Scott Tilley 7:58 a.m. ET Feb. 9, 2017

A recent trip home from Montreal to Melbourne took me nearly 30 hours. It should have taken me 8. The cascade of mechanical problems, poor customer service, and overall incompetence left me tired and frustrated. I lost time. I lost sleep. But at least I eventually made it home safe and sound.

The whole experience made me realize how susceptible our air travel system is to a single point of failure. Just one thing going wrong causes a terrible domino effect. Unfortunately, I can only see the situation getting worse as traffic levels increase.

Air travel is just one form of transportation that makes up our national infrastructure. Consider cargo traffic, which has increased significantly in the last few years. Cargo ships have become gargantuan platforms that carry huge loads across the oceans. Ports around the world are constantly being re-dredged to accommodate these floating behemoths. One of the biggest cargo ships in the world, the CSCL Globe, is more than four football fields long. It can carry 19,000 twenty-foot containers. Think how many 18-wheel transport trucks that means on the highways.

How do we know whats inside each of these cargo containers? What technology do we use to ensure that weapons are not smuggled into the country? Once the containers are unloaded from the ship, what rail and road routes do they take before they reach their final destination?

The volume of trucks and cars on our roads is also growing. In many parts of the world, the rising middle class is resulting in a surge of highway traffic. In 2010, there was a traffic jam outside of Beijing, China that lasted for almost two weeks. Nearly 20 lanes of traffic stretched for more than 60 miles.

And you thought your commute was bad.

The amount of time people waste in their car, stuck in traffic during their daily commutes, continues to increase. In some big cities, spending more than four hours a day each way has become the norm. Not only is this terribly stressful on the driver (and passengers), its a colossal loss of productivity. Our national GDP suffers from gridlock. Its also a mounting security risk.

Tonight at 8:00pm in the Henegar Center, Dr. Cliff Bragdon will be speaking about transportation security as part of the Center for Technology & Societys Tech Talk series. Tickets are just $10 and can be ordered online at http://www.henegar.org or by calling the box office at 321-723-8698. I hope you come to hear about some of the many challenges facing our national transportation system and some of the possible solutions to avoiding intermodal gridlock in the future.

Scott Tilley is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Contact him at Technology Today@srtilley.com.

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A growing concern: Technology and transportation - Florida Today