-- today, there was a document proposed of steps the european union could take despite the reimposition of u.s. sanctions. all of these different things, trade wars with the united states. instead of doing oil business with the central bank of iran , move allutsche bank trade with iran to the central banks, and open yourself up to money laundering concerns, my god. and all these other crazy things. thehe end, this is still world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. they are still building ballistic missiles. we know they want to make nuclear weapons. >> that is time. i'm director of the national history center of the american historical association. i want to bring you to this brief history of infrastructure in the united states, part of an ongoing series that the center

sponsors to try to bring historical perspective to current issues. the center is strictly nonpartisan and the purpose of the program is not to advocate any particular set of policies, but rather provide historical context that can help inform policymakers and the public as they deal with the challenging issues we face. to -- before handing the podium over -- make a few thank you's. first, to the mellon foundation which funds this series. second, to the office of congressman gerry connolly, who kindly arranged the bookings for this room. finally, to amanda. , the associate -- to amanda perry, the associate director who did the hard work of arranging this. i want to pass it over to professor zachary schrag of george mason university.

thank you. i am honored to be here today with these 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 illuminated by electric light, arrived by rail and airport, drank coffee that arrived by seaport, through miles of pipes and means. pressing my luck, i will guess that many people here shower this morning, perhaps in water heated by natural gas. professor eisenhower said the unifying forces of our -- dynamic forces of the very name we bear, the united states. prof. schrag: but as professor bednarek has written, so crucial our error infrastructures to our

daily existence that we view them as natural and inevitable. we only notice the shortcomings when something does not work. when we are asked to boiler water, the water goes out, or a bridge collapses. we pay attention to infrastructure only in times of failure, certainly the case with the washington metro, the case i have -- a case i have studied. study, but not a simple one. the 10 most important words written about the history of technology, technology is neither good nor bad nor is it neutral. however natural and inevitable infrastructure systems may seem, they are the product of people months, weeks, or centuries in the past. tomany cases, these have led benefits, but even benefits and costs cannot be distributed fully evenly.

just as we live with the choices made by americans in the past, future generations will live with the choices made now by engineers and inventors, operators and maintainers, voters and consumers, private and public enterprises, and by congress. as for all of the briefings sponsored by the national history center, our goal is not to prescribe policy, but offer historical perspective in the hope that it will help everyone understand the potential consequences of the choices that face us today. i'm pleased to introduce my two colleagues. bednarek is professor of history at the university of dayton where she teaches courses on urban history and american aviation. it includes america's airports, and mostke flight, recently, airports, cities, and

-- u.s. airports since 1945. her article, "the flying machine in the garden," was included in the best american essays of 2007. to 2014, she served as the executive director of the urban association -- urban history association, and then as president of the ohio academy of history. she will be followed by peter professor of history and the department of engineering and society at the university of virginia. rivals,cle, street published in technology and culture, won the abbott payson usher prize. and he is a member of the university of virginia center for transportation studies and of the sustainable urban mobility project of technical university eindhoven, netherlands.

prof. bednarek: i want to give you a quick primer on the history of airports in the united states. generally, they are locally or publicly owned. while airports are critical to a national and international air transportation system used by a majority of americans, there has long been a debate on their funding, construction, maintenance, and expansion. should it be local or federal, public or private? to give you context, the first customers for airports were actually members of the post office. the post office wanted to use airplanes to carry the mail, so they needed airfields, landing fields across the country. they did not have the money to build a national system of air transportation, so they went to them,cities and asked

could you please build an airfield for us? cities at that time did not have the power to build landing often private interests would come forward, chambers of congress or other -- chambers of commerce or other organizations. if you go back to the 1920's, both public and private entities came forward to establish our airport infrastructure. when federal930's, money became available for jobs programs, air transportation was one of the few expanding areas in the country. there was a great need to improve the airports that had existed. that federal policy said if you are going to get federal money for this, you have to be publicly owned. so many of those private airports became public. cities would buy them, sometimes even just for one dollar, so

they would technically be public pwaorts and get some wpa or money. the first big infusion of federal money into airports came during world war ii, when many airports, municipal airports, were enlisted for the duration. they became training fields or manufacturing sites. a lot of cities, atlanta for example, chicago, minneapolis, dayton, where i'm from. war all came out of the with vastly expanded and improved facilities because they had been used by the military during world war ii. that really set the stage for the expansion of civil aviation after the war, because of all the work that had been done during the war. the airport funding then, after the war, became a point of real debate. it was no longer a jobs program,

no longer a defense program. should federal money continue to flow to airports? and there was a momentous debate during the 1950's where airports were strictly local. should cities be the one to pay for them or counties or states? or are they indeed a national asset that federal money should be paid for? and if indeed money should flow from the federal government, should it come out of general tax revenues or, say, a special trust fund, which is what happens with highways? eventually, that decision is made, but not until the 1970's for the history of airports. there is a long debate about who pays for airport development in the united states. federal?al or but also, is it public or private? because the main users of our commercial airports are our commercial airlines, which in

this country are and always have been private companies. so what should their contribution be to the infrastructure that makes their business model even possible? the major commercial airports i talked about, there are a wide friday of other airport types in the united states. there are private airports, public access airports, big, small airports. and they are also vying for the same kind of funding that the large commercial airports that most of us are familiar with our vying for. so, where does the money from this trust fund go? it toward, thel major airports who seemingly have their own revenue stream with the commercial airlines and the retail they have in their terminals, and parking fees that they can do. or do we funnel it toward small

airports, the regional relievers, small general aviation airports, that take traffic away from those large commercial airports and make it possible for them to focus on airline traffic. that is a part of the debate. the debate also has resolved who should have access to those, who receives federal funding, and for those of you who know anything about general aviation, it is everything but the commercial airlines. they are often seen as "free riders" in the system. they used the air traffic control system without necessarily paying for it, and they want to use all the airports in the country without fees, soe same kind of argue the commercial airlines, that they pay. asthe 1950's and 1960's, airline travel was expanding in the united states at a dramatic

rate, one of the things people pointed to, why can't we expand more, why do i have flight delays, why am i circling to get into the airport? little all of these airplanes are clogging up the slots at the airport, so there was a big fight to move ga off the big airports and give them their own airports. but they are saying, it is our tax dollars 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 1920's even. 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 biggest limiter in building new airports and expanding existing ones. if there is a big expense that airports have that does not have to do with runways and terminals, it is mitigating noise. either soundproofing businesses around them, or -- the only way to control land use around them would be to literally buy out everyone around you. caret down the homes, move the businesses, nobody around to make complaints. a very simple but expensive answer, and one that has a dramatic impact on the shape of the landscape around the united states. is repeatedly the issue of privatization.

should airports be publicly or privately owned? in much of the western world, airports have become privately owned. the big example is british airports, all privately owned after maggie thatcher came in. there was talk of privatizing airports in the united states during the 1980's. it comes up periodically. we have pretty much stuck with the public model in the united states, although there are some people who call for privatization all the time. to that, i would remind everyone of a little thing called the dubai port steel. like one of the reasons that congress decided this was a good thing, why should we have our ports being operated by foreign companies? we don't let our airports be run by foreign companies. but remember that capital is global, and the british airports are owned by a spanish company.

there is my primer on airport history. [applause] >> i want to thank the national history center. an honor to me to be in the company of these two great historians, zach and janet. prof. norton: and to be in the company of you all, advising our public service on how to give the best infrastructure future we can have. i think that infrastructure future is dependent upon a past .e don't understand very well in fact, more than that, i would say the past we have grown up , about surface transportation in this country, is a past that was created in .art to justify the status quo i don't think we can understand the status quo or how we got this until we re-examine

past, which is what i tried to do myself in my own work. i will concentrate on the 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 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. they are excellent tools for certain jobs, particularly in areas of low to moderate and city and for trips of more than one mile but under 100 miles. by that standard, there is some degree of sense for our automobile-dependent transportation system in the

lower density areas. it is harder to explain why this country -- i don't think it is an exaggeration -- destroyed and rebuilt its own cities in the 20th century to serve automobiles, as if the city serves the transportation mode rather than the other way around. i would like to concentrate specifically on that question, which has substantial policy implications for the future. and history which 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 had affordable parking when we got there, and that much of the urban fabric they knew would be gone to make room for this, they would be shocked. and i don't mean ordinary urban americans, who certainly

would've 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 we ask ourselves, how did that happen? and i think we will better understand the status quo. to go back 100 years, you would find people strolling in streets wherever they chose. the judges, juries, and even police officers at the time were quite accepting of this. moreover, if such a person was injured by a vehicle, the jury and judge would be most likely to find in favor of the 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 the city, relatively to an automobile. that is not to say that it is

not have a place. it is a tool, and it has jobs for which it is well-suited. our policy error in the 20th century that we are living with now is, i would say, misunderstanding a tool that is excellent at certain jobs as the tool for all jobs in all applications. how did this happen? is that common story americans preferred the automobile. ,hey bought it in mass particularly when it became affordable thanks to henry ford, and policy responded to this massive demand and 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 their explanation, the thisminant message is that was, indeed, a response to popular demand by americans who preferred to drive. that is the account you will get in the exhibit called "america

on the move," which we will find in the general motors polyp transportation of the national museum -- motors hall of transportation, which they -- to possibler them, out of generosity or self-interest. i will give you a highly simplified, and for that reason, it could certainly be questioned , 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, 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. judges, juries, police officers, and even transportation experts. the first generation of traffic engineers in this country that dealt with street traffic, as , wered to real traffic also unanimous that the automobile is the wrong way to get around the city, and in fact , the single most predictable recommendation of traffic engineers in the 1920's was to which curb parking, to you would get the objection, it will be hard to drive. which they would say, good, there are better ways to get around the city. infrastructure then, particularly electric street railways, while not very fast, moved people in quantity with spatial efficiency and at low cost. , this was an obstacle to

people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities. her dominantly at first, local people with this interest. the local automobile club, the local automobile dealers association, the taxicab company. they attack this problem first at a local level. was toferred message equate traffic safety with keeping pedestrians off the street, which sounds sort of commonsensical to us now, outside of crosswalks. sell onea tough century ago when the first generation of traffic safety campaigns unanimously vilified the car and driver and put all the responsibility on them. if you want to operate an automobile on a city street, that's fine, but you've got to make sure that as the operator of the dangerous vehicle, you accept the full responsibility of going at a suitable speed and making sure you are alert to

pedestrians everywhere. newspaper editorials were unanimous, that drivers bear the responsibility. the problem, first of all, is of responsibility shifting. how you do that? in the safety campaigns, local automobile industry -- interest -- midwestern slang called jaywalker. jaydriver, one was someone who menaces pedestrians. they invented this term -- to insult pedestrians who walk everywhere, and got boy scouts to hand flyers to people telling them, did you know you are jaywalking? and newspapers tell us this is how people learned the word. the second step was getting cities to actually legally for , and by theng

mid-1920's, they were succeeding through means that i won't go into for reasons of time, but which i would be happy to explain. a nice illustration of this redefinition comes from the yellow taxicab company of managed which in 1926 to introduce the first coordinated traffic signals on city streets anywhere in the world. traffic signals coordinated so that motor vehicles going a certain speed would never get a red light if they run through one green light at an appropriate speed, they would hit a succession of green lights, sometimes called the green wave. they got this because they wanted streets to be for cars, namely taxicabs. in, they got it response was quite vocal for pedestrians. we can't walk in the street wherever we want anymore. this was a piece of the red --

of the redefinition as well. inransitional point came 1923 when locals of cincinnati, 42,000 of them, signed petitions to mechanically equip automobiles with speed governors such that they would not be capable of going faster than 25 miles per hour. and this was to be a referendum. they got it on a ballot, had the referendum in cincinnati. i call it a transitional point because it terrified people who wanted a future for automobiles in cities into organizing first, locally, then nationally. the automobile interest group of that time was called the national automobile chamber of congress. they formed a traffic and safety committee and became the predecessor of what is later called the automobile safety foundation, by then funded entirely by the automobile manufacturers association, predominantly general motors.

they organized and are quite explicit, we have to redefine city streets as places predominantly for automobiles. we do that by redefining safety as keeping people off of the street, and we redefine safety also as making what they were then pleased to call "foolproof" highways, without grave crossings, median strips or shoulders, so you would not have collisions. they promised it would eliminate 98% of collisions. it never got there because they introduced new hazards having to do with things like speed and rear end collisions, for example. and they became the basis for the highway transportation engineering discipline, which promised to free us from the affliction -- that by the 70's was causing us -- more than 50,000 fatalities per year,

traffic fatalities through highway engineering alone. we have learned the hard way that that was clearly not enough. we have since introduced, sometimes against objections from the automobile industry, ways to reduce those numbers. but as long as we have an automobile-dependent society, conventional automobiles, that will persist. i want to close by saying a word about the future. reasonable hope that autonomous vehicles will deliver us from this affliction and other ones like traffic congestion. but by no means is this a panacea or certainty. technology gives us a menu from which we can choose, it is not an inevitable fate that we have to prepare for, as it is so often characterized. one of the terrible legacies of automobile dependency and the 20th century, i would contend,

is that we have public health disasters in the form of sedentary living. it has given us unprecedented levels of preventable disease due to physical inactivity. autonomous vehicles could perpetuate that. in more practical terms, we are dealing out with a physical infrastructure crisis, maintaining infrastructure from the 20th century. it is a tough problem. i don't know that we can readily changethe proposal to technology, when technology itself requires substantial maintenance and we should be asking ourselves, do we need to prepare a plan for avoiding a future of a technology infrastructure maintenance crisis, not just a physical infrastructure maintenance crisis. i also want to it knowledge we have a guest from the dwight d. eisenhower commemoration --

commission. dell, and i suggest that a republican five-star general has warned us about the situation in 1961 president eisenhower ourioned us against losing independence as a democracy to the military industrial complex, the congressional corporate theance that would compete popular will as expressed through democracy. tot was rise and analogous what we should now be cautious about, which is as -- since 1930's, much of our transportation policy is the product of similar complexes having to do with organizations

like the american road builders association, national highway users conference, the associated general contractors of america, all of which deserve a place at the table, but their voices must of thewd out the voice citizenry of the country. thank you very much. applause first of all we learned that infrastructure is the physical object and also a series of rules. you are generally allowed to go where the road is. airplane you by land at whatever airport.

debates over the -- these things for example. it is not just a preference but a policy. we are constantly going back and forth between the question of infrastructure should respond to popular demand or shape popular demand. i would like to throw in the , it turnedmikulski into a 40 year career in congress. i think there is a role for ordinary citizens to say no, this is not our preference. third is this question of public and private that is not an either or question. it is a range of possibilities. how many different things have been tried, many of them have advantages and disadvantages.

way tos no one right distinguish between public and private. the question of externalities positive and negative. we will have benefits long beyond their immediate needs, whereas we heard about traffic , these costs are not always visible when the project is being designed. tv so going to be on please wait for the microphone before you ask a question. i will look for hands. my name is just a feed

peterson. if you could speak to freight movement in the city. spent time talking about passenger and people movement how many upsering truck she can send down a road at a time. talk more about the freight side of it. historically, both local or motor free -- motor freight operators like trucking companies have long been making roads and streets including urban roads and streets accommodated to motor vehicles. if you go back 100 years or even just 80 years most of that was a multi-modal system where freight would be delivered and

distributed from warehouses to retail destinations. was certain streets and roads that were primary conduits the truck andkept other kinds of delivery traffic off of the smaller streets. that's not too different from where we are for the most part today. policy becomes -- there may be a watershed here after the 1950's start mandating much more accommodating street and road infrastructure for , particularly on

justification for emergency the firehave to put out and so on and that serves the interests for trucks on these streets and roads as well. 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. that particular policy transition in the mid-20th century curb turning transportatione system serves motor vehicle access is in important transition. >> maybe they will all be delivered by drones then you will have an entirely different problems to deal with. thank you very much.

on transportation infrastructure, there are different kinds of infrastructure that we are trying to deal with as well in terms of electrical grids and the like. one question might be is do any of you have any thoughts on that ? different ball of >> altogether. the second question has to do implications for infrastructure in terms of creating transportation infrastructure, they are smaller and denser in population.

one of the ways in which you are across great distances , which and railroads have largely disappeared from the american scene. would any of you like to speak to that as well as? 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 current. that is what they post office is all about. as early as the 1920's 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 ifrs, which was days ahead

it was carried by the railroad. to provequite dramatic the value of airmail, particularly for the contracts other kinds of documents that were very time sensitive. you could deliver them very quickly. it's a long way from one coast to the other in the united thees, that also influenced type of airplanes that we developed here in the united states and then went on to , wheree world aviation that become the standard around the world, because it could conquer the distances, and the it becauseuld use they still had their empires and could use it to travel throughout the world.

u.s. caused it to do that. you have to have a lot of airports. a lot of people complain. nationopean and a airports are so much nicer than the u.s. airports. it, many of about us have limited number of places where the international travelers come into and they are designed to be showcase airports. they get a lot of national funding for them. i think of every town and city wants to have their airport. nationalhave a single port of entry. dulles was kind of thought might be that, but we don't have that. we have multiple ones. it's not surprising that we don't have a showcase airport.

-- one mighthing complain about how global our airports are, we just have a lot more of them than anyone else. it is a different political economy here. they are locally owned and operated. there are limited amounts of federal funding here and the national government has not designated anyone as your single point of entry. about the size of the country and its significance for transportation, i think it's interesting and not generally that well-known that when to sixnt roosevelt went lines on the map of the usa in 1938 and handed them to the bureau of public roads, thomas mcdonald's and said tell me what you think, the answer coming was, people don't

want to drive 3000 miles. that.e trains to do he did not see that is the best way to commit energy. to him railway made sense. to get a trained archer that at a time that suited me i could , then thehe charlotte departure was an hour late. to make sure i could be here i had to leave last night which meant a hotel room. i think everyone of those .ignals was a smack in the face this bothers me when i continue naive what i consider statements about what americans prefer to do when they travel

presented in absolutist terms. if i had ended up taking the car it would not have been my preference. that could have justified yet another springfield internet exchange. the last time i used it i didn't pay anything for it so why wouldn't i do that? suggest that the large size of the country doesn't -- is not a self-evident justification for long distance road infrastructure. although clearly some of that is necessary. other kinds of our infrastructure, there are analogous questions. gas pipelineom a is coming in, most local people are unhappy about it.

we have the classic question in infrastructure and janet refer to it when she spoke about noise, to what degree the local preference relative to our larger interest? thatling to revive a term used to be ubiquitous among regulators but i hear less and less, what is the public interest? made many of us remember the equal time rule, you gave one side a point of view and you had to find something to offer the other point of view and give us public service announcements, too. guide ifbe a useful not by any means a simple fire of the problem. having worked in the direct arearch of water, these startednomists do with

calling them monopolies when you're building something really big, it's not so healthy to have another big thing build next to it. in the 20th century people said we will big one did -- one big road or powerline or water line and in some cases they will be privately owned and in other cases publicly owned. we're talking about water that big american city has privately owned water. all of these have some of the same issues. including these questions of the public interest. if you areroblem committed to very small government is what do you do when there are these natural

monopolies and even some people who are thinking of -- may see it as a role for government in owning or regulating some of these systems. question? eisenhower had developed views on infrastructure, and to some degree that came from this experience as a professional military officer, especially in world war ii. presidency, hee learned to think as a professional military officer inclusively and he considered freedom of movement and the ability to move over land, at sea, in the air and even in space. totalview,s a large but at the core of it what he

carried as a military officer, remembering the five-star and wanted to because general after the presidency. he carried that into the presidency with a core of security. security of the united states as a premier public interest if you will. there was him, the president paying attention to that. describe the attention to that today as a major element of public interest in the context of infrastructure? eisenhower had an inclusive view as president, but i am not competent about how that is viewed today. i'm not sure about my competency about how it is viewed today is distinctive in this room of people who are indeed policy experts.

from the national security point of view as i am sure everybody knows is -- the interstate were justified or argued for on the grounds that they would help to evacuate cities in the event of a soviet attack, they would want to evacuate cities. it appears to me that this was never one of the views president eisenhower shared, in part of notes on a meeting he held before he left office, where he thought the emphasis on urban highways have been overplayed. if i am interpreting those notes quickly there is wisdom there. it was hurricane harvey that hit houston and people could not get out of that city. houston has the best urban

highways of the entire planet and they could not get out of that city. if i recall correctly, there was in order not to evacuate because it would have caused chaos on the highways of the city. if i am interpreting the minutes of that meeting correctly that president eisenhower did not share of the view that highways were the best way to evacuate people. i think history will bear him out. not been a success. >> this is an issue for many countries, the roman empire bill freight. connect starting in the early modern. railroads, you think about the countries like canada and russia holding those long trunk lines.

the transcontinental railroad in the u.s. is easier to justify it on military grounds rather than freight grounds. i think it has made a stronger sense of the limits, conference in canada where i had a chance to talk to historians, canada builds and interstate national highway but they built one and to build whato kind of connectors they want. to fewer urban high were -- highways. this goes back to what peter was saying about surface streets can have too much of a thing, that is true of highways and airports, that can be true of railroads. i don't know if there is any great dam has

cost of whose -- building the dam's. >> security is tied to the airports. airports areal connected with air national guard and reserve units. they are an important part of that. they always have been from the beginning. navy, air force units on the airports, so that is still there and can cause some problems. but again, most people if they want to security the new normal go to the airport. shoes, i had to

show id to get in this building, take off my shoes, go through a metal detector and a full body scan to go get on an airplane today. security has impacted the airport. but for national security interests, the airport infrastructure is still very important to the total force of the united states. the policy discussions about building infrastructure today are tied into a lot of other , arguably interfere with infrastructure as cheaply, prevailing wage laws, project labor agreements, you've got contracts to small business, locally madeto use

products and u.s. made steel and that sort of ring. how far back does it stretch in the fifth -- history of the federal government and infrastructure? go back a long --, possibly in happy old andhave the old force labor british roads talks about how and if theyunded up wanted bread. infrastructure is a way to soak up idleness goes way back, then it goes way forward. he is saying that into the 20th century a lot of roads were still being done by farmers,

it's equivalent to jury duty. horses, thist your goes well back. it's probably a good thing. or --r they are dam there is a balancing but historically public works have a long tradition of providing work release. i also heard in your question in requirements that limit your alternatives perhaps in a non-optimal way and in that respect that goes way back as well as. one of the biggest complaints among city transportation officials would be happy to tell

you is that the state departments of transportation tied their hands about what they can do within city limits. sometimes to some extent impose urban standards on dense city course in ways where they are not so well-suited. going back, one of these constraints start kicking and you can see them go back a long way as a reflection of successful agenda advancement, a lot of our state highways mid typically madere every enforced portland's summit . it had more to do with a success of the portland cement association for self advancement .han with any obvious advantage it has a lot of disadvantages, some of which are haunting us

now, some concrete is crumbling. what this transportation experience with dedicated tax-exempt trust funds about other infrastructure and development? it's never as easy as they say it's going to be. fund,he aviation trust even after it was set up their will be continued fights about who pays the taxes, how much is it, what can be paid out of it and what cannot, and oftentimes , it did notome up make provision for dealing with aircraft noise.

there had to be this long fight to allow for trust fund moneys to go to log calories to do with the noise issue, for example. think that is going to stop the political fights over it that money can just flow out of, not so much. model ofsoline tax road funding has a strange and underappreciated history. it begins in the 21st state, 1919, it was viewed as a tax. by 1930 every single state and d.c. had a gas tax. they realize this was their ticket. we lobby for the gas taxes on income this -- condition that money go to roads, often just

construction of the roads. selling of this model that people will pay for what they get, which is open to question because after all, five minutes on a world to lane north the coda highway will cost you the beltway when the cost is very different. not unlike best buy charging by the pound for everything they sell. you would get congestion in the electronics department, not in the towel's department. most interesting is the internal conversation about gas taxes within the automobile interest groups. they do not save much within themselves, this makes sense because people will pay for what they get. they say instead, check it out, if we have a gas tax and the

more people drive the more roads we built. that is not the end of the story because the more people will drive the more we build. this is a self reinforcing feedback loop that will give all of us a very nice retirement. this interesting moment in is the first generation of limited access highways starting with the passive and had turned park prior to the federal where they -- act, aild highways, those have different feedback where people have to decide, is this trip worth the $10, the $20? in virginia we had it effort to retroactively do that and people toe screaming that they had pay $15 or $30 one in fact that cost has only been there. it's only visible that you are

causing $30 of congestion to people behind you, but you never noticed it before. there is something to be said for some user fees if people can't find a way to not make them -- and this debate goes all the way back when new york opens up it is free of a pop if you want to go in get clean water at the public pump. if you wanted piped into your home, you pay extra. that is another high bid -- hybrid model that in the reflected a little bit more as opposed to just getting it free for everyone. >> it is exactly noon so we did

very well in terms of our schedule. thank you all for all those great questions and thank you peter and janet for your considered responses. applause]