where does the money from this trust fund to go? do with violet towards the major airports who seemingly have their own revenue stream with the commercial airlines that are there, , and we tell they have n their terminals and parking fees they can do? or do we funnel more towards the small airports, the small general aviation airports that

take traffic away from those large commercial airports and they could focus on airline traffic. so that's a part of the debate. the debate also has been about who should have access to those, who receives federal funding, for those of you who know anything about general aviation, general aviation, everything but the commercial airlines, they are often seen as rewriters in this system. they use the air traffic control system without necessarily paying for it and they want use of airports in the country without paying the same kind of these, so argue the commercial airlines, that they pay. and particularly during the 1950s and 1960s as commercial airline travel in the united states was expanding at a really dramatic rate, one of the things people .2, why can't we

expand more, why do i have flight delays, what am i circling to get into the airport was, because all of these little airplanes are clogging up all the slots at the airports. so there was a big fight to move ga off of the big airports and give them their own airports. they are saying it's our tax dollars that are paying for this. there's a lot of fights within the aviation community itself over who has access to the airports, who gets to use them. but the number one problem, issue, facing airports that explains a lot of what is going on is airport noise. especially since the dawn of the jet age, but going back to the 1920s. people don't like to live around airports. airports create a tremendous amount of noise, and particularly after the jet age, noise became the single against

limiter, and building your airports and expanding existing airports. if there is a big expense that airports have that does not have to do with runways and terminals, it's mitigating noise. either soundproofing homes and businesses around them, or as many airports found, the only way to control land use around the is to literally buy out everybody around you. you tear down the homes, remove the businesses. nobody there to make complaints anymore. very simple answer, but a very expensive answer and one that has dramatic impact on the shape of the landscape around airports in the united states. finally, there is repeatedly the issue of privatization. should airports the publicly owned or privately owned?

in much of the western world, airports have become privately owned. the big example is british airports which are all privately owned. after maggie thatcher came in there was talks of privatizing airports in the united states during the 1980s. it comes up periodically. in the united states we have pretty much stuck with a public model, although there are people who call for privatization all the time. to that i would just remind everyone of a little thing called the dubai ports deal were one of the reasons why congress decided that this is not a good thing was why should we have our ports being operated by foreign companies? we don't let our airports be run by foreign companies, but remember, capital is global entity the british airports are owed by a spanish company. there's my primer on airport history. [applause]

>> well, i want to thank the national history center. also, it's an honor to meet you be in company with these two great historians, zach and janet, and to be in the company of you all who are advising our public servants on how to give us the best infrastructure future we can have. i think that infrastructure future is dependent upon a past we don't understand very well. in fact, more than that, i would say the past we have grown up with about surface transportation in this country is a past that was created in part to justify the status quo. i don't think we can understand the status quo or how we got there until we re-examine this past, which is what i have tried to do myself in my own work.

time is short. i will concentrate for that reason on surface transportation infrastructure, particularly on roads and streets. and i will concentrate in particular on urban transportation because to try to take on both urban and rural would be difficult, and more than that, i think the more anomalous situation to explain is the urban one. we have a surface transportation system in this country that is automobile dependent. automobile dependency is not necessarily a bad thing. automobiles are excellent tools for certain jobs, particularly useful in areas of low to moderate density and particularly useful for trips of more than a mile but under 100 miles. and by that standard there is some degree of sense for our automobile dependent transportation system in a lower density areas. it's harder to explain why this

country, i don't think it's an exaggeration to say, destroyed and rebuilt its own cities in the 20th century to serve automobiles, as if the city serves the transportation mode rather than the transportation mode serving the city. for that reason i'd like to concentrate specifically on that question, which has substantial policy implications for the future and that has a history that i don't think is well appreciated at all. if we were to go back 100 years and tell people that in the future people would drive to work even in large cities, expect to find parking when they got there, expect policymakers to make sure we have had affore parking when we got there, and that much of the urban fabric that they knew would be gone to make room for this, they would have been shocked. and i don't mean ordinary urban americans who certainly would have been, but even experts and policymakers were quite explicit

that you don't rebuild cities to make room for cars. it makes no sense to do so. so i think we have to ask ourselves, how did that happen? and asking it i think we will better understand the status quo. again, to go back 100 years you would find people strolling in streets wherever they chose. you would find that, in fact, the judges and juries and even the police officers at the time were quite accepting of this. we would find more work that if such a person was injured by a vehicle that the jury and the church would be most likely to find in favor of this pedestrian who was using the street. and i think this is something we should be thinking about because it turns out that walking in cities is an extremely energy efficient public health conducive, low-cost, and spatially efficient way to get around a city, relative certainly to an automobile. it's not to say the automobile doesn't have a place. it is a tool, and like all tools it has jobs for which it is

well-suited. our policy error in the 20th century that we living with now is, i would say, misunderstanding a tool that is actually at certain jobs as the tool for all jobs in all applications. how did this happen? the most common story is that americans preferred the automobile. they bought it in mass, particularly once he became affordable thanks to henry ford, and policy responded to this mass demand and this preference. incidentally, if you go to the national museum of american history, a fairly short walk from here, you will find that while they are admirably complex in the explanation, the predominant message is that this was indeed a response to popular demand by americans who prefer to drive. that is the account you will get in the exhibit called america on the move, which you will find in

the general motors hall of transportation of the national museum of american history, which they paid $10 million to get them to name after them, presumably out of generosity at least but perhaps some self interest. how did that happen? i'm going to give you a highly simplified, and for that reason, it could be certainly question but i think the questions will stand up when it gets to the level of detail that i don't have time to get into, if i offer you this abbreviated account. the first obstacle to automobile predominance in american cities was the notion that people belonged in streets as they did, and automobiles did not come as they did not, and that was the general consensus view of ordinary americans as expressed in letters to the editor of newspapers which were quite vocal about this, but also judges, juries, police officers,

authorities and even transportation experts. the first generation of traffic engineers in this country that dealt with street traffic as opposed to real traffic were also unanimous that the automobile is wrong way to get around the city and, in fact, the think of most predictable recommendation of traffic engineers in the 1920s was to forbid curb parking, , to which you get the predictable objection well then, it's going to be hard to drive, to which there and was good, we have better ways for you to get around the city. urban transformation infrastructure then, predominately thin electric street railways, that although not very fast, moved to people in quantity with extraordinary spatial efficiency and at low cost. now, this was an obstacle to people who wanted a future for in cities. predominately at first local

people with this interest. i'm talking about the local automobile club, the local automobile dealers association, a local taxi cab company, and they attack this problem first at the local level. one of the preferred methods was to equate traffic safety with keeping pedestrians off the street from which it sound so to commonsensical to now. outside of cross works. but that was a tough sell a century ago -- crosswalks. when a first generation of traffic safety campaigns and vilified unanimously the car and the driver put all the responsibility on them and said look, if you want to operate an automobile on the city street, that's fine but you got to make sure that as the operator of the changes the uncle you accept the full responsibility for going at a suitable speed and for making sure that you are very alert to pedestrians anywhere and everywhere. newspaper editorials were unanimous about this. we need to make sure the drivers

bear the responsibility. so it was a problem first of all of responsibility shifting. how do you do that? in the safety campaigns, local automobile interest groups reinvented a term of midwestern slang called jaywalker. the original hybrid of the j they came a couple years earlier was j driver of the driver menaces pedestrian. they reinvented this term as way to ridicule the pedestrian who walks anywhere and in public safety campaign they cut boy scouts to work for them for free handy little cards to pedestrians that said you do know you are jaywalking? you should stay off the streets. newspaper campaigns tell us this is how people learned the word. this was not enough. it was a great first start. a second step was getting cities to actually legally forbid jaywalking, and by the mid 1920s they were succeeding at this through means i won't go

into for reasons of time for which i would be happy to explain. a nice illustration of this redefinition for whom streets are come from yellow taxicab company of chicago which in 1926 managed to introduce the first coordinated traffic signals on city streets anywhere in the world. that is, traffic signals coordinated so that motor vehicles going a certain speed would never get a red light is going to appropriate the day would hit the green wave. they got to see because they want to streets to be for cars, namely for taxicabs, , and once they got in, the response was quite vocal for pedestrians, hey, we can't walk in the street wherever you want anymore. this is this is a piece of that redefinition as well. a transitional point came in 1923 when local people in

cincinnati, 42,000 of them, signed petitions to mechanically equip automobiles with speed governors such that they wouldn't be capable of going faster than 25 miles per hour, and this was to be a a referen. they got it on the ballot. i had a referendum in cincinnati. i call it a transitional point because it terrified people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities. it terrified them into organizing first locally and nationally. so the automobile interest group, national automobile interest group was called the national automobile chamber of commerce. they formed a traffic and safety committee that became the predecessor of what was later called the automobile safety foundation which was by then funded entirely by automobile manufacturers association, we dominantly general motors. they organized and they are quite explicit, we have to redefine what city streets are for. we have to redefine the best

places predominately for automobiles. the way we do that is by redefining safety, redefine safety is keeping people off of the streets, and we redefine safety also as making what they did were pleased to call foolproof highways. that is, highways with upgrade crossings, median strips and shoulders such that you would have collision. they promise these highways would eliminate 98% of all collisions. never quite got there. because of course the introduce new hazards having to do with things like speed and written collisions, for example. and they became the basis for the highway transportation engineering discipline, which promised to free us from the affliction, the affliction that by the '70s was costing us more than 50,000 the titles a year in this country of traffic for thales through highway engineering alone.

we have learned the hard way that was clearly not enough. we have since introduced, sometimes against the objections of the automobile industry, ways to reduce those numbers. but as long as we have an automobile dependent society, conventional automobile dependent society, that affliction will process. i want to close by saying a word about the future. there's hope and it's not unreasonable hope that autonomous vehicles will deliver us from this affliction as most of the ones like, for example, traffic congestion. but by no means is this a panacea or certainty. technology gives us a menu from which we can choose. it's not an inevitable fate that we have to prepare for the way it so often characterized. one of the terrible legacies of automobile dependency in the 20th century i would contend is that we have public health disaster in the form of

sedentary living. it's given us unprecedented levels of preventable disease due to physical inactivity. autonomous vehicles could perpetuate that. in more practical terms perhaps we are dealing now with the physical infrastructure crisis, how do is maintain the overbuilt infrastructure that we inherited from the 20th century? it's a tough problem. i'm not sure we can readily accept the proposal that it's a solution to switch to technology when technology itself require substantial maintenance and we should be asking ourselves, do we need to prepare a plan for avoiding the future of the technology infrastructure maintenance crisis, not just the physical infrastructure maintenance crisis? finally i want to knowledge we have a guest here from the white d eisenhower commemoration memorial commission carl, and i

suggest a republican five-star general has warned us about the situation we are now in with highways. in his farewell address three days for left office, in 1961 president eisenhower caution us against losing our independence as a democracy to the military industrial complex, a content -- congressional corporate aligned which would compete with the popular will as expressed through democracy. that morning i think was wise anything it's analogous to what we should now be cautious about, which is as we've learned, since the 1930s much of our surface transportation policy is the product of similar complexes having to do with organizations like the american road builders association, which is to become the national highway users

conference, the associated general contractors of america, the american trucking association, all of which deserve a place at the table but their voices must not crowd out the voice of the citizenry of the country. thank you very much. [applause] >> before you open up the questions i i would like to drp out common themes that are think are important not just to transportation but to all kinds of infrastructure. first of all we learned infrastructures not just a physical object. it's also a series of rules about who gets to use that. if you're in your car unless there's a sign this is private road future about to go where the road is. whereas if you try that on airplane and land it would have airport you want to come that's going to be a problem for you. we see this all kinds of other infrastructure as well particularly transportation but we have debates over the radio

spectrum, for example. secondly, the importance not just a preference by the policy. that in a democratic society we are constantly going back and forth between the question of whether infrastructure should respond to popular demand or shape popular demand, and it's very delicate. i like to throw opening of barbara mikulski who came to prominence as a protester against a massive freeway through baltimore. that turned into a 40 year career in congress tenures in houston 30 years in the senate. there is a a think role for ordinary citizens to say no, we don't like this, this is not a preference for whatever the engineers say. the third is this question of public and private that is not an either/or question. it is this range of possibilities and one thing with her and from history of infrastructure is how many things have been tried, many of them have the same advantages and disadvantages. there is no one right or wrong way, there are many wrong ways but no one right way to

distinguish between public and private roles in infrastructure. and then finally and this takes us back to the question of externalities positive and negative. good works of infrastructure will have benefits long beyond their immediate needs. i think at central park, for example, were as we heard about jet noise, traffic facilities, these are the negatives whose costs are not always visible when the project is being designed. the one last thing i will say about infrastructure is that we are going to be on tv so please wait for the microphone before you ask your question, but i will look for hands. >> my name is -- >> wait for the mic. my name is sarah jo peterson. i have a background in history

and -- my question is, if you could speak to freight movement in the city. i think we spent a lot of time talking about passenger movement and people movement, but especially now we're all wondering how many ups trucks you can send out a street at the time, what kind of come tell us more about the freight side of this in the freight side and the decision-making of the policymaking that happen. >> historically, both local motor fleet operators like local trucking companies and in later national organizations, the american trucking associations, have long been advocates for making roads, streets and urban roads and streets accommodating to motor vehicles. now, if you go back 100 years or so or even just 80 years, most of that was a multimodal system where the freight would be delivered particularly by steam railroad in the distributed from warehouses to retail or other

destination in the city. and there was certain streets and roads that were sort of primary conduits for this that kept the truck and of the kinds of delivery traffic off of the smaller streets, and that's actually not too different for the most part from our today. i've is a ups truck may find itself going down quite a small street. policy i think becomes, there may be a watershed here after the 1950s when standards, particularly those coming from the american society of state highway officials can later american society of state highway and state official start mandating much more accommodating street and what infrastructure for trucks, particularly on the justification that emergency vehicles need to have wide turning, but the fire pirate ao

on and that happens to serve the interest of those also want trucks on the streets and roads as well. such that this permits the large vehicle traffic to percolate through the urban fabric much more completely for better and for worse, depending on who you ask. so i would consider that particular policy transition in the mid-20th century where curb turning radii, where the functional classification system serves particularly motor vehicle access is an important transition. >> i would just throw and may e it will all be delivered by drones and then you have an entirely different problem to deal with. >> other questions? >> so thank you very much.

all three of you are experts obviously on transportation infrastructure. there are a variety of other different kinds of infrastructure that obviously we're trying to deal with as well, congress is, in terms of electrical grids and the like. when question might be to ask if any of you have thoughts on that and its relationship to transportation infrastructure? are we dealing with similar sorts of questions or issues in that regard, or is this a different ball of wax altogether? the second question has to do with the size of the united states and its implications for infrastructure. if you look at most european country that are our counterparts in terms of creating transportation infrastructure, smaller, much of denture in population. obviously one of the reason which you move across great

distances is airways. another one is railroads which has largely disappeared from the american scene. i wonder if any of you would like to speak to that issue as well? >> well, obviously the size of the united states played a big role in the embrace of aviation. we were just very large, and airplanes could transport people and things much faster than surface transportation could. that's with the post office was all about. they wanted to deliver the mail faster, as the even as early as the 1920 they did an experiment where they were going to fly day and night, the mail, , from one coast to the other, and they could do it in 36 hours which was days ahead of what could happen if there was carried by the railroad. this was one of the dramatic

stunts that was done to prove the value of airmail, particularly for say contracts are of the kinds of documents that were very time sensitive. that you could deliver them very quickly. and it's a long way from one coast to the other in the united states. and so that also influenced didn't cause but influenced also the type of airplanes that we develop here in the united states, that then went on to dominate world aviation, the d.c. three i'm thinking of where that became the standard airliner around the world because it could conquer the distances that were in the united states and the european powers then could use it to consist of other empires, could use it to travel throughout the world. so the size of the united states had to do that but then it also,

had up a lot of airports different and a lot of people complain, the european airports and the asian airports, they are so much nicer than use airports. part of it is if you think about it, again, many of them have limited numbers of places where the international travelers have to come into and their specific designed to be showcased airports. they get a lot of national funding for them. whereas in the united states again, every town and city wants to have the airport, and we don't have a single national port of entry. dulles was kind of thought may be might be that we don't have that. we have multiple ones, and so it's not surprising that we don't have a big showcase airport that can be one of the best airports in the world. and so that's something i don't think it's into the debate will be complained about how horrible

our airports are. we just have a lot more of them than anyone else, and is a different political economy. again, there locally owned and operated. there is limited amounts of federal funding here, and the national government has not designated anyone as your single point of entry that we're going to make as our showcase airport. >> about the size of the country and its significance first of all, for transportation, i think it's interesting and not generally that well-known that when president roosevelt, through six lines on a map of the usa in 1938 and handed it to the chief of the bureau of public roads, thomas mcdonald and told me tell you what you think. the answer coming from mcdonald, one of the biggest highway and automobile promoters we've ever had was, people don't want to drive 3000 miles.

people don't want to drive 2000 miles. they have had trained to do th. in 1938 they had d.c. threes as will come along to help them do that, and he did not see that as the best way to commit this road building energy to these long-range roads. to him real made a lot of sense. i took real to get it off and university of virginia in charlottesville. to get a train departure of time that i couldn't take the charlottesville train. i had to go to fredericksburg which is an hour nap away, and then the departure was an hour late. so to make sure i could be actively last meant a hotel room. this is quite interesting. everyone of the signals was like a little smack and phase, take the car, dummy. take the car. this particularly bothers me when i continue to see what i consider rather naïve statements about what americans prefer to do when they travel presented in absolutist terms. if i ended up taking the car it

would not of been an expression of my preference, although very likely any genetic study that happen to measure that would have call that a demand and, therefore, they could have justified yet another springfield interchange expansion. which the last one cost $676 million in the last time i'd id it i didn't pay anything for it, so why would i do that? i want to suggest that the larger size of the country doesn't, is not a self evident justification for say really long distance road infrastructure, although clearly some of that is necessary. about of the kinds of infrastructure, yes, i think there are analogous questions. for example, right now where i am from, a gas pipeline is coming in. predictably most local people are unhappy about it so we have a classic question in infrastructure, and janet

referred to also when she spoke about noise, which is to what degree do we consider the local preference relative to a larger interest? here's where i would like to revive the term they used to be ubiquitous among regulators that i i see less and less, and that is what is the public interest? it's what made many of us remember, for example, the equal time ruled on broadcasting or if you give one side of . if you you might find somebody to offer another point of view. it gave his public service announcements, too. those were reflections of the public interest doctrine that aa think might be a useful guide, if not by any means a simple flyer of this couple get a problem. >> i'd just like to toss in, i haven't worked on direct research on water and electricity but i taught some of it. these are what economists in the early 20 simply start calling natural monopolies when you're building something really big,

it's really not so healthy to have another really big thing built next to it and privately owned railroads were overly built rigid competing trunk lines in both railroads and up in bankruptcy. and that's when the subject of a kind say we'll build one big powerline, when big road, we will build one big waterline. in some cases these will be private account, in other cases they will be publicly owned. we're talking about water that most american, big american cities have publicly owned waters. all of these two of some of the same issues, including these question of the public interest. so this is again a problem if you are committed to very small government, is what do you do when there are these natural monopolies? even some people who i'm

thinking of hayek for example, very skeptical of the government role may see a role for government in either owning or lease regulating some of these systems. question? >> as you know eisenhower had developed in definite views on infrastructure, and to some degree that came from his experience as a professional military officer, especially of course in world war ii. so when he came into the presidency, he thought and a learned to think a professional military officer inclusively, and he considered freedom of movement and the ability to move on land, at sea, in the air, and even in space. so his he was very much a larger totalview, but often at the core of it was what he carried as a military officer, remembering the five-star general status,

and his decision to be addressed as general, not president after the presidency. as he carried to the into the presidency he was always conscience conscious at the core security, security of the united states as a premier public interest, if you will. so there was him, the president, bringing attention to that. is it that, how would you describe the attention to that today as a major element of public interest in the context of infrastructure? eisenhower had a definite inclusive view and inform much what he did as president but i don't know and i'm not competent about how that is viewed today. >> as a historian i'm not sure my competency about how it is viewed today is necessarily distinctive in this room of people who are indeed policy experts. i will note that the national security point of view, as i'm

sure everybody knows in this room, the interstate highways in particular were justified or argued for on the grounds that it would help to evacuate cities in event of a soviet attack. you would want to evacuate cities. it appears to me that this was never one of the key is that president eisenhower shared, in part base this on notes from a meeting he held about a year before he left office, where he thought that the emphasis on urban highways had been vastly overplayed. i think if that's fair, if i'm interpreting those notes correctly, there is wisdom there because i believe it was hurricane harvey that hit houston and people couldn't get out of that city, and houston has the best urban in a state highways of the entire planet and they couldn't get out of that city.

in fact, if i recall correctly there was in order not to eat i could because it would've caused chaos on the highways of the city. so if i'm interpreting the minutes of that meeting correctly that president eisenhower didn't share that view that highways when the best way to the back people from a city, i think history of their outcome and not just in hurricane harvey but also other hurricane evacuation that have not been a stupendous success. >> i would just like to throw in that this is an issue for many countries, the roman empire built roads to connect and primarily for troop movement rather than freight, and starting in the early modern time european countries build roads for the same reason and then later railroads so you think about a conscious like canada and russia building these long trunk lines. really the transcontinental railroad in the united states is easy to justify as on military

grounds than freight grounds as richard white has written. that said, some of these countries i think have maybe stronger sense of limits. there's a great conference and candidate write a chance to talk to canadian historians and his understanding candidate bill and interstate national highway, but they build one and then it's up to the provinces to build whatever urban freeways under the kinds of connectors they want. as a result this leads to fewer urban freeways of the kind that future senator mikulski was protesting against. i think this goes back to what peter was saying about surface streets connect to much of a good thing. that's true of highways. that can be true of airports. that can be true of railroads. i don't know if there's any place that has overbuilt water, certainly dams, there is a great dam building them and ended in

the 1960s people interested the cost, and by middle and otherwise a building those dams. it's nice to have some kind of feedback loop of some system, whether it's user fees of congress are some to say this is too much. >> security is tight to the airports. most people don't realize it but most commercial airports also are co-located with either air national guard or reserve units. so they are an important part of that. and always have been from the beginning. navy, air force, army units on those airports. so that is still there and can cause some problems. but again if you want, most people at the want to encounter the national security state or the new normal, just go to the airport. right? take off your shoes. i didn't even have to show id to get in the study but had to show

an id, i had to take, shoes, i had to go through a metal detector, a full body scan to get onto an airplane today. so security in that way has certainly impacted the airport, but for national security interests, the airport infrastructure is still very important to the total force in the united states. >> mark levinson. the policy discussions about building infrastructure today are tied into a lot of other objectives, that are arguably interfere with building infrastructure at least as cheaply as it might be built. you've got prevailing wage laws, in some places project labor agreements. you've got requirements you get contracts to small businesses. you've got requirements to use locally made products or us-made steel or that sort of thing. how far back does this stretch

in the history of the federal governments involvement in infrastructure? >> i think they go back a long way, possibly before the founding. you have the old system of forced labor on roads, and british roads, a book talks about how people, vagrants were rounded up and told you're going to sort rocks if you want bread. so the idea of infrastructure is being way to soak up idleness certainly goes way back, and it goes way forward. paving the way is on newark highways anything in the 20th century a lot of roads were still being done by sort of farmers as, the equipment to jury duty. you're just pulled off and say, get your horses and it, it is

your road day. this goes well back, and it's probably a good thing, in terms of again these traits are projects whether they are dams or airports. milton friedman ridiculed limits it if that your objective everything should be built with a spoon, but again this a balancing act but yes, historically public works have very long tradition of providing work release. >> i also heard in your question and interest in requirements that limit your alternatives perhaps in non-optimal ways, and then that respects early that goes way back as well. right now, for example, when the biggest complaints about city transportation officials as a national association of city transportation officials would be happy to tell you is that the state department's of

transportation tie their hands but what they can do within city limits, even, and sort sometimes just to some extent at least impose suburban or rural standards on vince city cores in ways where they are not so well-suited. yes, going back one of these constraints start kicking in, you can see them go back a long way and take the as reflection of successful agenda advancement by interest groups with the stickiness. for example, a lot of our state highways of the mid-20th century and the first generation of interstate highways were typically made of reinforced portland cement and i think that it more to do with the success of the portland cement association in self advancement van with any obvious advantage. yes, it has him durability advantages but it has a lot of disadvantages, some of which are haunting us never there's a lot of reinforced concrete

infrastructure that is crumbling all around us. >> what does transportation experience with dedicated taxes and trust funds teach us about other infrastructure and development? >> that is never as easy as they say it's going to be. speaking from the aviation trust fund, even after it was set up there would be contained fight over who pay the taxes into, how much is it, what can be paid out of the, what cannot, and oftentimes n, few example, t avn trust fund was set up in 1970, and it didn't make any provision for dinner with aircraft noise. and so there had to be this long fight to allow for aviation trust fund monies to go to

localities to do with the noise issue and so on. so if you think that's going to stop a political fight over it and make it a simple cash register that money can chisel out of, not so much. >> the gasoline tax model of road funding has a very strange and i think underappreciated history pickett begins in the 20s, the first state, oregon, 1919, introduces it and it was not popular with automobile interest groups because it's viewed as attacks. by 1930 every single state and d.c. had a gas tax because they realize this was in their ticket. by the mid-\20{l1}s{l0}\'20{l1}s{l0} they were unanimous and coordinated, we lobby for these gas taxes on condition that the money go into roads, often just construction of roads leading maintenance as long-term burden that depend on the state. of course the public selling of

this model was people are going to pay for what they get, which is of course open to question because, after all, five minutes on a rural two-lane north dakota highway is going to caution as much as five minutes in traffic that is moving on say the beltway when the cost of course is extraordinarily different. this is, is always a flawed model. what find most interesting is the internal conversation about gas taxes within the automobile interest groups. they do not say, at least a a y much, among themselves, wow, this makes a lot of sense because people are going to pay for what they get. they say instead, check it out, guys. if we have a gas tax, then more people drive, the more roads we

build. now, that's not the end of the street because the more roads we build the more people drive and this is a wonderful self reinforcing feedback loop that will give all of us a very nice retirement. >> i would just say an interesting moment in this is the first generation of limited access highways starting with pennsylvania turnpike in 1939-9040 prior to the federal aid in 1956 a lot of eastern states build highways with tolls. tolls. we still have them. those have different feedback loop, where people really have to decide, is a district worth the ten dollars, worth the $20? we had in virginia and effort to retroactively do that with i-66 and people were screaming their heads off that they're being asked to be 15 or $30 when, in fact, the cost of sort of always been there. it's only visible now that yes, you are, in fact, causing 30 does with the congestion to other people behind you but you

never noticed it before. i think there's something to be said for some user fees if people can find a way to not make them to aggressive, and this debate goes all the way back to the 19th century as much with other modes such as water usage and electricity as it does with transportation. so when new york opens its aqueduct and 1840s, it's free at the pump, if you want to go and get free water at the public pump, a joystick is one piped into home you pay extra. and so that's again another hybrid public-private model that did reflect maybe a little bit more the demand as opposed to just giving it to prefer it when and not having an incentive to conserve. >> okay. it is exactly noon, so we did very well in terms of our schedule. thank you all for those great

questions, and thank you, peter and janet, for your learned responses. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> coming up i hearing on the status of puerto rico's electric grid after the hurricanes last summer. we will hear testimony from puerto rican officials, representatives from the energy department and u.s. army corps of engineers pics and energy and natural resources committee meeting at 10 a.m. eastern. live coverage on c-span2. later, testimony from homeland security secretary kirstjen nielsen on president trump's 2019 budget request for dhs. she will speak before senate appropriations subcommittee. that starts live at 2:30 p.m. eastern on c-span3. wednesday the confirmation

hearing for gina haskell to the next director of the cia. she would replace mike pompeo who left the position to become secretary of state. if confirmed she would be the first woman to head the cia. watch her testimony in front of the senate intelligence committee live wednesday at 9:3. c-span3. also online at c-span.org and on the free c-span radio app. >> sunday morning on 1968, american turmoil, we look at the cold war as the backdrop for the events of 1968 including the vietnam war, the presidential campaign, and the space race. watch 1968, american turmoil,

live sunday at 8:30 a.m. eastern on c-span's "washington journal," and on american history tv on c-span3. >> sunday on q&a, university of california santa barbara english professor on this book inseparable him about the life and times of conjoined twins. >> you can imagine, these are two married couples. they cannot be insane bed, right? and also, so that's when they set up two separate households about a mile from each other, and they stick to this very rigid schedule, is that they will say stay, live in one house for three days with his wife, and during these three days he

basically is the master of the house. he can do whatever he wants to and the other will give up his free will. that's alternate master. three days later they moved to the other house. >> did it work? >> apparently. they have 21 children. >> q&a sunday night at eight eastern on c-span. >> next, representatives from the travel and tourism industries take part in a discussion on their current efforts to combat and reduce human trafficking. it was held by the helsinki commission and the congressional trafficking caucus. it's one hour and 20 minutes.