questions asked by members of many different divisions and the answers given by Secretary LaHood gave me a new and unique perspective on how the organization works as well as how certain aspects of government work.

The trend I’ve begun to hear in a few places concerns multimodal transportation solutions. Personally, my commute to work includes a bus, a subway, and plenty of walking. I would bike if there were a safe place to do it, since it would be much faster.

Unfortunately, one mode of public transportation doesn’t cut it. We have plenty of technology. We have trains that look like bullets and passenger planes that can break the sound barrier. We have tunnels and bridges, subways and highways. What we don’t really have is a good understanding of how all these modes of transportation operate as a whole, and how to improve the entirety of the system.

And what I was beginning to grasp based on Mr. LaHood’s answers was that no one is really funding these types of questions. There’s money for specific projects — paving highways, improving high-speed rail, looking at runway safety issues — but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to examine a problem of this magnitude right now. Beyond that, there most likely will not be one cookie-cutter solution that works everywhere. It’s a huge issue that will take a long time and a lot of brain power to solve.