The best transportation system in the world: railroads, trucks, airlines, and American public policy in the twentieth century

describe the inevitable and perhaps the natural order of persons and organizations in the transportation industries once freed of government.Actually, starting in 1978 with airlines and in 1980 with railroads and trucking, transportation firms entered a period in which authority for rates, routes, and service devolved from the hands of government regulators at the CAB and ICC to the hands of transportation executives.In turn, leaders in the transportation industries and especially the trucking industry quit organizations such as the Regular Common Carrier Conference and reshaped other organizations such as their rate bureaus.In the period between 1980 and the mid-1990s, executives at railroads, trucking firms, and airlines modified ways of conducting business constructed over the course of the previous half century and longer.We characterize these processes of change as those of devolution and deinstitutionalization.These processes involved much more than a return to "free" markets.After 1980 as before, government remained central to the organization of transportation industries and firms.For instance, government officials permitted airline executives such as Robert L. Crandall of American Airlines to construct "fortress hubs" at key airports; and government leaders permitted railroad executives such as John W. Snow at CSX, originally a railroad company, to create intermodal companies owning barges and ocean-going container ships.During the 1990s, federal officials even abolished the Interstate Commerce Commission as well as remaining state laws regulating truckers' rates and service.In the 1990s, federal abolition of state law was called preemption.After the 1980s, then, government still framed the transportation industries, and government was and also remained the principal author of transportation markets.Stated once again, in the realm of framing these three main transportation industries, their firms, and their markets, leaders of the American state always sat squarely in the driver's seat.Consequently, we structure this study around long-term periods of transportation governance and long-term periods of government-constructed markets during the twentieth century.For all the litigating and lobbying that surrounded the business of transporting freight and passengers over that lengthy period of time, we identify three main periods in the political economy of American transportation.In the first period, between 1920 and 1940, leaders in the federal government, who had before considered the railroads as the nation's primary form of transportation, struggled to deal with new means of moving people and goods.In the 1920s, however, members of Congress as well as leaders at the ICC advocated consolidation of the railroads as the answer to the nation's transportation problems.Only during the Great Depression did members of a new group of federal officials begin