Leadership Quote by Jerry Costello

“The United States transportation system is the envy of the world” is the kind of booster line a politician reaches for when the argument isn’t about engineering so much as national self-image. It’s aspirational patriotism framed as a brag: not merely that America moves people and goods efficiently, but that other countries supposedly want what we have. The verb “envy” does heavy rhetorical lifting. It sidesteps measurable claims (on-time performance, safety, emissions, access) in favor of a mood: confidence, dominance, inevitability.

Costello, a long-serving Midwestern Democrat, likely deployed this in the policy arenas where infrastructure talk is really spending talk. Praising the system flatters constituents who depend on highways, freight, and aviation while justifying federal dollars without sounding like government is fixing a failure. If the system is already “the envy,” then new investment becomes maintenance of greatness, not a rescue mission. That’s smart politics in a country suspicious of “big government” but addicted to the benefits of big public works.

The subtext is also defensive. By the late 20th and early 21st century, transportation debates were crowded with uncomfortable comparisons: Europe and East Asia’s sleek passenger rail, cities built around transit rather than car dependency, and the crumbling optics of bridges, interchanges, and airports. So the line functions as preemptive reframing: don’t look over there; look at our scale. America does, undeniably, excel at moving freight and enabling long-distance mobility. But calling it “the envy” masks who gets left out - rural towns without options, families priced into car ownership, communities split by interstates - and turns a complex system into a patriotic mirror.