Clayton Nall – The Road to Inequality

Show #197 | Guest: Clayton Nall | Show Summary: The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act inaugurated the greatest public works project in American history. It’s for the most part highly acclaimed, creating unprecedented mobility for the average American. Clayton Nall, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford, has a different take. He’s pored over databases and archives to discover the deeper effects of the modern highway system – its creation, he says, increased the urban-suburban political divide and aggravated uneven access to basic services and resources. The effects are still surfacing today partisan battles over transportation and infrastructure. How do we fix – or at least compensate for – a system that’s literally cemented in?