Tom Vanderbilt is the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and the forthcoming You May Also Like: Taste in An Age of Endless Choice. His interest in infrastructure has taken him to some interesting places, like the underground mountain home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. But it’s the more mundane structures, like a new pedestrian bridge in Greenville, S.C., that are the real measure of the country’s vision for the future.
