Holiday travel sucks, and probably has ever since a bunch of shepherds, wise men, and angels converged on a stable in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. Every November, every December, every year, America’s highways and airports runneth over, and not in the good way.

Thus, a question: What would it take to make the US a transcontinental Whoville, where the only thing louder than the roar of efficient travel is the constant caroling? And would it be worth the price?

The Fix

“Well, for starters I would design a system where the power didn’t go out in the world’s busiest airport for 50 hours,” says Seth Young of Ohio State University’s Center for Aviation Studies.1 (It was 11 hours, but still, ouch Atlanta.)

More seriously, Young says the problems with holiday travel begin because most people are moving through major airline hubs. The best ways to alleviate that strain? Build more runways at smaller, regional airports, and route more flights through them. This would free up the larger hubs to handle the bulk of long distance holiday travel, all those people choosing Florida and Mexico over winter and extended family.

For those big city airports, Young recommends investing in frequent, reliable public transportation linkages. “People leave for the airport much earlier than they need to, which creates additional volumes of traffic,” Young says. If they know they can make their flight with time to spare, they’re less likely to show up mega early and spend six hours taking up space.

As for ground travel, adding lanes and freeways seems like the straightforward fix, unless you’ve completed your Armchair Associate’s Degree in Transportation Theory. “In any situation where you expand the infrastructure, you will encourage travel on that infrastructure,” says Megan Ryerson, a transportation engineer at the University of Pennsylvania. This is the rule of induced demand: If you build it, they will crowd. The real answer, then, is more investment in things like Amtrak, high speed rail, or, because we’re fantasizing anyway, hyperloop. Basically anything that spreads demand over multiple modes.

Of course, no transportation dreamscape would be complete without autonomous vehicles. Instead of a carpool lane, think of a dedicated roadway for robocars, shuttling people to the airport in orderly, automated fashion, no long term parking fees required.

Finally, infrastructure dollars could stretch a long way when applied to little technological fixes, like simply giving people accurate, real time information about their travel. Think Waze, but for everything: traffic, train times, whether the TSA security checkpoint has only one lane open (seriously, why do they do this?). The more information people have, the more rational their travel decisions become, and the less likely they are to trigger gridlock.

Crisis Reverted

Say we did it all: enough runways, planes, and lanes to handle humanity at its most itinerant and quiet the grumblers. Now we’ve got another question: What happens to to all that infrastructure during the 50 weeks a year Americans aren’t trading gifts and political opinions with their weirdest blood relations? Our best guess: disaster.

“If you force Delta to buy an extra 300 jets to satisfy demand for Thanksgiving and Christmas, they would then have to cover the cost of those extra jets,” says Paul Lewis, the vice president of finance and policy at the Eno Center for Transportation. “They would do that by increasing prices on all flyers through the rest of the year.”

Then there’s the cost of maintaining all the additional runways. Airports, which are usually owned by their host cities, make money by charging airlines a landing fee to use their facilities.