A few months ago, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg unveiled Momentum, a new federal program created to “help countries around the world learn from our best practices in transportation planning and modernization.”
It was an odd move for a country whose mobility network seems more likely to arouse pity than admiration when viewed from the outside. The US road transportation system is a climate bomb that generates more than twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as roads in the European Union, thanks to the dominance of personal vehicles. American efforts to build cleaner alternatives such as high-speed rail – common in Japan, China and many European Union countries – have consumed billions of dollars and produced little gain.
