ABSTRACT
This chapter will review aspects of the experience of the United States in the process of infrastructure integration, with an awareness of the findings presented by other contributors to this volume. The focus will fall upon transport systems, an emphasis that aligns nicely with the topics examined by most of the other authors; in any case it would be impossible to examine all USA infrastructure networks. From the outset, however, it is necessary to recognise that the continental scale of the USA requires at least one fundamental shift in perspective from that adopted by most other contributors. Rather than exploring how a single infrastructure network was integrated (or not) across national boundaries, the stance adopted for this chapter is to examine the challenges of connecting different American transport sectors into a single functioning network. To be sure, several authors discuss more than one mode of transport, but multi-modal questions are not the central focus of their chapters. This chapter could have reviewed in detail the development of the standards, regulatory structures, legal mechanisms and other activities that promoted operational integration within a single infrastructure sector, for those problems were every bit as challenging in a North American context as in Europe. But the challenges of integration across sectors is the essential issue for the United States, for the continental sweep of the nation largely removed the political boundaries that so complicated infrastructure integration in Europe. Thus for the United States, a discussion of intermodal integration offers a more interesting story, even while this topic also adds a different dimension to the conversation among infrastructure within this volume.
