few resources, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Growth
in demand for scarce space on the roads, along with decades of deferred
maintenance, have led to ever-growing traffic congestion traffic that
has become a major drag on the productivity of the intercity trucking in-
dustry as well as a major source of frustration for commuters who have
no practical alternatives to using their cars.
$29 billion for highway improvements, $8 billion for mass transit, and
another $8 billion as a down payment on the construction of a handful
of high-speed rail corridors. So, too, would investments in smarter roads
that use a variety of information technologies to minimize bottlenecks.
portation, some of the lowest-hanging fruit is getting short shrift. In par-
ticular, we estimate that every $1 invested in the intermodal transporta-
tion network the infrastructure for seamlessly shifting freight from
truck to rail to ship and back would yield $5 to $8 of benefits in terms