The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (review)

As the mammoth title of this book suggests, the three authors, Mark Rose, Bruce Seely and the late Paul Barrett, cover public policy matters that relate to the core forms of commercial transportation in the United States during the past century. In the process, they first examine railroads, indicating that progressive-era politicians brought about harsh statutes that damaged the earnings powers of these quasi-public corporations. Following the period of federalization (1917-1920), Congress passed the epic-making Transportation Act of 1920 (Esch-Cummings Act) that sought to restore railroads, especially weaker carriers, to profitability. Even though the federal government continued to wield great powers in the daily operations of railroads, the 1920 measure was unsuccessful in achieving one of its principal goals of creating a limited number of strong, competing systems. The law also revealed that an over-arching transportation policy had not been achieved. In the 1920s, too, federal policy makers failed to establish controls over modal competition, especially the rapidly expanding motor-carrier industry.

During the New Deal major changes occurred in national transportation policies. The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 brought about federal regulation of both interstate buses and trucks. By the end of the decade, commercial aviation came under the thumb of the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Politicians and bureaucrats agreed that aviation was a unique form of transportation and required special attention and nurturing. Unquestionably, the overall assumption was that transportation was a series of modes. "The result was a 'national' system composed of separate transportation industries and separate transportation markets," note the authors, "each now defined variously as technology of mode and governed by several equally disconnected policies and regulatory agencies" (p. 33).

In the years to come regulators really did not act much differently. The Transportation Act of 1940 still kept railroads and their surface competitors under tight reign, although the federal government relaxed controls over railroad mergers, abandoning the ambitious unification scheme called for in the legislation twenty years earlier.

Yet, rumblings could be heard for a rethinking of public policy. Significantly, Sinclair Weeks, who served as secretary of commerce in the Eisenhower cabinet, spearheaded a detailed study of surface transportation and concluded that the ICC needed to embrace a more flexible approach to rate-making, especially for railroads. Tariffs should include a "zone of reasonableness." This thoughtful, forward-looking report went nowhere, in part because of the political nature of transportation regulation. Motor carriers and their Teamster allies saw deregulation as an especially frightening prospect. In subsequent presidential administrations, the urge to bring about some deregulation increased and virtually all forms of transport were included. Fueled by growing consumerism, the wreck of the giant Penn Central Transportation Company in 1970, a troubled national economy burdened by "stagflation," Congress and President Jimmy Carter embraced deregulation of airlines in 1978 and then partial deregulation of railroads, trucks and bus transport soon thereafter. These actions were revolutionary; deregulation "[. . . .] not only devolved rate making and routing authority to transportation executives, but also fostered a process of diminishing or dissolving federal and state agencies and deinstitutionalizing business relationships that in many cases had been shaped over the course of all or most of the twentieth century" (p. 213). Still, as the authors show, Washington lacked a comprehensive transportation policy, but its over-all impact hardly disappeared. After-all, deregulation represented another form of administrative and legal strategy.

While perhaps the title of this work is meant to be sarcastic, the authors have ambitiously tackled a massive topic and have succeeded in showing the complexities of regulatory policies over an extended period, grasping the "big picture." Although the pre 1970s period has been extensively chronicled in various secondary studies, the more recent coverage is fresh and stimulating. Moreover, the authors...