The Trump administration has shared the outlines of its effort to reform and rebuild the nation’s transportation infrastructure. John Tierney, writing for City Journal, sums up the approach as “get the federal government out of the way.”
Decisions made a half century ago to forbid tolling on Interstates has left us in a predicament. “Much of the system needs to be rebuilt because the highways are at the end of their useful life,” says Tierney, “yet there’s not even enough money to maintain the existing roads.” It may not seem like much of a solution to get Washington out of the way when North Carolina is also short of money to meet all of its projected transportation needs, but Tierney notes, “it was the standard approach during America’s rise as an industrial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New York built the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway system on its own, mostly by relying on private companies.”
Whatever the source of funding, it will need to be better prioritized, likely based on actual consumer demand instead of the aspirations of politicians and others.
