Transport in America is having a crisis moment. You can see it in the headlines — from the debacle at Boeing, through to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge, to the fact that the US can’t even build its own commercial ships anymore.
Adding to this list of woes are longer term problems like the lack of good overland train travel, poorly maintained roads and post-pandemic declines in the safety and reliability of city transit systems. More recently, there’s a sense that the electric vehicle revolution is stalling as Tesla slumps, China gains and Donald Trump threatens to pull the plug on the entire clean energy transition if he becomes president again.
These stories are often put in separate baskets. But like so many things in complex systems such as transport and logistics, they are in fact connected, often in unexpected ways.