Marco Chitti: Who Decides that Roads Lead to Rome?

We citizens love to connect with each other by lamenting the exorbitant taxes we pay to wasteful governments and the inflated prices of consumer goods and services.  But how often do nuanced arguments about transportation infrastructure figure into those conversations? Probably never; roads, bridges, railways… we just take them for granted, right?  However, the status of its transportation networks has always been key to determining any economy’s potential well-being.  For example, if goods and services are in supply at point a. but in demand at point b., well-designed transportation infrastructure makes for efficient transaction (i.e. doing business costs less and is more likely to happen, making lower taxes a likelihood).  Even the CIA underlines the significance of transportation infrastructure to the relative power of a modern global market economy: in The World Factbook, the CIA compares each country to all others based on its number of airports, kilometers of railways, roadways and waterways.  So, who decides that roads lead to Rome?  Come welcome urban planner and transportation scientist Marco Chitti to our show and he will show us how he and his colleagues are already planning transit well into the future.

WATCH: YouTube / Facebook