Part I: Nicole Gelinas on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation

Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas and I agree on most things. Common thread? We don't know what we want and we're just not going to get it anyway.

I’m fortunate to have access to lots of interesting people who work in the transportation and infrastructure space. One such person is Nicole Gelinas, who’s a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute—a conservative think tank that publishes its own original research and fosters a quarterly publication, aptly or not, named City Journal. It tackles issues using arguments I don’t agree with and its conclusions sometimes fall far away from my understanding of how the world works.

But I read it anyway.

We have to read and engage with ideas we don’t agree with and language we find uncomfortable. As long as an author argues in good faith, this type of debate is what made statesmen once, and will once again. I can’t say this to be true for all of City Journal’s authors and editors (the same can b…