The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century

The Best Transportation System in the World focuses on the centrality of government in organizing the nation's transportation industries. As the authors show, over the course of the twentieth century, transportation in the United States was as much a product of hard—fought politics, lobbying, and litigation as it was a naturally evolving system of engineering and available technology.

For example, in the mid—1950s, President Eisenhower, concerned about a railroad industry in decline, asked C...