Author: Marina Ivanova

Winter storm was expected to drench the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic states with rain through Thursday morning and to bring snow to the Midwest through New England. That could have caused serious trouble to people traveling for the holidays. Some airlines were even advising customers headed to destinations such as New York, Boston and Philadelphia that they could reschedule their travel without a penalty or receive a refund. Despite the storm Thanksgiving travel started smoothly Wednesday at Orlando International Airport.

Delays were concentrated in the Northeast, where the storm brought wet weather to already busy airports and snow to inland areas. By midafternoon Wednesday, Orlando International Airport reported three canceled flights and 65 delays of more than 30 minutes.  These are the times when we’re reminded it’s one system,” said MCO spokeswoman Carolyn Fennell. “If planes can’t get out of their point of origin, then there are delays here.” The longest delay was two hours, airport officials said. Southwest Airlines, the busiest carrier at Orlando International, said operations were getting back on track Wednesday afternoon after minor delays because of the storm. Spokesman Dan Landson said about 75 percent of the airline’s system had great weather, which helped things run more smoothly.  Allegiant, the primary carrier at Orlando Sanford International Airport, said the airline has only a handful of flights scheduled Wednesday, which is a quieter day for departures from the Seminole County airport. Airline spokeswoman Jessica Wheeler reported no problems at midday Tuesday. Officials at Orlando International predict air traffic will be back to normal by Saturday and Sunday, which are forecast to be the busiest days at OIA during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Lawmakers are proposing black boxes to be installed in future car models to track mileage. America’s road planners are currently struggling to find cash to mend a crumbling highway system and some are proposing a „tax per mile” as a solution. The device would fit on the dashboard and would track a driver’s mileage, and then the mileage would be tallied up before a tax bill was sent to the driver at the end of the year.

This technology comes to replace the current „gas tax” which has proved to be non-effective. It has not been raised more than 20 years; plus each car could go different miles with the same amount of gas – those are some of the arguments supporting the idea. “This works out as the most logical alternative over the long term” says Lee Munnich, a transportation policy expert at the University of Minnesota. But many are concerned that a device like that would give the government another way of tracking citizens.  “Concerns about Big Brother and those sorts of things are a major problem,” said Alauddin Khan, who directs strategic and performance management at the Nevada Department of Transportation. “It was not something people wanted.” There might be a solution. A small California company, called True Mileage has a device that could go in the place of a black box but does show the car’s location. It was originally designed as a way of paying car insurance “per mile”. This technology doesn’t use GPS and only uploads limited amount of information using a modem. “People will be more willing to do this if you do not track their speed and you do not track their location,” said Ryan Morrison, chief executive of True Mileage. The U.S. Senate approved a $90 million pilot project last year that would have involved some 10,000 cars. But the House leadership killed the proposal. Several states are going ahead anyway – Nevada, New York, Oregon and Illinois developed different strategies for testing the technology. The I-95 Coalition, which includes 17 state transportation departments along the Eastern Seaboard (including Florida), is studying how they could go about implementing the change.