For more than fifty years, U.S. transportation planners and engineers have focused their energies and our investments on building a transportation system that moves private cars as quickly and efficiently as possible. This worked to make it easy for many people to get around - up to a point. Increasingly, however, a pileup of factors is making it harder and harder to rationalize the practices, funding mechanisms, and even philosophies that made the 20th century the embodiment of personal freedom via driving a car.
