Nostalgia for "The good old days of lawful evil" usually involves transport images - uncongested trains and streets. But while traffic congestion is more palpable now, it doesn't mean choices back then were right. We may have been on easy side of curve - now we pay for the past.

Of course there's a great @CityLab piece for this. Even transport policy deserves accurate historical treatment - there are dangerous consequences for getting it wrong. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/11/the-problem-with-mussolini-and-his-trains/507764/

Historical treatment of transport policy is hard for a few reasons:

1) The system is complex - you need training to find beginning and end of something like crowded streets or trains. The causes aren't always where you expect to find them, they also interact in unexpected ways.

2) Transport systems never start operations at full capacity - there's always growth to reach congestion of a train, bus system or road. So the same project can look both good and bad depending on when you view it, but some parts are down to natural growth. of course...

3) Transport policy is inextricably tied up in politics. That's just how it is, it's not a good or bad thing. Even claims to "remove politics" from transport are political. This affects various decisions made about project selection, funding, maintenance, which leads me to...

4) There is no laboratory to perfectly test the effects of any complex transport decision before making it, let alone one where you can test the counterfactual of a choice you've already made. This is a field where hindsight is not 20/20 - investigators should respect that./ End