About the Briefing
This handout was created for the AHA’s May 18, 2018, Congressional Briefing on the history of infrastructure development in the United States. Panelists Janet R. Daly Bednarek (Univ. of Dayton) and Peter Norton (Univ. of Virginia) discussed the history of major American infrastructure projects, their influence on current development, and how historical perspectives on these past accomplishments can help solve the overhaul of America’s aging infrastructure. Zachary Schrag (George Mason Univ.) moderated.
A recording of the briefing is available to watch on C-SPAN.
The long-awaited infrastructure plan released by the Trump administration calls for limited federal funding, emphasizing instead the role of state and local governments as well as public-private partnerships. Greeted by Congress with little enthusiasm, debates over how to fund infrastructure initiatives continue to delay legislation. The federal government’s role building and maintaining infrastructure has been debated since the nation’s founding.
Infrastructure in United States
- Is the role of infrastructure to respond to demands, or shape them?
- Infrastructure development must not be isolated from fiscal responsibility, social equity, public health, or environmental sustainability
- What is the federal role? Prior to the New Deal, infrastructure was largely a state and local affair. Since then, the federal government has been instrumental in building dams, highways, and airports, and promoting electrification. But some powers have been devolved since the deregulation of the 1980s.
- Who should pay for infrastructure? Infrastructure projects involve a blend of public and private funding
- No project is strictly public or private, but every project involves some blend of public and private money
- For example, private cars drive on private roads; private airplanes land on public runways; public dams sell electricity to private utilities
- The “infrastructure crisis” is a maintenance crisis, not a supply crisis
U.S. Airport Infrastructure
- Developments in air transportation infrastructure
- In the 1920s both public and private local entities came forward to establish earliest airports
- In the 1930s, new Deal programs that provided funding for airport work limited such funding to publically owned airports; in response, many local governments purchased their local airports
- Defense spending during WWII provided extensive funding for the expansion and upgrade of many municipal airports
- In the post-war period, cities, states, and public authorities own or manage the vast majority of US commercial airports
- While airports are critical to a national (and international) transportation system, there has long been debate over funding their construction, maintenance, and expansion.
- Should public funding, especially federal, be limited to runways and navigation aids? Should federal funding come from general tax revenues, or from a special trust fund?
- Who should have access to airports receiving federal funds? This has been a long conflict between commercial airlines and general aviation.
- Concern over aircraft noise has been the single greatest challenge facing the construction of new airports or the expansion of existing airports of all kinds
- People don’t want to live near airports, the need to buy surrounding lands makes airport construction more expensive
Dedicated taxes and trust funds
- Aviation trust fund set up in 1970
- Did not make provisions for dealing with aircraft noise, which resulted in fight over whether or not aviation trust funds could go towards
- Trust fund does not necessarily reduce the infighting about how money can be used or for what purposes
Participant Biographies
Janet R. Daly Bednarek is a professor of history at the University of Dayton where she teaches courses on urban history and the history of American aviation. Her work on airport history includes America’s Airports: Airfield Development, 1918-1947, Cities Take Flight: A Centennial History of the American Municipal Airport, and, most recently, Airports, Cities and the Jet Age: US Airports Since 1945. Her article, “The Flying Machine in the Garden: Parks and Airports, 1918-1938,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American History Essays, 2007. From 2005 to 2014 she served as the Executive Director of the Urban History Association and from 2016-2017 served as the president of the Ohio Academy of History.
Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. His article “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” published in Technology and Culture, won the Abbott Payson Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. He is a member of the University of Virginia’s Center for Transportation Studies, and of the Sustainable Urban Mobility project of Technical University Eindhoven (Netherlands).
Zachary Schrag is professor of history at George Mason University. He is the author of two books, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, and Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009, both of them published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Schrag’s articles have been published in the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Urban History, Research Ethics, Technology and Culture, and Washington History, and his essays have appeared in the American Historian, AHA Perspectives, TR News, the Washington Monthly, and the Washington Post.
