Rethinking America's Highways
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2018
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Poole joins City Journal contributing editor Nicole Gelinas to discuss Poole's new book, Rethinking America's Highways: a 21st-Century Vision for Better Infrastructure.
Americans spend untold hours every year sitting in traffic. And despite billions of taxpayer dollars spent by transportation agencies, our nation's roads, tunnels, guardrails, and bridges are in serious disrepair. According to transportation expert Poole, traffic jams and infrastructure deterioration are inevitable outcomes of American infrastructure policymaking, which is overly politicized and prone to short-term thinking.
Robert Poole, an MIT-trained engineer, is co-founder and director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, where he has advised numerous federal and state transportation agencies.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is your host, Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal. |
| 0:05.5 | Coming up on the show today, we have a conversation between two of our top experts in the nation on infrastructure and transportation systems. |
| 0:14.4 | First, we have Nicole Jelineas. Nicole is a City Journal contributing editor and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. |
| 0:21.5 | She writes regularly for us and elsewhere about mass transit, infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, and much else. |
| 0:28.5 | Nicole was joined by a pioneer in infrastructure policy, Robert Poole. |
| 0:32.9 | Bob is the co-founder and director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, and he's advised |
| 0:38.6 | numerous federal and state transportation agencies for decades. Bob stopped by our studio to talk |
| 0:44.6 | with Nicole about his new book, Rethinking America's Highways, a 21st Century Vision for Better |
| 0:50.9 | Infrastructure. We hope you enjoy. |
| 1:09.6 | Thank you. for better infrastructure. We hope you enjoy. Good afternoon. This is Nicole Jelineas with the Manhattan Institute. I am here with Bob Poole. He is the author of a new book called Rethinking America's Highways, a 21st Century Vision for Better Infrastructure. And Bob is the director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation. |
| 1:28.3 | Good afternoon, Bob. |
| 1:29.3 | Thanks for coming over to talk to us today. |
| 1:31.3 | Hi, Nicole. |
| 1:32.3 | Thanks very much. |
| 1:33.3 | Well, you think that our highway system is broken. |
| 1:38.3 | Congestion, potholes, lost productivity, and so forth. |
| 1:42.3 | Tell us why you think that and when this problem came about. |
| 1:47.8 | Well, this problem has been building. I've been in transportation for over 30 years, and all those |
| 1:53.4 | problems that you just identified were problems 30 years ago, and in many cases, even worse today. |
| 2:00.4 | The funding situation |
| 2:01.3 | is worse. The gas tax is on its last legs. The condition of highways is slightly improved, |
| 2:08.4 | but we still have about 30% deficient bridges, which is incredibly bad. We have massive congestion |
... |
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