 It's striking how much of our imagination about the future is centered on transportation, at least in terms of the imagery of it, right? You look at how the establishing shot of a sci-fi show or film, for example, tells you you're in the future and usually what establishes it is there's different ways people are getting around. There's levitating cars or there's starships or something like that. And so we've always, rightly or wrongly, had a disproportionate sense that what tells us we're in the future and not the present or what marks the present as different from the past is how we get around. I would argue the most important piece of transportation technology was not a vehicle, it was the smartphone. And certainly the thing that changed transportation for most of us most tangibly was probably the rise of rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. They were using the same kind of cars that the taxis used and that we used to get ourselves around, but the way in which we would summon them changed. I find that my novels and all of them do start with transit. I find that it's a good way to take readers through the world. And in the piece I wrote for Future Tense, when Robot and Crow saved East St. Louis, we start with a drone. And again, we immediately see the different kinds of social relationships in those areas. And I think that's what's really great about thinking about transit through science fiction is that it lets you evoke all these different kinds of social institutions and how they affect infrastructure and transit. I do think it's interesting to think about the Jetsons and the Flintstones, right? Both of them, unlike Star Trek with their transporters, have the presumption of the conveyance that moves you from point A to point B. There's the family car and the Jetsons, it's the flying car, right? In the Flintstones, it's the foot-propelled vehicle. Interestingly, we've moved actually in both directions. We've come to realize active transportation isn't a primitive thing. It's a very advanced thing and we're doing more with bicycles and self-propelled transportation in that regard. What even the Jetsons did in picture is that by the time anybody's got a flying car, George Jetson probably doesn't have to drive. And again, it's revealing that sometimes what matters most is something we weren't really thinking about, which is how we relate to these pieces of transportation technology versus what their physical capabilities, like their speed, for example, actually are. When I'm trying to create a story, I'm always keeping in mind that the future is not one thing, quote-unquote. So we need different elements to try to build that sense of possible reality. So the whole transit system that I was writing about in the story was actually evolved in my novel, Pacific Storm. And that was, again, it was, I don't want to call it window dressing, but it's kind of one of those cues that the story is not now. I distinctly remember it must have been maybe four years back or so. There was a rail extension from New Haven to Hartford. This extension basically made it a lot easier and a lot cheaper to get from New Haven all the way to Springfield with various stops in between. And my family lives in the Hartford area. And before then, even though I lived in New Haven, if I was without a car, I had to depend on very sporadic Amtrak times to go home. The CT rail operated almost, depending on the day, every single hour. And so the ease with which I was able to go home and see my mom increased greatly. And I found that my life and my quality of life improved drastically as a result of increased access to home cooked meals. Access to mobility is so important and it's often so politically contested, right? It's not an accident in my view that one of the single moments of the civil rights movement was the bus boycott and these struggles over who got equitable access to transportation, not just the dignified and equal use of transportation assets, but often even whether people were served at all. And frankly, you see the implications of mobility most dramatically when it is denied, when you see the living in a community that can be a transit desert, for example, in the same way that we have food deserts impacts the life choices and the economic opportunities of the people who were there. Transportation is empowering and access to transportation empowers people to reach educational opportunity, economic opportunity, even social cohesion, the ability to gather with loved ones or participate in civic life. So this got me thinking that the the role of transportation is really just as much about time as it is about space and giving people these different opportunities. How do you create infrastructure that doesn't kind of decay socially so that you don't assume you're always going to have the same configuration of settlements and and the same kinds of commutes? When I go to the mainland, the thing that strikes me because we drive a lot is the interstate system. I mean, to me, that is one of the wonders of the world. The idea that you can get on this road and just go almost anywhere in the entire country. That's kind of the scale of transportation infrastructure that I just find fascinating. We have to make decisions that are a bit of a bet on the future. And at the same time, we don't want to bet the farm on the future turning out one way or the other. So much of the work around transportation has kind of a very present, very real, very now kind of needs need state. We have to get from point A to point B and solve issues that are with us in the moment. And then on the other hand, the work itself, the output of the work in many cases, bridges, tunnels that, you know, if we think very fundamentally about it has such permanence. These are the means to build cathedrals of infrastructure and the nature of a cathedral is that it takes a long time to complete and then it's in service for a very long time. We rely on the cathedrals of infrastructure from past generations, right? We're figuring out what to not just iconic things like the Golden Gate Bridge, but we're figuring out what to do about the Baltimore and Potomac tunnels. They're 149 years old and a lot of people depend on them right now. When we think of transportation, it's not just about people, it's the transport of goods. And, you know, in the beginning, I was wondering, how does my reparation story tie into this issue of transportation, right? But there's a whole dispersal element of it. It's not just the calculation of an amount that you would send to individual citizens residing in your metropole. How do you get that money to these people? And one of the side effects of the whole plan to pay reparations is that, you know, because it's sort of zoned, you know, with this complicated algorithm involving zip codes and whatnot, a lot of it is based on where people live. And all of a sudden, when people are able to afford to live somewhere else, that changes. And they go live somewhere else where they have access to a different school system or what have you. And that has all sorts of domino effects. So what I spent a lot of time thinking about is, how can we deploy our capital in an agile or nimble way? So that some of these decisions will make sense, even if we don't quite know how commuting patterns are going to work in seven years, let alone 50. But we know that certain things are going to be true. We know that you're going to need bridges to get from one side of a physical barrier to another. We know that we're going to need resources and hubs where people can come together to access modes of transportation, even if those modes of all things like train stations or town squares or transit hubs or airports and ports. So what we've got to do is invest in the things we know we're going to need no matter what, and then create room for other things to happen that might be very difficult to picture. And the best way to do that is to not think about the asset first, but to think about the people that it'll affect first.