Transportation policy remains of vital importance because it
lies at the heart of the American economy. A synergistic relationship exists between the transportation industries and
the rest of the economy. Systems and methods of moving
goods and people have driven the American economy forward, and advances in the general economy have propelled
improvements in transportation. Transportation developments have been determined by geographic factors and
human actions. Some of the human actions affecting transportation have been unthinking responses to the “invisible
hand” of the market or to other unplanned factors, but many
changes have resulted from conscious policy decisions made
by the government at all levels and sometimes by nongovernmental policymakers, such as the heads of large corporations or unions.
Transportation Policy in the Colonial Period
Geography often determines how people and freight move
from one place to another. During the colonial period, before
the Industrial Revolution came to America, geographic factors such as the deep estuaries and navigable rivers along the
Atlantic coast far outweighed human policy, but nevertheless,
colonists consciously adopted some noteworthy policies to
control transportation between the populations of the
seaboard colonies and the six other areas with which they
traded: the European continent, the Caribbean Islands, the
interior inhabited by Native Americans, Africa (especially
West Africa), French Canada, and the Spanish American borderlands. Government policies modified or limited relations
with all six regions but almost never as effectively as the policymakers desired. The Navigation Acts provide the most famous example of such regulations. First in 1651 when Oliver
Cromwell controlled England and then in 1660 after the
Restoration, England tried to ensure that trade into and out
of the American colonies would be carried on English ships
manned mainly by English sailors (with the understanding
that “English” included colonial Americans). Exporting “enumerated” goods such as tobacco to the continent of Europe
and, after 1663, importing most European goods occurred
only through England. When the Caribbean Islands concentrated on sugar production in the second half the seventeenth
century and those islands became a major market for New
England fish and the middle colony cereals, Parliament tried
to channel North American foodstuffs to the British West Indies rather than to the French or Dutch West Indies. The Molasses Act of 1733, an attempt to direct North American ships
to Jamaica, Barbados, and other British islands, imposed a
prohibitive duty of 6d. per gallon on molasses imported from
non-British islands, but the chicanery of American merchants and the greed of bribable customs collectors nullified
the act.
At various times, the imperial government and individual
provinces established policies concerning trade and transportation with areas other than Europe or the Caribbean. In
the seventeenth century, the English government gave the
Royal African Company a monopoly over the sordid business
of transporting slaves from Africa to the New World. Ironically, by the end of the eighteenth century, the British nation,
which had become the dominant carrier in the transatlantic
slave business, experienced an awakening of conscience, and
the British navy began to effectively patrol against slavers.
Freight to and from the other three areas mentioned—the interior of North America, Canada, and nearby Spanish territories—was carried by packhorses, wagons, canoes, or sailing
vessels and at different times fell subject to a combination of
provincial, British, or foreign laws, with widely varying degrees of effectiveness. Provincial governments regularly licensed traders who transported rum, firearms, and trade
goods to Native Americans—sometimes to prevent an outrageous exploitation of these people and sometimes to protect
favored traders from interlopers from a different province.
The American Revolutionary War shifted most major
policy decisions about transportation from London to the
new nation, but the formation of the American transportation policy has never been entirely free from the policies of
foreign nations. For instance, England retained some say
about U.S. transportation policy long after the Revolution.
The British negotiators of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 obtained a provision giving Britain navigation rights on the
Mississippi. Much later, in the 1846 Clayton-Bulyer Treaty,
Britain secured equal rights to control any future transisthmian canal Americans might build, a right it retained until
the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Even in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, Britain, along with its fourteen European Union colleagues, has had a voice in U.S.
transportation policies over such issues as landing rights of
American airlines and mergers of transportation companies;
an example of the latter is the recent merger of Chrysler with
Daimler-Benz, a leading manufacturer in America of heavyduty trucks and school buses.
Transportation Policy in the Early Republic
Upon achieving independence, Americans rejoiced in their
expansive new country, but several major transportation issues confronted policymakers. These problems included inadequate access to the two great waterways that could afford
easy transportation across much of North America—the
Mississippi/Ohio and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence systems;
the Appalachian barrier to communications between the
eastern and western halves of the United States; and poor
north-south roads along the eastern seaboard.
To the frustration of Americans, full access to the Mississippi/Ohio and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence systems remained tantalizingly just out of reach. For years to come,
American policymakers sought to make those two great systems provide effective transportation. The challenge proved
particularly great in the prerailroad age, when only waterways
could economically transport high-volume, low-value farm
products for distances greater than 20 or 30 miles.
The Paris peace settlement of the 1780s gave the United
States the eastern side of the Mississippi Valley down to
Florida, but Florida, controlled by Britain since 1763, reverted back to Spain. Spain knew that if farmers living on the
three-eighths of American soil drained by the Mississippi, the
Ohio, and their tributaries had access to the world’s oceans
through New Orleans, a flood of settlers would spill over into
Louisiana and Texas, leading to a spread of American power.
Therefore, Spain resolutely resisted the efforts of John Jay and
other American diplomats to let American rafts and flatboats
float down to New Orleans to connect with shipping on Lake
Pontchartrain. America’s inability to change Spain’s attitude
caused many frontierspeople to support the new U.S. Constitution, since a stronger national government would be more
capable of pressuring Spain into negotiating navigation
rights. In 1795 New Orleans finally became incorporated in
America’s transportation system when Spain acquiesced to
Pinckney’s Treaty out of fear that if it did not unlock New Orleans, Americans would ally with George III, their former
king, and seize the city. So Pinckney’s Treaty opened up the
Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, but Spain’s cession of New Orleans and Louisiana to powerful France in 1800 again threatened to stifle the West. President Thomas Jefferson remained
determined to enable western farmers to transport their produce through New Orleans. He told Robert R. Livingston and
James Monroe that the United States should “marry the
British fleet and nation” if Napoleon would not sell New Orleans. The crisis ended in 1803 when Napoleon agreed to sell
New Orleans and all of Louisiana. With the political problem
solved, the question became how to turn the “father of waters” into a practical, two-way highway. Over the next two
centuries, steamboats (and their diesel successors) and the
dams, locks, navigation aids, and dredging of the Corps of
Engineers fulfilled this goal.
The history of transportation policies in regard to the
Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River differs from that of
the Mississippi. Very different geography, British control of
the St. Lawrence, and the eagerness of merchants and investors in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to
bridge the Appalachian barrier between the East and the West
created transportation routes into the middle of the country.
These new routes diminished the interest of American politicians in Montreal and Quebec as possible entrepôts of the
Midwest. Several geographic considerations made the St.
Lawrence less important than the Mississippi as an outlet to
saltwater: Most of the rivers in the middle of the country
flowed south into the Mississippi, not into the Great Lakes;
the lakes and the St. Lawrence froze in the winter; and an impassible obstacle, Niagara Falls, existed between Lake Erie and
Lake Ontario until the Welland Canal provided a bypass in
1829. Not until the mid-twentieth century, during President
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, did American policymakers join with Canada in developing the St. Lawrence
Seaway (1959) to make the St. Lawrence a practical outlet for
mid-America.
In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, proposed a grand system
of canals and turnpikes to connect eastern river systems with
the trans-Appalachian Ohio/Mississippi system and to provide north-south roads to supplement seaboard coastal shipping. The National Road (or Cumberland Pike), which initially (in 1818) connected the Potomac at Cumberland,
Maryland, with the Ohio at Wheeling, Virginia, and later was
extended at each end to Baltimore and central Illinois, is a
tangible result of Gallatin’s plan. Two twentieth-century
highways, U.S. 40 and Interstate 70, followed the route of that
first federal highway. But by the 1830s the job of developing
transportation routes across the Appalachians shifted from
the federal government to states and seaboard cities. Henry
Clay and President John Quincy Adams, proponents of the
American System that would have given the federal government responsibility for developing a transportation system,
lost control of the national government to Andrew Jackson
(president from 1829 to 1837) and his followers, who favored
a limited federal role. Jackson demonstrated his attitude most
famously with his “Maysville veto” (1830), a refusal to spend
federal funds on a highway. In the 1830s the national government handed over maintenance of the National Road to the
states through which it ran. The prevailing consensus was
that the formation of an American transportation policy
should be decentralized.
Rivers and Canals
Before the Civil War, East Coast ports vied with each other to
extend their hinterlands across the Appalachians. Investors
and local leaders wanted the produce of the Midwest to reach
world markets through their cities rather than via New Or-
leans and the Mississippi or by the St. Lawrence. Clearly, New
York City became far more successful than its rivals, and the
Erie Canal served as the foundation of its success.
In all of American history, the decision to build the Erie
Canal may be the most significant example of a wellconceived transportation policy. As early as the 1740s, New
York’s lieutenant governor, Cadwallader Colden, had realized
that a canal through the Mohawk Valley could connect the
Hudson to Lake Erie and thereby expand New York City’s
hinterland to encompass the heart of the continent. In the
early 1800s, as New Yorkers planned to build the canal, the
federal government declined to participate in the project.
President James Madison had constitutional scruples about
whether the federal government should undertake such a
project—especially since it would not benefit Virginia—so it
became an undertaking of solely the state government of
New York. DeWitt Clinton, its most vociferous supporter,
won the backing of the state legislature (and the governorship for himself) and began construction on July 4, 1817.
When the canal opened in 1825, it ran 363 miles from Lake
Erie at Buffalo to Albany on the Hudson, and its impact on
New York City, 150 miles downriver from Albany, became apparent immediately. Western grain went through New York
City, and manufactures and immigrants headed for Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois traveled up the Hudson from the city.
The success of the Erie Canal stimulated Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston to attempt to duplicate New
York’s achievement. Pennsylvania’s rugged Allegheny Mountains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh yielded no pathway for a canal crossing, so Philadelphians persuaded the
state legislature to underwrite the Main Line system. Instead
of a single canal like the Erie, Pennsylvania’s Main Line connected Philadelphia on the Delaware River to Pittsburgh at
the Ohio with a mix of canals, railroads, and inclined planes.
(Inclined planes used steam-powered winches placed on the
tops of ridges to pull flatcars up railroad tracks.) The Main
Line system, a brave effort that enthralled Charles Dickens
with its scenic views, proved a colossal economic failure.
Railroads
Also a failure, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, financed by investors from the Baltimore/Washington region, did not
breach Maryland’s mountains and never reached its second
namesake. By the 1830s most of New York’s rivals realized that
their best hope of reaching the other side of the Appalachians
depended on the new British invention—railroads. On July 4,
1828, investors at Baltimore watched Charles Carroll of Carrolton, Maryland, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, inaugurate a new transportation age as he turned the
first shovelful of dirt to begin construction of the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad. In the early 1830s, the longest single railroad line in the world, the Charleston and Hamburg,
stretched from Charleston, South Carolina, toward the Mississippi. In the 1850s Philadelphians, having given up on the
Main Line system, completed the Pennsylvania Railroad to
connect the City of Brotherly Love with Pittsburgh. But unfortunately for all of New York City’s rivals, by the time their
railroads reached the beginnings of the Ohio/Mississippi system on the other side of the mountains, New York merchants
had two western rail connections of their own. The Erie Railroad, completed in 1851, ran from the Hudson to Lake Erie
along the latitude of the Pennsylvania–New York border, and
by the middle of the 1850s, the steamboat operator Cornelius
Vanderbilt had tied together a series of small railroads between Albany and Buffalo into the New York Central, which
soon had connections into Manhattan.
By the time of the Civil War, maps of the U.S. transportation system showed a vast array of railroads and a few key
canals—of which the Erie remained by far the most important, for it carried from the Midwest to New York more freight
than the combined total carried by all the major railroads that
crossed the mountains. Four key railroad trunk lines existed:
the Erie and the New York Central ran from Lake Erie to New
York City, the Pennsylvania ran from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, and the Baltimore and Ohio ran from Wheeling to Baltimore; each of the four had subsidiaries or partners that continued into the heartland. In the South, a railroad route from
Charleston to Memphis had been built, and the Boston and
Albany brought Boston in touch with the West, albeit over one
of New York’s railroads. But as George Rogers Taylor and
other transportation historians have noted, America’s railroads and canals were not the product of a carefully planned
national transportation policy. They had resulted from a series
of rival policies, with each financed and supported by individuals and concerns representing parochial interests that had little or no care about a national transportation policy. No uniform gauge existed on American railroads. In cities such as
Philadelphia, Richmond, or Pittsburgh, transferring cargo
from one railroad to another required the use of a horse and
wagon because “connecting” railroad companies often did not
physically join each other. The national government did become interested in transportation policy in a limited capacity
when officials authorized the use of army engineers to survey
the line of the Baltimore and Ohio and in 1850 when Congress approved a grant of federal land to finance the Illinois
Central’s route from Chicago to New Orleans. But between
the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, local investors and city and state governments continued
to make the key decisions about transportation policy.
After the election of Lincoln and the Civil War, even
though states, municipalities, and private investors continued
to have considerable input concerning transportation policy,
major decisions occurred at the national level. The two
biggest issues in the last third of the nineteenth century involved the building of railroads between the heartland and
the Pacific Coast and determining how much public regulation should be exercised over the railroad companies that had
become so dominant in the American economy. At a time
when railroads had no competition from motor vehicles or
airplanes, they employed more people than the U.S. government, and more money was invested in them than in all of
America’s manufacturing.
By the 1850s many people had foreseen a rail connection
between the Mississippi Valley and California. Jefferson Davis,
secretary of war in Franklin Pierce’s administration, ordered
a study of possible routes, and just five years after Mexico
had ceded a huge part of its territory in the treaty ending the
Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848, negotiators persuaded Mexico to sell the Gadsden Purchase to the United
States. The purchase ceded the Gila Valley to the United States,
a good southern route to California. Before the United States
lurched into the Civil War and during the war as well, several
general assumptions developed about what the policy should
be in regard to a Pacific railroad. Because of the vast distances, sparse population, and rugged terrain involved, private investors could not bear the entire cost of construction;
government aid would be required, and it had to come from
the national government, not from states. Furthermore, people believed a Pacific railroad should be a privately owned entity, not a government-operated route like the Erie Canal or
the failed Pennsylvania Main Line. When Americans first
started envisioning a transcontinental railroad, no one could
foresee the construction of as many railroads as would be
built by 1893—five!
In the 1850s every major city in the Mississippi Valley,
from New Orleans northward, hoped to become the terminus of the transcontinental railroad. When President Lincoln
signed legislation chartering two companies, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, to build the rail connection between the center of the country and California, the South had
already seceded, eliminating any possibility of a route from
New Orleans or Memphis. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862
and an amending law in 1864 chartered two private companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, to construct
the railway. The Union Pacific built from Omaha westward,
and initially, the Central Pacific was to build from Sacramento 150 miles into Nevada. However, effective lobbying by
the Central Pacific brought authorization (in 1866) for that
railroad to go indefinitely eastward until it met the tracks of
the Union Pacific. The joining of the two lines occurred on
May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in a celebrated ceremony that was instantly reported to the entire nation by telegraph. Congress gave generous land grants and
cash loans to the Central Pacific and Union Pacific and to
three other transcontinental railroad companies that were
soon chartered: The Southern Pacific joined San Francisco to
New Orleans in 1883; the Northern Pacific connected St. Paul
and Portland, Oregon, in 1883; and the Atchinson, Topeka,
and Santa Fe reached southern California in 1888. In return
for the generous help of the nation, the railroads committed
to carrying troops for half fare, a provision the nation appreciated during World War II (after which the discount ended).
A fifth transcontinental line, the Great Northern, completed
between St. Paul and Seattle by James J. Hill in 1893, was built
when the nation no longer felt compelled to give railroads
huge land grants. By the end of the nineteenth century, many
Americans thought national policy had been much too favorable to the railroads, and disgust over the Crédit Mobilier
scandal and other reports of unsavory corporate influence on
members of Congress increased the dissatisfaction. (Crédit
Mobilier was a company established by the Union Pacific
Railroad and received contracts to construct its rail lines.
Company stock was given to members of Congress, who then
granted land and federal subsidies to the company to increase
their profits. The involvement of prominent politicians was
exposed in 1872 and 1873, with several resigning from office
as a result.) But historians have not reached a consensus
about the wisdom of the policy of giving great gifts of land to
expedite construction of the western railroads.
Now, in the twenty-first century, when almost all longdistance passenger travel occurs by automobiles or airplanes
and when trains no longer carry most freight, it is hard to envision how much railroads dominated both freight and passenger business in the late nineteenth century. However, because railroads had overbuilt, extending their lines into places
with too few customers to maintain a profit, and because
managers looted many companies, even in the age of railroad
dominance, railroad bankruptcies were very common, especially during the economic downturns of 1873 and 1893. Yet,
despite the weak financial condition of many lines, the public became convinced that the railroads still took advantage of
their customers. Farmers in states such as Kansas or Minnesota, many served by only a single railroad, resented paying
higher freight rates than shippers between Chicago and New
York. They thought the only explanation for higher rates west
of the Mississippi and the still higher rates west of the Missouri was that competition between the several trunk lines
running east from Chicago kept rates low, whereas out on the
prairies, the lack of competition allowed companies to gouge
their captive clients. Farmers in Texas, a state that had given
considerable public land to the railroads, were infuriated by
the rail companies’ failure to complete their lines in the time
required by their charters. Everywhere, Americans wondered
if the free railroad passes given to members of Congress and
other legislators constituted bribes, designed to persuade
them to ignore unfair rates. The public’s unhappiness with
railroads in the late nineteenth century led to a national policy of strictly regulating and supervising railroads, which was
destined to endure into the last quarter of the twentieth century. When railroads had a natural monopoly, it made sense
for the public to intervene in the absence of competition, but
the country’s determination to control railroads persisted
long after real competition developed from automobiles and
trucks running on government-financed highways and airplanes taking off from publicly built airports.
The national policy of strictly controlling the railroad industry took root in the 1870s with the so-called Granger
Laws—laws passed by Midwestern farming states to regulate
railroads. Those laws, named after a farmer’s organization,
the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, eventually
ran afoul of the interstate commerce clause in the Constitution. When an 1886 Supreme Court decision (the Wabash
case) drastically limited states’ ability to regulate intrastate
commerce that had interstate links, Congress gave the federal
government jurisdiction over railroad traffic. The Interstate
Commerce Act of 1887 mandated fair rates for interstate railroad traffic and established the quasi-judicial Interstate
Commerce Commission (ICC) to supervise railroads. Congress approved the act by a vote of 219 to 49 in the House of
Representatives and 43 to 15 in the Senate, indicating strong
public support for it. The creation of the ICC constituted a
landmark in the evolution of national transportation policy,
but a series of court decisions over the next quarter century
undermined the ICC’s effectiveness. Not until the Progressive
Era, during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, William
Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, did the ICC effectively
control railroads. The 1903 Elkins Act forbade secret rebates
to favored shippers. The Hepburn Act of 1906, one of Roosevelt’s most important reforms, gave the ICC power to actually set railroad rates (subject to appeal in the courts) and extended its jurisdiction to express companies and oil pipelines.
During World War I, the federal government took total control of railroad operations after bad weather and inept distribution of freight cars caused a breakdown in the nation’s rail
system. After the war, however, railroad operations returned
to prewar conditions, but the government retained a high degree of control over the railroads. For the next 60 years, the
ICC opposed the railroads’ efforts to fight truckers for freight
by slashing rates, and the government’s antitrust policies discouraged railroad mergers and consolidations.
In the early twentieth century, just when the public began
insisting on strict regulation of the apparently monopolistic
railroads, two new technologies—the automobile and the
airplane—emerged, for which new transportation policies
had to be devised.
Automobiles
Although an experimental automobile was demonstrated in
France in 1769, the first really modern cars were invented in
Germany in 1886. Despite being steadily improved in succeeding years, autos remained unreliable and expensive until
Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908, a truly revolutionary advance over earlier vehicles. Remarkably sturdy, easily repairable, and priced at $825 initially—and sold for
under $300 in the 1920s—it was within the reach of the middle class. Ford’s Model T and a range of cars produced by over
200 other manufacturers brought a public clamor for good
roads, and governments at every level responded. From the
1830s to the early years of the 1900s, the federal government
had contributed little to America’s roads, but from Woodrow
Wilson’s administration to the present, it has consistently
played a major role in the building and maintaining of America’s highways.
Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act in 1916, laying the
foundation of the federal highway policy. This act, which had
epochal implications for federal-state relations because of its
matching-dollar provision, offered cooperating states $5 million in 1917 and an additional $5 million each year thereafter
(culminating in $25 million in 1921) if they would spend a
dollar of state money for each dollar they received from the
federal government. Allocation of the 50:50 matching dollars
to the 48 states occurred according to a formula based equally
on area, population, and post road mileage. For nearly a hundred years, the federal government has appropriated highway
money to states under such a matching-dollar system, but the
ratio between federal and state dollars has varied greatly,
sometimes going to 90:10 for parts of the interstate system.
The formulas, always the subject of intense political debate,
have become far more complicated than the original one
based on population, area, and post roads. The most important of the federal highway matching-dollar programs, the interstate system launched in 1956 during Eisenhower’s administration, began after fierce debates. The creation of that system required major decisions about transportation policy.
Should trucks pay fuel and tire taxes comparable to the real estate taxes railroads paid to states and localities? Should truckers’ fuel taxes be as high in relation to their vehicle weight as
passenger car fuel taxes were to the weight of automobiles?
Should most of the interstates be toll roads paid for by users?
Americans answered all these questions in the negative.
Airplanes
The Wright brothers realized one of humanity’s greatest
dreams in 1903. News of their flight spread speedily, and
within a quarter century, large numbers of Americans had
seen airplanes thanks to the barnstormers who seemingly
flew into every hamlet. Although airlines and airplane manufacturers operated as private industries, a consensus developed that government at the national, state, and local levels
should establish policies that would help this exciting new
form of transportation—all the more so after World War I
demonstrated the military significance of airplanes. The earliest planes were marvels, but they were not very efficient. Not
until the first modern airliner, the Douglas DC-3, began flying in 1935 was it possible for an airline to make a profit just
from the passengers its planes carried. In the 1920s, under the
pretense that the U.S. Post Office had a desperate need to
speed mail through the air, the federal government began
awarding airmail contracts to airlines. This stimulus and the
creation of a system of navigation aids with federally paid air
controllers, became as vital to the airlines as federal land
grants had been for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific
Railroads in the 1860s, and few among the public begrudged
that help. States and localities assisted the airlines by constructing airports and not charging the airlines for the total
cost. And in the mid-twentieth century, to ensure that airlines
made money, the Federal Aviation Administration limited
the number of airline routes and regulated ticket prices.
In the last third of the twentieth century, a fundamental
change in national transportation policy occurred as the nation adopted deregulation—although it would be more accurate to describe this as a policy of less regulation. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter approved legislation deregulating the
airline industry. Total deregulation had not occurred—federal
inspectors continued to enforce rules about safety and proper
maintenance, and the actual flights of air carriers remained
under the watchful eyes of air controllers. Deregulation actually meant a virtual end to restrictions on who could serve
which routes and what prices airlines could charge for tickets.
The results proved dramatic. Increased competition, lowered
ticket prices, and passenger mileage more than doubled. New
airlines sprang into existence, and some airlines, most notably
Southwest, flourished. But all did not. Bankruptcy or forced
takeover became the fate of some of the famous pioneering
airlines, such as Pan American, TWA, and Eastern.
Jimmy Carter’s administration also deregulated the railroad industry with the 1980 Staggers Act, named for a congressman from West Virginia—a state whose coal companies
had long chafed under the railroads’ inability to cut freight
rates without going through the onerous process of obtaining
ICC approval. Even before the Staggers Act, the federal government had begun easing its antitrust policies to permit the
railroad industry to merge troubled lines, and it had agreed
to let the railroads shed their unprofitable passenger service
to local governments’ transit systems or, in the case of longdistance service, to a federally supported quasi-governmental
agency, Amtrak (founded in 1970). A series of mergers resulted in two giant railroad companies, the Union Pacific and
the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, controlling the West’s historical routes from the center of the country to California;
two other giants, CSX and Norfolk Southern, dominating
railroad traffic east of the Mississippi; and two medium-sized
railroads, Kansas City Southern and Illinois Central (the latter a subsidiary of a Canadian railroad), operated in between
the western and eastern giants. As part of the trend toward
less regulation, President Bill Clinton signed a law in 1995
that curtailed some of the ICC’s powers, dividing its remaining responsibilities between the Surface Transportation
Board and the Federal Highway Administration and terminating the ICC itself. In that same year, a federal trucking
deregulation superseded most state trucking regulations.
As the United States proceeded into the twenty-first century, national transportation policy rested on the assumption
that much of the regulation that had developed since the latenineteenth-century days of the Granger Laws unduly hampered American economic development. Recent trends continue to move toward some sort of deregulation, but that
does not mean railroads, airlines, trucks, passenger cars, tugboats and barges, and pipelines operate in a totally laissezfaire state. Through the power of the purse, in such laws as
the Intermodal Surface Transportation Act of 1991 and its
2001 successor, the national government continues to mold
transportation policy. Using the threat of withholding highway funds, for example, Washington has successfully pressured states to enact laws requiring the use of seat belts and
curbing driving under the influence of alcohol.
In the coming years, debates about transportation policy
will center on certain key issues. How far should deregulation
proceed? How should the nation weigh the social benefits of
Amtrak against its inability to be self-supporting? In the
urban areas, how should federal money be divided between
mass transit and highways? What is the relationship between
transportation policy and urban sprawl? How should transportation policy relate to petroleum policy?
—Joseph A. Devine
References
Bilstein, Roger E. Flight in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Goddard, Stephen B. Getting There. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994.
Nevins, Allan, with Frank E. Hill. Ford. 3 vols. New York:
Scribner’s, 1954–1963.
Taylor, George Rogers. The Transportation Revolution,
1815–1860. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951.