Change but i was also tripping on potholes like everybody is. I was stuck in traffic. I was hearing sad stories of innercity people who couldnt get jobs or had to take two or three buses and the subway to get to school. So that was going abroad and writing a maglev train in shanghai where we went to another city. Subway connections to the train. The train was so fast we went to another city in 20 minutes that otherwise took an hour and a half by bus. So all of those things together made me feel this is a really Important Mission and i had already been talking to you. You were such a help in this whole project. I had already been talking to you about the need for a new vision for america because you have been putting forth a vision just at the end of the Clinton Administration when you are leaving office. Unfortunately the world changed in the 2000s. We have a lot of defense spending. We have a lot of other preoccupations and a financial crisis so we havent made the kinds of investments we need to make. So i thought this is so important to the future of the country and im i am part of the u. S. Competitiveness project at Harvard Business school. We really care about making sure that america is strong and also the American Economy and quality of life are as excellent as they could possibly be. They were once again leaders in the world so ive put aside what i thought was my leadership book to write this and then it was really interesting that i ended up concluding it is all about leadership. There are many other details but its all about leadership and the leadership for innovation and collaboration the visions is as important as the engineering. Thisthis is a technical issue. We could do this. We have the Technical Skills in america and in fact and technology we lead the world. Its just that we are not always applying our own strength so leaders need to step up to this and i started out saying you know the start the sorry state of our infrastructure but in fact there are many reasons for hope. We see many great ride checks and with enough public agitation and discussion which you have also been so active and involved in then we could really get leaders to step up. Thats why wrote a book and so move is a title not only suggests a book about transportation infrastructure but also suggests what we have to do in america which is we have to move. We have to get moving. Host we do and we have to leave again in the subtitle of the book actually talks about putting america back in the leadership position when it comes to Infrastructure Investment and let me just say this. I want us to actually come back to this issue of leadership because you have got a lot to say about that as far as Going Forward but lets just unpack it a bit and you do something very interesting. You talk about transportation as more than concrete, asphalt and steel. You talk about it as a family concern, as a business concern. Lets do that a little bit but let me also ask you about allison, natalie and jacob and how you actually dedicate the book to them and then you really tell us to think about it in some degree from their perspective meaning Infrastructure Investment and its importance. Thank you. It fell as the natalie and jacob or three lovely little children and we need to think about this issue not only for business and the economy but also for the children who are growing up now and i have had the privilege of reading books to those children including some of their favorites and some of my favorites which i think are really great metaphors for what we need to do. I know we will get to the real industry policy in all of that. I wanted to also signaled this is a family issue so a high proportion of Household Budgets, up to 20 of Household Budgets for an average family ford spent on transportation is a big deal but Allison Natalie and jacob like books like dr. Seuss oh the places youll go, very inspirational and in the middle of that look as i was reading it i was startled to see that the characters bopping around in dr. Seuss like ways and then gets to a place in the metal called the waiting place waiting for the trains to go the bus to come the planes to go, it was all about transportation and so the rest of the book says you got to get out of the waiting place and its inspirational for kids who can do it. We have to do it for them now. The other one is the little engine that could. Host thats my favorite. Guess though that is truly a metaphor for america. I can imagine that look ever been written other places although other places have a generosity of spirit like the little engine but the little engine was the woman stepped in to carry toys for kids when all the big engines were too busy too important. The establishment wasnt listening and so to me thats a signal that we also have to count on the little engines entrepreneurs, Community People to Push Congress and to do some of the work. So that was why i started the book dedicated to them but its their future that we are really talking about. Its interesting you mentioned the congress and the president and now we can get a little bit into the policy. I know that yesterday you were part of the kick off of infrastructure with the Vice President and also with secretary fox. As we get to the end of the month were congress has once again extended the transportation bill this time for the 30second time, if they have to extend it again i will be 33 times that they have extended it a month or two or six months or whatever and a clarion call was we need a longterm plan for Infrastructure Investment. Do you think that thats important as we think about moving america back into the leadership post . We definitely need longterm. We are going to count on the small engines and the small engines will produce many innovations that will help, but we do need the big engines and we do need longterm funding. When funding is subject to short term fixes, then nobody can plan plan. You cant really plan to upgrade. Maybe you can patch some of the potholes on the roads but you cant plan projects that reinvent it in for Allison Natalie and jacob he would refer the longterm but for all of us by the way this is also a shortterm pain issue because of the amount of time we lose productive time stuck in traffic, the frustrations. The First Responders i cant get places quickly enough because they cant move on the roads so longterm funding would reduce some of the political uncertainty. That would attract more investors. That would be helpful to the Public Sector because if we had more privatesector investors they wouldnt all have to come out of public money. They wont necessarily invest if they think its the public site will run out and maybe there is no public will. They are looking for longterm commitments. This is both the u. S. Private equity which is now looking at infrastructure and its sovereign wealth funds from other countries Infrastructure Investment firms. There is money out there they would like to invest but its not simply politics. Its banned certainty with shortterm fixes. Its not something we want to authorize and i feel the same way about air traffic control. When not subject to congressional budget cycles they cant also make investments even intellectual investments in new technology thats experimental because they might start something and its cut off. Its interesting you mentioned the issue of cost and i thought immediately about how you started off where you say stuck on the way to the future. Thats the first chapter but this first paragraph and im not going to read it all but a couple of sentences are worth reading for sure. The average American Commuter wasted total of 38 hours in traffic per year. This is the average so some would be even higher. This amounts to five. 5 billion hours of lost u. S. Productivity annually. These are staggering figure so you are saying that we all pay a cost when the system is not working effectively. We do we all do and thats just commuter stuart. What about people who are trying to buy groceries are going to Health Care Appointments were trying to get to school . School buses get stuck in traffic too but when you get to High School Students they often are using the public system so this really is a huge cost in the Health Care Cost because being stuck in traffic means they are burning fuel unnecessarily and pollution from those idling cars. There was a study in brooklyn that said 45 of all air pollution is caused by idling cars or driving around to find parking once you are in a city. So we have adjusted to some of that although people complain. We should complain that theres a way in which the human mind will not realize theyre something you can do about it and we call it normalizing. Thats normal. Lets build and extra hour in and so leave early, come home late and dont see the family. There are so many costs and consequences and so we have to solve. Thats an immediate problem that also requires longterm investment because if all we did was repair the roads or repair the train tracks which really needed we still wouldnt be heading for the future. Because we are growing in population. We need to do something. Host right, right. In that paragraph that i was reading you said we lose about 121 billion in cost for fuel and lost time and just congestion annually and thats over 70 billion for people just stuck in traffic. What about the person who says okay put in a disk disc and listen to a book on tapes. Guess who sa said we are very good at making sense of something or making it seem normal and working around it. But you could listen to that look on tape in your office or at home with the kids. We werent meant to live in our cars but even if we were even if we were because Auto Companies might like to have people. The cars became is the Henry Ford Health to build the middle class with the automobile. Just do he did and cars have become dining rooms for many people but we dont want them to become living rooms. But its also the fuel, the time time, the frustration and what about bad weather . We have had some really Severe Weather and there was a time think it was in 2014 in atlanta where cars couldnt move. Host the ice storm. Just go for 20 hours and people were stuck in their cars. Thats really scary because aside from cramped space people could die. These are the dire stories, the dire consequences and it doesnt have to be that way. Thats the other message of move that we dont have to accept this and their solutions. Many of them are already in place and the rest of the country. Host its interesting you say we dont have to expect it. We have actually never really accepted the normal. This is a country that has always thought that tomorrow could be a better than today. You mentioned the intercontinental railroad. You mentioned the interstate system. Its not like we havent dreamed big and produce pig in the past. What do you think of this moment now and this is going back to the question of leadership i think but what are your thoughts there . You touched on many of these in the book. Just go in the history of braille you have to look at the Transcontinental Railroad and many people point to that as the glorious past and why could it be like that today but when i dug into the history which was fascinating it wasnt so glorious as it took decades of discussion and no one really did did it until Abrahan Lincoln forced it through. Host even at a time of war. Guess who the civil war. Isnt that amazing . There were a lot of compromises that have to be made. It didnt work perfectly. The track started to be laid from the east coast of the west coast and they didnt mean the metal so that take extra money to fix fix it. There were tales of corruption. That was how jpmorgan and john d. Rockefeller made their fortunes and started monopolies but we could do it. We could envision that big project because we were envisioning the growth from coast to coast and how do you use that coasttocoast territory . You are not going to connected by stagecoach. The railroad connected it and made it possible for farmers to ship their products east to get goods coming back west and it made it possible for settlements to spring up there yet you know that well from your time as secretary of transportation that every time you put in a transit stop you get economic growth. People build around that so we did it then but thats always going to say it has lessons for today because i wasnt all that easy. It did take a leader who managed to forge the coalition to get the political will. We have had other interstate highways was really big like the Transcontinental Railroad. Have a defense rationale and it was a big old project. It was 1000 miles of highways and the huge price tag. Opened up all kinds of opportunities and has held the American Economy after the work. It helps settlements because the suburbs were already there but they could grow even more because people could live in the bucolic, idyllic green suburbs supposedly and get to work in cities. Cities were kind of abandoned at that time and we can get back to that later but this defense rationale that we have had for all of our big projects including sputnik the space race race, the cold war those investments on defense grounds, some of them are levels. Its because president who wanted the interstate highways said we could move troops and we could evacuate cities. In Hurricane Katrina in new orleans in 2005 it was clear you cant evacuate cities by everyone having their cars and heading to the interstate. It doesnt work so well those were really great rationale for the time i also say we are stuck in the past. We havent had big visions are big enough visions since the 1950s, maybe the early 1960s about the role that these projects play our future. We have some beautiful infrastructure, or gorgeous bridge in boston signature rage. Its like a piece of sculpture that people admire. There are other fantastic ridges. The golden gate bridge. They are beautiful works of art but they also are not a vision for what we need to do to connect people and help them move across those bridges so we need its time for a really big new vision that takes into account the 21st century. Does what you were trying to do in your vision 2000. Host yes it is and you mentioned that earlier and i wanted to come back to it though one thought before we moved here and i think its very interesting that really fdr during his administration thought of this National System of roads and you are right it really took a few years of gestation if you will but then this emphasis on defense during the eisenhower years to move it forward. I think the question may be is there are way for maybe the issue of competitiveness and our need to be competitive globally. Might that replace what has been the driver of defense and security to some degree . I think thats certainly a rationale that resonates with the Business Community and with officials. Local, state, federal etc. And we could sell it a little bit to the American Public jobs but im not sure that by itself its enough to sell the public i mean. People know that china has invested a great deal and that japan had already invested. It was part of their rebuilding after world war ii but its a little bit more remote just to say we want to be number one on making 10 indicators but if it doesnt translate to things that improve peoples lives. So my thought is and what ive been saying in this book and want to say to the people who are elected leaders, i feel many of us could be leaders whether we are Holding Office or not. Im trying to be a thought leader here. What im trying to say to them in move is we need a vision about mobility. Mobility is so essential youve talked about transportation is a signatory system of the nation. Mobility, we have to be able to move goods. We have to be able to move ourselves and we have to be able to get where we want to go. Other countries are moving faster. We can use it metaphorically to talk about catching up or getting into the lead as we compete with other countries but we also have to continue to be the land of opportunity. I say we have gone from a land of opportunity to a state of delays but we have to get that back so this is all about holding the middle class restoring the middle class. It is all about reducing inequality because one of the things that keeps people poor as they can get to jobs. We have to make things affordable for people, accessible to people so if we wrapped mobility and competitors together then we have a shot and i think we should all be starting the conversation figuring out a good way to talk about it. Because it was all National Defense or the interstate highways when i looked at the history they were never actually called the National Defense highway act but everybody referred to them that way. Everyone knew sputnik was about eating russia but the space race by itself was also inspiring to people. Astronauts. Mad science, all of those. Yeah and this picture of people actually landed on the moon. Its powerful. We dont arouse peoples imagination about the future and this is such an exciting area to excite imagination. We have entrepreneurs dreaming up all kinds of things that sound while but its inspiring. It is, you mentioned both china and japan. As you know china now is promoting its one belts, one Road Initiative where they are trying to bring up to date the old silk road and its all about trade and its all about participating in the global economy. Dinesh noi recently and you know about this as well but i was recently in japan and i rode the bullet train and they were