Pete Buttigieg listens as U.S. president-elect Joe Biden announces his nomination as transportation secretary on December 16, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Pool/Getty Images
On a coast-to-coast, New York-to-San Francisco trip in 1919, Dwight Eisenhower discovered that you could barely cross the country by car, the roads were so run down. After he became president 40 years later, he decided to fix this by building a first-rate, nationwide highway system. We still drive on the result: some 40,000 miles of highways built for the equivalent of more than $200 billion in today’s dollars.
President-elect Joe Biden’s $2 trillion transportation agenda is the most ambitious since Eisenhower, putting the electric car, the train, and renovated roads and bridges at the center of American economic and jobs policy.