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insider's look. the american history tb weekly newsletter gives you the upcoming program our nation's past. visit c-span.org and sign up today. >> next a look at historic infrastructure projects in aviation and roads and how these influence today's infrastructure development in the u.s. this is part of an event hosted by the national history center in washington dc. >> we will start this morning's session. good morning i am dane kennedy i am director of the

national history center of the american historical association. i want to welcome you all to the briefing of this history of infrastructure in the united states. i should explain that this is part of an ongoing series that the center sponsors that tries to bring historical perspectives to current issues. the center is strictly nonpartisan and the purpose of the program is not to advocate for any particular set of policies but rather to provide the historical context that can help inform policymakers and the public as they deal with the challenging issues they face. before handing the podium over i want to make a few thank you's . first of all to the mellon foundation that funds this theory, we are very grateful. also to the office of congressman jerry connelly who arrange the bookings for this room and finally to amanda perry

the associate director of the center who did all the hard work of arranging all of this. i want to turn the podium over to professor zachary schrag of george mason university. >> thank you. i am honored to be here today with two distinguished historians of infrastructure and an audience that i hope is willing to be persuaded that knowledge of history can inform present debates. we are gathered in a room eliminated in electrical lights. we arrived by road and air. without pressing my luck and going to guess that many people shower this morning, perhaps in water heated by natural gas. president eisenhower in 1955 said that the unifying forces of our communication and

transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear, the united states. but as a professor has written, so crucial are our infrastructure systems we view them as natural and inevitable. we tend to only notice shortcomings when something doesn't work. when we are asked to boil our water or when a bridge collapses. we pay attention to infrastructure only in times of failure, certainly in the case of the washington metro which has received attention as its liability has declined. infrastructure is a crucial technology that it is not a simple one. the 10 most important words ever written about technology, technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral. however natural and inevitable infrastructure systems may seem, they are the product of choices made by people, whether months years or even centuries in the

past. in many cases those choices have led to great benefit that neither benefits or costs can be distributed fully and even the most beneficial investments are likely to harm someone's interest. just as we live with the choices made by americans of the past, you sure generations will live with the choices made now by engineers and inventors, operators and maintainers, voters and consumers, private enterprises, local state governments and of course the congress. as with all the briefing sponsored by the national history conference, our goal this morning is to not describe policy but to offer historical perspective in the hope that people can understand potential consequences and the choices that face us today. i'm pleased to introduce our colleagues who have studied infrastructure made in the past. janet is professor of history in the university of dayton where he teaches courses.

his work on airport history includes america's airport airfield development. a centennial history and most recently airport cities and the jet age. the flying machine in the garden parks in the airport was included in the best american essays of 2007. from 2005 two 2014 she served -- she will be followed by peter norton, executive professor of history in the department of engineering and society at the university of virginia. is the author of fighting traffic, the dawn of the moderates in the american city. his article street writers jaywalking and one the avid patent usher prize and he is a member of the

-- each will speak for about 10 minutes afterwards i will open the floor to question. >> i'm going to try to give you a quick primer on the history of our ports in the united dates. -- airport in the united states. the major airports are locally and publicly owned. they owned by a city, county, state, or public authority. airports are critical to a national and international air transportation system used by more -- a majority of americans, there has been a debate of their funding, their construction, their maintenance and their expansion. should it be local or federal, public or private? to give you some context, the first customers for airports were actually members of the post office.

they needed -- they didn't have the money to build a national system of -- cities at that time didn't have that power to build landing fields but also private interest would come forward. chambers of commerce or other businesses would come and they established the first airports in this country. if you go back to the 1920s, both to establish infrastructure. in the 1930s when federal money became available for jobs programs, air transportation was one of the few expanding areas in the country and so there was a great need to improve the airport that had existed.

that if you are going to get federal money for this, you have to be publicly owned. many of those private airports became public. cities would buy them just for dollar so they would be technically public airports and could get some wpa money. the first big infusion of federal money into airports came during world war ii when many airports around the country , municipal airports were listed for the duration. they became training fields or manufacturing sites, they all came out from the war with vastly expanded and improved facilities because they had been used by the military during world war ii and that set the stage for the expansion of civil aviation after the war because all of the work that

had been done during the war. the airport funding after the war became a point of real debate. it was no longer a jobs program, it wasn't a defense program. should federal money continue to flow to airports? there was a momentous debate during the 1950s where airports strictly local, should cities be they want to pay for them or are they indeed a national aspect that federal money should be paid for. money should flow from the federal government, should it come out of federal tax revenues or should it come out of a special trust fund? and eventually that decision is made but not until the 1970s. there is a long debate about who pays for airport

development in the united states. local or federal but also is that public or private? the main users of commercial airports are commercial airlines which in this country are and always have been private companies. so what should their contribution be to the infrastructure that makes it possible? beyond the major commercial airports, there are a wide variety of other airport types in the united states. there are private airports and public access airports, big airports, small airports. they are also buying for the same kind of funding -- vying for the same kind of funding that commercial airports are familiar with and vying for. where does the money for this trust fund go? do we funnel it to the major

airports who seemingly have their own revenue stream with the commercial airlines that are there and the retail they have in their terminals and parking fees that they can do or do they funnel it more towards the smaller airports that take traffic away from the large commercial airports and make it possible to make it for us -- focus on airline traffic. so that is a part of the debate. they are often seen as free riders in the system. they use the air traffic control system without necessarily paying for it and they want to use all airports in the country. without paying the same kind of

fees so argue the commercial airlines that they pay. particularly during the 1950s and 1960s as commercial airline travel in the united states was expanding at a dramatic rate, one of the things that people pointed to was why can't we expand more? why do i have flight delays? why am i circling to get into the airport? all of these little airplanes are clogging up all of the slots at the airports. there was a big fight to move ga off of the big airports and give them their own airports and they are saying but it is our tax dollars that are paying for this? there are a lot of sites within the aviation community itself over who has access to the airports and who gets to use them. the number 1 problem or 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 all the way back to the 1920s people don't like to live around airports. they create a tremendous amount of noise particularly after the jet age, noise became the single biggest limiter in building new airports and expanding existing airports. if there is a big expense that airports have that doesn't have to do with runways and terminals, it is mitigating noise, either soundproofing homes and businesses around them or as many airports found, the only way to control land- use around them is to literally buy out everyone around you. you tear down the homes, he removed the businesses, no one 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 be 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 talk of privatizing airports in united dates during the 1980s. it comes up periodically but in the united states we have pretty much talk with the public model although there are people who called for privatization all the time. to that i would just remind everyone of a little thing called the dubai ports deal where one of the reasons why congress decided that this was 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 and indeed the british airports are owned by spanish company. so there is my primer on airport history. >> i want to thank the national history center and also it is an honor for me to 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. our infrastructure future is dependent upon a past we don't understand very well. more than that i would say that 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 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 on surface transportation infrastructure particularly on roads and streets. and urban transportation because to try to take on both urban and rural would be difficult. the more anomalous situation to explain is the urban one. the surface transportation system in this country is automobile dependent. it is not necessarily a bad thing. tools for certain jobs. they are particularly useful.

for this they would have been. so i think we have to ask ourselves how did that happen. in asking it i think we will better awed the status xwoe. so, again to go back 100 years you would find people strolling in streets wherever they chose, you would find fen the police officers at the time were quite accepting of th this. and i think this is something we should be thinking about. as it turns out that walking in

cities is an extremely energy efficient, low cost and efficient way to get around a city relative certainly to an automobile. again 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 we are living with now is, i would say, misunderstanding a tool that is excellent in certain jobs in all applications. how did this happen? well the most common story is that american's prefer the automobile. they bought it in mass once it became affordable thanks to henry ford and policy responded to this mass demand and preference. if you go to the national museum of natural history you will find

while they are admirable complex in their explanation, 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 in the national museum of american history which they paid $10 million to name after them out of generosity at least but perhaps some self interest as well. how did that happen? i'm going to give you a highly simple reason, but i think the questions will stand up when it gets to the level of detail 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 belong in streets as they did, and automobiles don't as they did not, and that was the general consensus view of ordinary americans, for example, expressed in letters to the editor in newspapers which were quite vocal about this, but judges, jury, police officers, and even transportation experts. they were also unanimous that the automobile is the wrong way to get around a city and in fact the single most predictable recommendation of traffic engineers in the 1920s was to forbid curb parking, well then it's going to be hard to drive, and their answer was good we have better ways for you to get around a city.

then urban transportation infrastructure, electric streit railways moved people in quantity and at low cost. now, this was an obstacle to people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities, predominantly at first local people with this interest, i'm talking about the local automobile club, the local automobile dealers association, the local taxi cab company, and they attacked this problem first at the local level. one of the preferred methods was to equate traffic safety with keeping pedestrians off the streit, which sounds sort of common sense to us for now outside of cross walks, but that was a tough sell a century ago when the first generation of traffic safety campaigns put the responsibility on the driver, if

you want to operate a vehicle on a city streit and you have to accept the full responsibility for going at a suitable speed and making sure 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 how do you shift the responsibility? in the safety campaigns local automobile groups reinvented a term called jay walker. the original hybrid of jay was jay driver for the driver who menaces pedestrians. they reinvented this term as a way to make fun of pedestrians

who walked anywhere. and 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 jay walking and by the mid 1920s they were succeeding at this through means i won't go into for reasons of time but which i can be happy to explain. a nice little illustration of this redefinition for whom streets are comes from yellow taxi cap from chi chicago, and traffic signals were so they wanted streets to be for cars,

mainly taxi cabs and once they got it in the response was quite vocal for pedestrians, hey, we can't walk in the streit wherever we want anymore, so this is a piece of that re definition redefinition as well. in 1923, local people in cincinnati, 42,000 of them signed petitions to mechanically equipment automobiles with speed governors so they wouldn't be capable of going faster than 25 miles an hour, and this was to be a referendum. they got it on the ballot. it terrified people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities. it caused them to original locally then national

nationally. the automotive safety foundation was by then funded by the automobile manufacturers association, predominantly general motors, and they organized and they're quite explicit we have to redefine what city stress are for and we have to redefine them for automobiles, and we redefine safety, and redefine saved as keeping people off the streedz and we redefine redefine median strips and shoulders, and it would eliminate 98% of collisions, and they became the

basis for the highway transportation engineering discipline, which promised to free us of the of the traffic fatalities in the year. that was not enough, we have since introduced sometimes against the objections of the automobile industry, ways to reduce those numbers, as long as we have an automobile dependent society, conventional automobile dependent society that will exist. there's hope and it's not unreasonable hope that vehicles will deliver us from this -- a f

-- one of the terrible legacies of automobile dependency in the 20th century i would contend is we have public health disaster in the form of sedentary living that has given us unprecedent levels of preventable disease, and vehicles could perpetuate that, in more practical terms we're dealing now with a physical infrastructure crisis, how to maintain the infrastructure we inherited from the 20th century. we should be asking ourselves, do we need to prepare a plan for

avoiding a future of a technology infra structure maintenance prices, not just a physical in stra struck -- infrastructure. we have a guest here from the i named karl, and i suggest a republican five star general has warned us about the situation we are now in with highways. in his fair well address three days before he left office, the president cautioned us about losing our independence to the military industrial complex, that washing i think was wise and i think it's analogous to what we should now be cautious

about which is as we have learned since the 1930s, much of our service transportation policy is a product of similar complexes, having to do with organizations like the american road builders association, what used to be called the national highway users conference, the general contractors of american, the american trucking association all of which deserve a place at the table but their voices must not crowd out the voice of the citizen is of the country. thank you very much. >> so before i open up to questions i would like to just draw four quick common themes i heard in both present even taksz i think are important not just to transportation but to all kinds of in stra structure. infrastructure is a series of rules about who gets to use that so if you're in your carr unless

there's a sign that says private road you're generally allowed to go where the road is. if you try that on an airplane and land at whatever airport you want to that's going to be a problem and we see that in all kinds off from infrastructure. we're going back and forth whether infrastructure should shape public demand and it's very delicate. there was -- there is a role for ordinary citizens to say this is what we want.

the third is not an either or question, it's a range of possibilities and one thing you learn from the history of infrastructure, there is no one right or wrong way, well there are many wrong ways but not one right way to distinguish between public and private roles in infrastructure. and finally, the question of positive and negative. good works of infrastructure has benefits long beyond mead needs, central park for example, we hear about traffic fatalities, these are the negative impacts whose costs are not always visible when the project is being designed. the one last thing i will say about infrastructure is we are going to be on tv, so please wait for the microphone before you ask your question, but i

will look for hands. . >> wait for the mic. >> so my name is sarah peterson, i have a background in history and infrastructure, but my question for peter is if you could speak to fright movement in the city. i think we spent a lot of time talking about passenger movement and people movement but how many ups drugs can you send toub a streit at a time, what kind of -- tell -- send down a streit at a time, so tell us about freight. >> later national organizations between the american trucking associations have long been advocates for making roads and streets including urban roads and streets accommodating to

motor vehicles. now, if you go back 100 years or so or even just will 80 years, the freight would be delivered typically by steam railroad and delivered to warehouses or retail or other destinations in the city, and there was a certain streets and roads that were primary conduits for this that kept the truck and other kinds of delivery traffic off of the smaller streets and that's actually not too different from the most part today. obviously ups trucks may find itself going down quite a small streit. there may be a water shed here

after the 1950s when standards, the american society of transportation officials start mandating much more accommodating streit and road infrastructure for trucks, particularly on the justification that emergency vehicles needs to have ride turning rad snichlt us, so this permits the large vehicle traffic to peculate 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, the curb turning radius, where the functional classification system serves motor vehicle access, is an important transition.

>> i would just say maybe they will all be delivered by drone, then you'll have an entirely different problem to deal with. >> another question? . >> thank you very much. all three of you are experts on transportation infrastructure. there are a variety of different kinds off from from that were infrastructure, so one question might be to ask if any of you have any thoughts on that and it's 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 all together? the second question has to do with the size of the united

states and its implication for infrastructure. if you look at most european countries in terms of creating transportation infrastructure, they're smaller, denser in population, obviously one of the ways in which you move across great distances is railroads, which is largely disappeared from the american scene. i wondered 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, because we are just very large and airplanes could transport people and things much faster than surface transportation could. that's what the post office is all about, they wanted to deliver the mail faster so even as early as the 1920s 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 it was carried by the railroad. and this was one of the dramatic stunts that was done to prove the value of air mail, particularly for, say, contracts or other kinds of documents that were very time sensitive. you could deliver them very quickly and it's a long way from one coast to another in the united states, and so that also influence didn't cause but influenced the type of airplanes we developed here in the united states that then went on to dominate world aviation, the dc3 i'm thinking of where that became the standard airline

around the world because it could concur the distances that were in the united states, and the european powers could then use it because they still had their empires, and they could use it to travel throughout the world. but then you also have to have a lot of airports, and i know a lot of people complain, the european airports are so much nicer than the u.s. airports, and if you think about it, again many of them have limited numbers of places where the international travelers come into and they're specifically designed to be show case airports. they get a lot of national funding for them whereas in the united states again every town and city wants to have their airport, and we don't have a single national important of

entry. i know dullas was thought to maybe be that but we don't have that. we have multiple once so it's not surprising that we don't have a big show case airport that can be one of the best airports in the world. and so that's something that i don't think gets into the debate where we complain about how horrible our airports are. we just have a lot more of them than anyone else and it's a different political economy here. they're locally owned and operated. there is a limited amount of federal funding and the national government has not designated anyone as your single point of entry that we're going to make as our show case 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 drew six lines on a map of the usa in

1938 and handed it to the chief of the public rode roads, thomas mcdonald, he said people don't want to drive 3,000 miles, people don't want to drive 2,000 miles, they have trans to do that and in 1938 they had dc3s as well to help them do that and they did not see that as the best way to commit this road building energy. to him rail made a lot of sense. now, i took rail to get here, i'm from the university of virginia in charlottesville. to get a train departure i couldn't take the charlottesville train i had to go to fredericksburg which is an hour 1/2 away and the departure was an hour away, so i had to leave last night to be sure to be here so i think every one of those signals was a smack in the

face, take the carr, dummy, take the carr. and this particularly bothers me when i continue to see what i consider rather niave states. if i ended up taking the carr here it would not have been my preference, and that would have been a demand and that would have justified another springfield interchange expansion which the last one cost $671 million and the last time i used it i didn't pay anything for it, so why wouldn't i do that? so i want to suggest that the large size of the country doesn't -- is not a self evident

for infrastructure. yes, i think they are analogous questions. for example right now where i'm from, as in much of the country, a gas pipe is coming in. predictably most local people are not happy about it, and janet spoke about it when she talked about noise, to what degree do we consider the local preference relative to a larger interest and here's where i would like to revive a term that is what is to be the public interest. it's what made many of us remember the equal time rule, it gave us public service announcements too, and i think that might be a useful guide if

not by any means to simplify this complicated problem. >> i would like to toss in there, i haven't done research on water and electricity but i have taught some of it. ryan is pretty close, these are economists in the 20th century started calling this, when you start building something really big it's not healthy to have another big thing built next to it and the railroads were overly built where you have competing trunk line, and in the 20th century we're going to big one power line, 1 big road and one big water line. in some cases they will be privately owned and in other case publicly owned. we're talking about water that big american cities have publicly owned water, san jose, california has a private one but highly regulated, but all of these do have some of the same issues, including these

questions of the public interest. and so this is, you know, again a problem if you're committed to very small government, is what do you do when there are these natural monopolies, and even some people who i'm thinking of hyatt for example are very skeptical of the government role may see a role in the government in owning or regulating some of these systems. do you have a question? >> as you know eisenhower had developed did he have views on infrastructure and it came from some of his experience as a military officer, especially in world war ii, so when he came into the presidency, he thought and had learned to think as 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 view was very much a larger total view, but often at the core of it is what he carried as a military officer remembering the five star general status and his decision to be addressed as general and not president after the presidency, as he carried that into the presidency, he was always conscious at the core of security. security of the united states as a premier public interest, if you will. and so there was him, the president, bringing attention to that. is 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 view when he was president but i don't know and i'm not competent about how

that's viewed today. >> well as a historian i'm not sure my competency how it's viewed today is necessarily, you know, distinct in this room of people who are policy experts. i will point from 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 they would help to evacuate cities in the event of a soviet attack, you would want to evacuate cities. it appears to me this was never one of the views that president eisenhower shared, in part based 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 over played. and i think if that's fair, if

i'm interpreting those notes correctly there's wisdom there because i believe it was hurricane harvey that history houston and people couldn't get out of that city and houston has the best urban interstate highways on the entire planet and they couldn't get out of that city. in fact, if i recall correctly, there was an order not to evacuate because it would have 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 the view, i think history will bear him out in other hurricane evacuations. >> i'd just like to throw in this is an issue for many countries. obviously the roman empire built roads to connect for troop

movement, and later we had railroads so you think of countries like canada and russia holding these long trunk lines. that said, i think some of these countries have a stronger sense of limits. there's a great conference in canada a few years ago where i had a chance to talk to canadian historians, and they built a national highway but they built one and it's up to the provinces to build whatever urban free ways and whatever kind of connect ores tors they want. so i think this goes back to what peter was saying about surface streets. you can have too much of a good

thing. that's true of highways that can be true of airports, that can be true of railroads with the over building, and, you know, i don't know if there's anyplace that has water -- certainly dams. so it's nice to have some kind of feedback loop of some system whether it's user fees or congress or someone to say no, this is too much. >> well, security is tied to the airports. most people don't realize it but they are colocated with international guard or reserve units so they are an important part of that and always have been from the beginning, navy, army, air force on those airports and that is still there and can cause some problems but,

again, if you wanted -- most people if they 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 this building but i have to go through a metal detect tore, but the airport infrastructure is still very important to the total force in the united states. . >> the policy discussions about building infrastructure today are built into other objectives.

you've got prevailing wage laws, you have in some places project labor agreements, you have requirements that you give contracts to small businesses, you have requirements to use locally made products or u.s. made steel or that sort of thing. how far back does this stretch in the history of the federal government's involvement in infrastructure. have these kind of requirements been around for a long time. >> i think it goes back a long way, you have the old system of forced labor on roads, and then british roads, vagrants were told you're going to sort rocks if you want bred. so the idea of infra stuck tur isstructure,

into the 20th century, a lot of roads were still being done by farmers, it's the equivalent of jury duty, you're pulled off and say get your horses and it's your road day. so, yeah, this goes well back and it's probably a good thing, you know, in terms of these projects whether it's dams or airports, but, you know, again there's a balancing act, but, yes historically public works has a very long tradition of providing work release. >> i also heard in your question an interest in sort of requirements that limit your

alternatives perhaps in nonoptimal ways and that goes way back as well. right now for example one of the biggest complaints among city transportation, is that the state departments of transportation tie their hands about what they can do within city limits, and sort of sometimes to some extent at least impose suburban or rural standards on dense city course in ways that are -- in which they're not so well suited. now, going back, when did these constraints start kicking in? you can see them going back a long way and particularly as a reflection of successful agenda advancement by interest groups that have a stake in this. a lot of our state highways in the mid 20th century were typically made of reinforced portland cement and i think

national had more to do with the success of the portland cement association in self advancement. it has a lot of disadvantages some of which is haunting us now with infrastructure crumbling around us. >> what does transportation's experience with dedicated taxes and trust funds teach us about other infrastructure and development? >> it's never as easy as they say it's going to be. yet, just speaking from the aviation trust fund, even after it was set up they will be continued on who pays the taxes into it, how much is it, what can be paid for it out of it,

and what cannot. so for example the aviation trust fund was set up in 1970, and it didn't make any provision for dealing with aircraft noise, and so there had to be this long fight to allow for aviation trust fund moneys to go to localities to deal with the noise issue, so if you think that's going to stop the political fights over it and make it a cash register money can flow out of? not so much. >> so the gasoline tax model of road funding has a very strange and i think under appreciated history. it began in the 20s, and it was not popular with automobile business group because it was viewed by a tax but every state had a gas tax because people

realized this was their ticket. and by the mid 20s there were unanimous and coordinated. we lobbied for these tax gasses on condition the money go into roads, often just construction of roads leaving maintenance as a long-term burden but that depended on the state. now, 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 cost you as much as five minutes as traffic moving on the belt way, i think it would be not unlike best by charging by the pound for everything they sell. of course you would get congestion, and the congestion would be like in the electronics department, not in the towels department, so it was always a flawed model and what i find

most interesting is the internal conversation about tax gases. 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 the more people drive then the more rods we built. that's not the end of the story because the more roads we build the more people will drive. so this is a self reinforcing feedback loop that will give everybody a nice retirement. >> i was just going to say an interesting moment in this. the first generation, like the pennsylvania turnpike prior to the federal aid of 1956, these eastern states build highways with tolls, and those have a different feedback where people have to real decide, is my trip

worth the $10, $20. we had in virginia a chance to do that with i 66 and people are screaming their heads off they're being asked to pay 15, $30 when that cost has always been there. it's only visible now that yes you are in fact causing $30 worth of congestion to other people behind you but you never noticed it before, so i think there is something to be said for some user fees if people can find a way to not make them progressive and this debate goes back to the 19th century with other modes and electricity, so if you want to get clean water in a public pump it's yours, if you want it piped into your home you pay extra, so that's, again, another hybrid public/private model that did reflect maybe a little bit more of the demand as

opposed to just giving it to free to everyone 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. 0. >> on thursday health and human services secretary will testify about his agencies 2019 coverage request. live coverage begins here.

0. >> our guest to discuss this landmark case are neal, and randy barn net barnette. live monday night at nine eastern on c-span. join the conversation

. >> i think it's important to remind the citizens of washington if you really get an opportunity to talk to each other, more than likely you'll find the things significant to each of us are very similar when we feel divisions between ourselves.

. >> i live here in olympia washington and what's important to me is the death penalty. i want to abolish it. . >> 123450 he joins other foreign policy experts to