Celebrating America’s Transportation Infrastructure

The American Road and Builders Transportation Association (ARTBA) is celebrating America’s 250th birthday by commemorating the 250 most important transportation infrastructure projects in our history. The list, called “Connecting a Nation: 250 Transportation Projects That Helped Build America,” includes expected items, like the first National Road (completed 1818), the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad and President Eisenhower’s 47,000-mile national interstate highway project (built from the 1950s through the 1990s) as well as national icons like the Brooklyn Bridge, Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge.

All transportation modes are included. Any such list must make choices. While the road-builders do not neglect ports and inland waterways by any means, the list only tends to include barge ports that are also significant blue-water ports. The ports of Norfolk, Seattle, Milwaukee, Mobile, New Orleans and (collectively) the ports of New York and New Jersey are all here, although the major river ports of St. Louis and Pittsburgh are omitted. (The old Chain of Rocks Bridge and the historic Eads Bridge are included.) The port of Paducah is missing (although the Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges get a collective mention), but the port of Burns Harbor, Ind., on the shores of Lake Michigan, is included.

Interestingly, the ARTBA list includes entire river navigation systems as single items. The Mississippi River Navigation system and Missouri River Navigation System each rate an entry. The Kanawha River Navigation system is described as “[the] first fully controlled U.S. river navigation system, enabling year-round barge traffic and supporting coal, chemical, and industrial industries.” The Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, Columbia/Snake River Navigation System, and the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System are included, as well as the Upper Mississippi River Lock & Dam Project (1931-1948). The Texas Gulf Intracoastal Waterway Improvements project (1906) gets a mention.

Whatever quibbles might be raised, the list is a comprehensive and worthwhile way to contemplate the importance of freight movements across all modes — rail, road, air and water — in growing our country.

To ponder the entire list, visit https://www.artba.org/advocacy/transportation-infrastructure-in-america/250projects/#250.