“ Somewhat ironically, the Obama Administration repeatedly invokes President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the father of the American interstate highway system, as its rail strategy’s historical forebear: by revolutionizing automobile infrastructure in the post-war period, Ike changed the way Americans get around. The way Langan sees it, however, a continent-wide obsession with the car and the labyrinthine web of roads and highways that followed constituted “fifty years of bad planning,” the fallout of which affected Canada as severely as anywhere in the lower forty-eight—reducing North American passenger rail to a “cruel joke.
