♪ Man: The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the great symbols of America... and there's something about a great bridge that is also about dreams and about journeying and about movement.

Man two: It symbolizes connection, but I think it also symbolizes aspiration.

Man 3: It doesn't look dated, it doesn't look obsolete, and it's not a dilettante bridge.

It's a very tough bridge.

David Rubenstein: The Golden Gate Bridge is a potent symbol of America's ability to dream big.

It is stunningly beautiful and even more vital today than the day it was completed, and while I do find it slightly terrifying to walk across the bridge, I can appreciate its majesty and what it represents about American ingenuity, innovation, and spirit.

These days, though, when I see the news, I find myself wondering where that spirit has gone.

Are we still capable of building major infrastructure projects like we did in the past?

Why does it take so much longer now and cost so much more, and what does this change tell us about our country?

♪ Rubenstein: At a time when America has become increasingly divided, it's important to consider the things that connect us.

We are connected by our national symbols, the meanings we infuse them with.

We are also connected, quite literally, by our infrastructure, and sometimes, they are one and the same.

Why do you think, over the years, the Golden Gate Bridge has become so iconic?

There are lots of bridges in the world.

What is it about this bridge that is so iconic and made it so famous?

One of the things that makes the bridge unique is humans came here and built something, and we didn't tarnish the site.

We actually, arguably made it better, and so it's a beautiful site where the manmade, built infrastructure added to the beauty of the site.

And the bridge means different things to different people.

Soldiers came home from World War II or Vietnam on a ship, and their first image of coming home is when they see the bridge and they go under it, and so it creates a powerful, emotional tie.

Arguably, it's one of the most recognizable symbols in the world, like the Empire State Building.

So we have the original drawings of the bridge.

This is one of the erection drawings that shows you the towers.

You know, the strong steel X-bracing that braces these two tower legs together.

1, 2, 3, 4 struts.

The tower is 746 feet tall.

The roadway is only about 1/3 of the way up, which gives it that elegant look.

The towers get a little smaller.

They taper as they go up.

That steel is from 1933?

Uh, from the 1930s.

That's correct.

1930s.

So how long does steel last?

It's a full-time job for our staff here to maintain.

But it could last 100 years or more?

It's kind of like a 1967 Mustang.

It's a lot more expensive to maintain than buying a new car, but you got to do it.

Man: We don't often think of American history as a history of transportation, but the reality is that the development of our country was based on different modes of transportation evolving over time.

Access to new forms of mobility, both for passengers and for freight, fundamentally changed the way our society was built and the way people were able to live.

The Erie Canal, built in upstate New York, connected New York City to the Midwest and exploded the development of cities like Chicago and other places throughout the Midwest.

Man: These projects were enormously ambitious.

They demanded some daring feats of engineering on a truly massive scale.

The Transcontinental Railroad completely transformed what it meant to cross the continent and opened up the West to ranching.

The development of street cars made suburban expansion possible, and people were able to move further and further away from the city center.

[Explosion] Norton: We have the Panama Canal cutting 50 miles across the Isthmus of Panama so that the ships can pass through, and there were a lot of projects built in the 1930s.

It really was a crescendo of big public works projects.

Of course, this was also the Great Depression, so there was enormous unemployment, and so there were big New Deal initiatives.

♪ Woman: These projects of the 1930s built an underlying infrastructure for the U.S., some of which we still rely on today.

Freemark: And then, finally, we had the investment in a massive automobile system.

It's been the dominant story in American transportation since the very beginning of the 20th century when investment was first made in major new roads throughout the country, but then in 1956, we as a country decided to invest in the interstate highway system and did so on a scale that was unimaginable before that point any place in the world.

This created an entire society built around the car, which meant sprawling subdivisions, cul-de-sacs, strip malls, gas stations on the edge of nowhere, and that has made America the country that it is today.

The car, as an individual mode of transit, is like something that has really defined the American built environment.

People want to be free, and mobility is the core of this.

♪ Pete Buttigieg: One of the magnificent things about New York transit, riding the subway, is that it isn't just for people who have no choice.

So you're on some of these lines, and you got everybody from day laborers to the Wall Street folks in their suits coming up and down because it's just the most efficient and effective way to get around.

♪ So welcome to the Transportation Operation Center, the TOC for short.

This brings together information from across the country, across our different networks.

We can summon information on everything from aviation-- you see every airplane in the airspace represented as a dot on that map-- to potentially something that's going on on a pipeline somewhere or in one of the transit systems, and the professionals here have a level of monitoring round the clock, and then they can also bring people in as needed for things like emergency response or secure conversations.

So at any given time, you can know what's going on in the transportation system in our country?

That's right.

We're in the middle of a big transformation.

They call it Next Generation Air Traffic Control.

It's estimated that just by more efficiently moving the aircraft around, there will be less need to be circling or to take elaborate routes.

It could lead to--up to a 15% reduction in the use of fuel, even with existing... Oh, wow.

technologies for propulsion as soon as we can safely make it happen.

Jerry Brown: Transportation infrastructure projects have a meaning beyond moving persons from point A to point B.

There's a mythic quality that helps define who we are, and anytime you do something that hasn't been done before, in some sense, that's a leap of faith.

Small communities, they might have a bus... Rubenstein, voice-over: Hearing about American infrastructure projects on the horizon, it's hard not to be skeptical.

Building anything today seems to require a level of commitment we don't want to make.

Why does it seem so much harder now than in the 1930s, and how did we ever manage to build something so ambitious?

Man: We have to go back to the mid-1800s when there was the gold rush and people started coming to California to head off and strike it rich, and at the time, there were ferries going back and forth into San Francisco.

The city grew up on the northeast shoreline.

It grew into the water, and then all these communities grew up around the bay.

So the way you got from the North Bay into San Francisco was you stood in line and you hopped on a boat and you got off a half-hour or so later, and there you were.

There were something, like, a dozen different ferry operators along the bay at one point.

Man: Marin before the Golden Gate Bridge was a backwater.

It was pretty rural, and you could only reach it by boat.

Around 1916, engineers and kind of credible people began pushing for the idea that we really do need to have a bridge to span the Golden Gate and connect San Francisco to Marin and the North Bay area, especially once automobiles were invented and then began percolating into society and population growth put strains on the ferry system, but more than that, cars put a strain.

So if you built the bridge, it would solve all your problems.

Brown: To build the Golden Gate Bridge, you needed a leader of some imagination and boldness.

Call them a visionary, call them a noodge, call them somebody that never shuts up or never goes away.

It takes persistence, and it takes people willing to go along and make the investment.

♪ Holden: Joseph Strauss was an engineer who had revolutionized drawbridges back in Chicago, and when they asked for proposals for a bridge to cross the Golden Gate, Strauss was the only one who really submitted a proposal and mapped out the prices, and he campaigned very hard for it both in Marin and in San Francisco.

He came out to California, and during the 1915 Pacific Exposition, he built a crane that took fairgoers up 150 feet high to look at the whole geography.

Norton: There was the question of whether it was even possible to build a bridge across the Golden Gate.

It is extremely difficult for lots of reasons.

The engineering and logistical challenges were profoundly complicated.

Holden: I think it's one of the most daunting geographic areas to build a bridge.

It was beyond people's imagination how difficult it was.

The bay and the Pacific meet at the Golden Gate.

All of the water in the bay empties into the Pacific every 3 days, and the tides coming in from the Pacific have to channel themselves through this hourglass structure and are quite awesome... and a fellow named Ellis actually designed the bridge.

Norton: Strauss hired Charles Ellis to work out the practical engineering of building the bridge.

He doesn't always receive the credit, but his calculations and his designs made it possible.

Did people think it was an engineering marvel to build this bridge?

A lot of people thought you couldn't build the bridge.

The unique geography of the site presents some challenges, and the distance across the strait is quite large, and so that distance necessitated a much bigger bridge than anything that had been contemplated up to this point in time.

Some people said that it was too big to overcome.

It's also a very harsh site.

Mother Nature introduces lots of challenges.

A geologist at Stanford said that the rock under the south tower is not strong enough and the south tower's gonna topple over.

A lot of very learned people challenged the viability of building at this site.

King: People said, "This is dangerous," "This is untested," and "This is a boondoggle," but also, "This is going to spoil nature," "Too expensive," and, "We need to do more study.

We need to do more research."

Mulligan: When this bridge was conceived, there was tremendous opposition.

There were over 2,000 lawsuits filed to stop the bridge.

The ferry companies that were owned by the railroads did not want to have a bridge built because they made a lot of money, and so there was tremendous amounts of litigation.

King: It was the major port on the West Coast, and you had a number of steamship lines, passenger lines, cruise lines all based in San Francisco, and for them, it was easier to not have a bridge there.

The War Department objected because they said, "If somebody bombs the bridge, our boats won't be able to get out from the harbor," but it's really deep water, so the bridge will sink to the bottom and the boats will float on the water and go through.

Newsreel announcer: Tides at the floods, swirling currents, father Neptune at odds with himself.

These, since time immemorial, have been one of nature's strongest barriers to stay man's march towards progress.

Today, this basic idea, the application of wire cable to the suspension bridge principle, makes possible one of man's greatest achievements, the longest bridge span yet attempted to conquer that world-famous entrance to San Francisco harbor, the Golden Gate.

Holden: And you have to realize, the bridge was built during the Depression, so these people were thinking big.

They were thinking beyond the poverty, which was spread across the nation.

Urban: Everybody was hungry.

The bridge paid better than most any other jobs, and there wasn't very many jobs to be had.

Once in a while, there would be ironworkers who'd come out who was scared.

They'd take a look at it, and maybe they're there one day, and that's it.

They'd take off.

They didn't want no part of it.

♪ Holden: The design for the towers was close to 750 feet high, and about 2/3 of the height would be above the roadway.

That would be like a 50-story building on top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Newsreel announcer: The Brooklyn Bridge, which amazed your grandfather in his youth, could fit in its entirety, anchorages and all, right under the main span of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A group of 452 wires form a single strand of the great cable.

Roebling engineers have made it possible with developments never tried before in suspension bridge history.

Adams: The Gate was the coldest place I've ever worked.

Well, that one was-- it's one to remember.

Ha ha!

You put all the clothes on you could get on and worked and worked hard, or you'd freeze.

Brusati: It did sway quite a bit.

A few times when it was really windy, you could feel the motion because sometimes when I'd get home I felt like I had been on a boat all day.

Newsreel announcer: When gales blew in from the full reaches of the Pacific, they were worse than any Roebling engineers had ever encountered in their long experience of bridge building, but the bridge men seemed to delight in fighting the gales.

The Golden Gate main cables are rapidly spun as spinning crews compete with each other.

Joseph Strauss, always the innovator, had a safety net under the bridge to catch any workers that fell.

19 had fallen and been rescued by the net, and they called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club.

Urban: I used to jump down there when we'd have to go pick up stuff.

I never climbed down the column.

That's too much work.

You just jump down in the net, and you just bounce and go pick your stuff up.

Man: I worked with a guy named Ed Walker, and he was a rotten, no-good [bleep], and his spit bounced, and he would fight anybody, and he was a tremendous ironworker.

He stopped all the time, and Strauss fired him because he wouldn't use a safety belt.

Strauss told him, "Tie off there," and he told him to go [bleep] himself, and so Strauss had him fired right then.

Rubenstein: Listening to these workers' stories, I am in awe of their bravery.

It's hard to fathom the dangers they faced on a daily basis, just by going to work.

Mulligan: Initially, only one worker died for the first 3 1/2 years, which was quite low for a job of that size back in the 1930s, but then, about 6 months before construction was done, while they're stripping some paving forms, scaffolding collapsed, and it tore out the net.

Urban: I was working that day.

I looked up, and here we seen this boom.

Instead of being up, it was laying down on the deck, and a bunch of guys were ganged up there, you know, so you knew something happened.

Brusati: I was on this catwalk, you know, right there, and somebody says, "The net broke."

There was one place where you could see the net down below, and it was gone all right.

Adams: I raised my head and looked, and there was two fellas hanging there by their fingers on the flanges of the beams underneath.

One of them hollered, "For God's sake, get a rope."

Then we could hear the fellas in the water hollering.

Lambert: People ask me, "What went through your mind?"

The only thing that went through my mind was survival.

I knew I had to hit the water feet first, and I managed to do it.

The only problem with that was that I was caught in the net and the net was headed for the bottom.

Then when the crab fisherman came by, he had an awful time getting me aboard because I had a broken shoulder, ribs, and broken neck and, you know, I was a wreck.

Adams: But the next morning, right back at 8:00, we were right back out there again and went right back to work.

My grandfather Wallace Bing Fong was born in San Francisco in 1903.

He went on to graduate from the UC Berkeley School of Engineering in 1923.

I look at his graduating class picture, and I think there are maybe 3 out of it looks like 100 who are Asian, and everybody else looks to be white.

Between 1882 and 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the law of the land, and that forbade Chinese from immigrating to the United States.

That was the first law in the U.S. to go on the books that specifically banned people from immigrating to this country on the basis of race, but my grandfather worked on the Golden Gate Bridge project, helping to design the circuitry of the original lights on the bridge.

It's something that I think transcends generations in this country.

Certainly at times, I've felt this as a Chinese American, as an Asian American, is that there is an unspoken feeling of you have to work hard to prove that you have a right to be here, and so to be a part of creating such iconic and lasting infrastructure for America, I hope he was proud of that.

You know, I'm proud that he did that.

Newsreel announcer: The bridge that couldn't be built.

The bridge that spans the Golden Gate.

The opening of this bridge was celebrated by the most brilliant fiesta the West has ever seen.

The Golden Gate Bridge was dedicated to the public's use.

My father was on the Golden Gate Bridge Authority.

My sister Barbara, my sister Cynthia, and my father, they all walked across the bridge on opening day, so that was exciting.

I thought that was pretty neat.

Mulligan: The first day it opened was on May 27, 1937.

The bridge opened to pedestrians, and everyone came dressed in their finest clothes, and they walked across the bridge, huge crowds, tremendous civic celebration, and then the next day, it opened to automobiles.

It was bumper to bumper.

Everyone that had access to an automobile wanted to celebrate because this was such a huge undertaking.

It's difficult to fathom how big this was for the community.

Holden: We were coming to the end of the Depression.

World War II was about to start, and you had a bridge that could drive into San Francisco.

So those 3 forces came together, and 30 years from 1940 to 1970, Marin's population more than quadrupled.

The bridge had a huge effect because you could now reach San Francisco easily by car.

Rubenstein: It's hard to imagine what San Francisco would look like today if the bridge had never been built.

So much of the city's economic development was a direct result of that infrastructure.

Without it, San Francisco would be a very different place.

Norton: A couple of years after the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, there was an enormous exhibit in the Highways and Horizons Pavilion of General Motors at the World's Fair, and they had an exhibit there called Futurama.

The model was about 3/4 of the size of a football field without the end zones, and you passed over this depiction of the America of 1960, which at that time was the America of 20 years in the future.

It was like you were in the future viewing it from an airplane window, and it culminated in a city where everybody's driving everywhere, and it's jaw droppingly beautiful.

Narrator: This 1960 drama of transportation progress is but a symbol of future progress in every activity, made possible by constant striving toward new and better horizons.

Norton; And what's interesting about that exhibit is General Motors was implicitly recognizing that you don't get projects done just by saying, "Oh, let's build interstate highways."

You get them done first by inspiring people with a very attractive vision of that future that you want.

Buttigieg: For example, the Golden Gate bridge is a reminder now of how important it is to have vision on the front end because there was no guarantee that that would've been funded or that it would've been completed.

It's also, I think, something that ties back to a deeper sense of who we are as Americans.

I think the Golden Gate Bridge is a symbol of America in two different ways.

It represents determination, commitment to the future.

It was built in the Depression, and they got it done and got it done magnificently.

It also represents something that we now realize was a mixed blessing, which is the increasing dependence on the automobile and the fact that we were going from being an urban culture to a suburban culture.

That stands as a symbol of the incursion of the automobile into all of American culture really in--once you get a few years later into the postwar era because it basically is part of an interstate, part of a highway.

Brown: It's not that the car isn't convenient.

It's not that the car is not fun.

It's--a lot of cars are a lot of fun.

[Car engine revs] Sport cars are fun.

Big half-ton pickup is fun.

You're up higher.

You're king of the world.

I mean, think about the movies.

The movies are fantasy, they're dreams.

There's even an aura that some cars like to project, the Mustang and other cars.

So, yeah, there's a real feeling for that, but when we understand the implications... Go, go!

Go, go, go, go, go, go!

we have to design more benign alternatives that people, I think, will follow.

There was a lot of road building in the 1930s.

We forget that because it's from before the interstate highway era.

Driving was very dangerous, much more dangerous then than it is now.

The argument was that to make driving safe, to save lives, we have to build dedicated, purpose-built motor highways just for automobiles and not just reuse the old roads that had been used long before when the speeds were lower.

When highways cut through American cities, especially in the fifties and sixties, ripping out neighborhoods, homes, schools, businesses, churches, and so on, the devastation was disproportionately visited upon communities of color.

Almost every significant city in America has a story to tell about communities that were devastated.

Buttigieg: Roads, highways, overpasses, bridges were constructed in a way that tore through whatever community had the least social and political power to insist that it go somewhere else, often low-income communities, typically communities of color.

Sometimes, it was even considered a feature, so-called slum clearance or blight elimination to destroy what had, in fact, been a thriving Black neighborhood.

Freemark: Transportation is the number-one contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

In other countries around the world, where people drive 50% less than Americans do, their greenhouse gas emissions are much lower, and lung disease is one of the major causes of death in the United States, and it's particularly bad in communities of color and low-income communities near highways.

King: A lot of destructive and in many cases irreversible damage was visited on the landscape and on cities in the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s, and I think that some of the damage came out of World War II.

It's like, "Look at us.

"We beat Japan.

We beat Germany.

"We know how to just get things done, "so now we're gonna get things done.

"We're gonna build interstate highways.

"We're going to tear down neighborhoods and build more efficient new neighborhoods."

And this "We're America, we can do anything, we know what we're doing" sparked this very strong reaction, which became, "We can't "trust you to just tell us "this is all gonna work out, and then you're gonna screw up the environment, you're gonna destroy cities."

Freemark: We now have such a car-based society, such a car-based life that it's very difficult for Americans to envision a different way to get around.

We need to come to a new consensus around other options for investment, but getting there is gonna require a different way of thinking in our politics.

After World War II, we built the interstate highway system, we built a lot of great airports, but then it seemed for the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, we let things fall behind.

Why do you think that was?

There's always been a side of Washington that's allergic to spending money on anything, but when you look at infrastructure, especially across the last 40 years or so, my whole lifetime, we've been underinvesting in it, and that's been catching up to us.

So you didn't have to be an infrastructure buff to see that the condition of our roads was beginning to create costs just in wear and tear on your car, to see, if you traveled a lot, that U.S. airports were falling behind our international peers, to see the need to do more.

Roads can carry only so much traffic, so that congestion is something that cannot be escaped even with zero emission vehicles because you still have one vehicle behind another vehicle behind another one, and then you have all these trucks, but I think if we really want to facilitate the movement of people, if we want to facilitate living in the more distant areas in Central California but working in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, we need something entirely new.

Rubenstein, voice-over: America's enduring love affair with the automobile is undeniable, but it's not sustainable.

So, what's our way out of this situation we've created for ourselves?

Goldberger: The nature of our culture today is not attuned to the commonweal.

We are so attuned to individualism that we often fail to notice or appreciate things that benefit the common good if they do not also have a great individual benefit for those who are going to make the judgment and approve them or disapprove them.

It's a terrible embarrassment if you believe in and love this country, why we who were for so long the technological leaders of the world are effectively a Third World country when it comes to rail.

Rubenstein: If you go to China or Japan, you very often see these high-speed railways that go at incredible speeds.

We don't have that in the United States.

Why have we fallen so far behind?

The truth is that we can't afford not to have these kinds of connections.

The way I think of it is partly a matter of national pride, and largely a matter of economic strength.

Why should a citizen of China or Japan or, for that matter, Italy or Morocco come to expect a standard of service that's not available to a citizen here in the U.S.?

We have to do better.

Brown: When I was first elected Governor of California, I had an idea to build a bullet train.

That was based on my experience in Japan, which I traveled to earlier in my life.

I was pretty impressed going from Tokyo to Osaka.

And so, I thought, "Why can't California have one of these?"

Subsequently, we started a high-speed rail authority to plan for it.

Not much happened until Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor and then actually a bond issue was put on the ballot and it passed.

So, California started building it.

And we've been building it ever since.

This is the biggest project that's going on in America.

Schwarzenegger: I am a big believer in building infrastructure.

And there's many reasons why I feel so passionate about high-speed rail.

First of all, the speed.

I mean, how much longer do we need to go and travel the same speed we did 100 years ago?

I mean, that's embarrassing.

Uh, I mean, I know there are some trains that go a little faster now, but it's really Mickey Mouse, let's admit it.

And then, of course, from an environmental point of view, also very, very important.

And then there's the economic stimulus.

The faster we move people and goods, that's economic power.

And for every billion dollars that we spend on infrastructure, we create 18,000 new jobs.

Think about how many hundreds of thousands, even millions of jobs it will create nationwide if we start building high-speed rail.

And I'll tell you another thing, that I have, you know, ridden high-speed rail all over the world.

It's great!

But it makes me mad that we don't have it in the United States.

I'm very impressed with the efficiency of the high-speed rail and the kind of speed it travels and how quietly it travels.

We hope that, and we're looking forward to having South Korea being part of the bidding process, to help us in California build the high-speed rail.

We're supposed to be the leaders.

We are supposed to be the number-one country in the world.

Let us build the best system in the world.

And let me tell you something.

Failure is no option.

No.

So, let's not give up on high-speed rail.

Let's just push forward.

We are gonna do it.

Trust me.

Demsas: It's a massive shift in how people can get around.

Not having to fly from L.A. to San Francisco.

I mean, the carbon impact of not having to fly anymore is massive, but also just the time is just something that we can really get back.

When you spend an hour and a half in congestion in the morning and the afternoon, that's 3 hours of your day you're losing.

And even if it were to take an hour and a half, the fact that you don't have to be paying attention, that you can be doing other things, I mean, it's fantastic.

Rubenstein, voice-over: On the one hand, this sounds great.

Who doesn't want to spend less time sitting in their car?

On the other hand, it costs up to $200 million to build a single mile of high-speed rail in this country.

Multiply that by the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

380 miles, $76 billion, and you can start to understand why it's so hard to build nowadays.

Brown: This is not an academic exercise.

It's complicated.

There are engineering challenges.

There are environmental challenges.

There's land acquisition challenges.

Then There's the financial challenges.

And that's what makes it so difficult.

Why the Golden Gate Bridge was difficult.

Why the Panama Canal was difficult.

But people say, "Oh, expensive, $90 billion."

But what you have to remember is this will last 100 years.

So, divide the 90 billion by 100.

Looks a lot more reasonable.

News anchor: Governor Jerry Brown and state leaders put pen to steel today as California becomes the first state in the nation to break ground on a bullet train line.

A lot of the time, many of these policies are coded as Democratic or Republican.

And so, elected officials don't want to do it because they think it's a win for the other side.

Even if it stands in the way of broad public benefits.

Man: This really is about not wasting precious taxpayer dollars on a program that's going to end up being exorbitant.

I support high-speed rail projects, just not this one.

This isn't high-speed rail, this is actually what I would call Franken-rail.

It's sociable!

It's amenable!

It's the future!

And it's happening right here in Fresno, California.

We got a lot to be proud of today.

Man: I was mayor when the high-speed rail idea was put together and it was focused on Central California, running the line through our area, and Fresno was presented with the possibilities.

I was initially intrigued by it.

It is intriguing to think what a train that goes 240 miles an hour from L.A. to San Francisco.

And yet I have seen the results of high-speed rail just bulldozing its way through an agricultural, bountiful landscape.

Thousands of acres taken, people's homes and businesses.

We have difficulty getting east-west from our downtown because of streets that are closed and construction that goes on and on and on.

So, here we are now with several billions of dollars' worth of concrete in the air, not connected, a far cry from being finished, and we are very concerned that the promise of this transformational infrastructure could very well be a real embarrassment to us if it's not completed, if it doesn't have value, and if Fresno is left with these concrete monoliths to failure.

And quite frankly, it's made me mad that they've torn us up.

Our ports have not been modernized in a long, long time.

Our delivery of goods and people on our surface highways and streets, those need to be repaired.

Our electrical grid is increasingly becoming unaffordable and also unreliable.

So, there's a whole lot of everyday, ordinary kinds of things that the people in our area look at and say, "Why are we spending this when we could be spending it on that?"

And instead, it's gonna suck up a whole lot of money, $105 billion, and be on par with the cost of the International Space Station.

Put that in context when we have so many other needs.

Demsas: When you think about high-speed rail in particular, it's really hard to conceptualize the benefits that I might get from some potential project that might exist 10 miles away in 10 years.

And so, what that means is that while in theory, I might be very in favor of transit being built in my community, I'm opposed to the specifics of what that looks like.

King: Once there was actually a route set, then you had the governments of those cities kind of all standing up and filing lawsuits, challenging the environmental process, challenging various aspects of it and saying, "We're not against it, "but the whole thing should be underground.

We're not against it, but.

We're not against it, but."

Whereas before, with the Golden Gate Bridge, there was a bond election saying, "We need this much money to build a bridge."

That one election was where everything played out and once it was done, it was done.

But with high-speed rail, you had this one election that said, "We're going to do this and the voters have endorsed the idea."

And that was just to set things up to then unravel.

[Boat horn blaring] Brooks: It wasn't that people were thrilled about the Golden Gate Bridge.

There were a lot of people who were unhappy about the Golden Gate Bridge and the same kind of concerns we see today.

People who didn't want noise and traffic.

People who thought that the bridge was gonna undermine their economic interest.

You know, these are exactly the kind of concerns we have today.

However, citizens didn't have the same vast array of tools we have today to delay and increase costs.

Freemark: In the post-World War II period, we had situations like fires in the middle of the Great Lakes because of pollutants going into those spaces.

We had whole species going extinct because of lack of care for our natural environment.

We had people being exposed to incredible amounts of air pollution in our cities, resulting in smog in areas around major factories.

All these things encouraged a blossoming environmental movement in the 1950s, and really exploded in the 1960s and 1970s.

And that environmental movement was based on the idea that a society built around growth, around maximizing of the economy, was producing a natural environment that was bad for our health.

And many of the achievements of that environmental movement were really positive.

At the same time, it created something of a backlash to investment in general.

And that produced what might be called people who are in favor of Not in My Backyard, or NIMBYs.

These people had been negatively impacted by the construction of the Interstate Highway System and felt very strongly they did not want to see that repeated.

Rubenstein, voice-over: Hearing about these modern-day NIMBYs reminds me of the 2,000 lawsuits that were filed to stop the Golden Gate Bridge.

A lot of those were business interests, but some were local residents who didn't want a bridge.

And yet somehow, it got built.

So, what changed?

There's a whole host of legislation that passes in the late sixties and early seventies that gives citizens the ability to sue when they don't believe that the government is faithfully carrying out whatever it's supposed to be carrying out.

And that ability to sue, as a citizen who's opposed to a project, is a fantastic lever.

Whose trail?

Our trail!

Brooks: Because suing stops the project, can require the government to consider your concerns, even if you don't represent a very important interest group.

I have to say that if I were a homeowner, I also would not appreciate a freeway in my backyard.

That's a legitimate complaint.

Norton: For people to live in the shadow of an elevated highway, really diminishes the quality of life and the attractiveness of the neighborhood around it.

Freemark: People are worried about decreases to their property values over time.

They think that somehow an investment in an improvement to their neighborhood will result in them being unable to sell their house at a reasonable cost.

And the vast majority of Americans' equity is invested in their homes.

But the investment in a public transportation system expands the accessibility of a neighborhood, allows people to go more places more easily, and that means essentially it's worth more to live in those places.

Norton: Big infrastructure projects can mean life or death for a community, can even make a community.

For example, the Golden Gate Bridge helped make Marin County what it eventually became.

It was a real game changer.

A new project can also marginalize a community, in effect, cut it off from the vine, so that it withers.

And you can see this today.

If you go on some of the old U.S. highways, you'll see these old motels, many of them abandoned, old signage.

And that signals when the interstate highways were built.

Whole towns have vanished because of infrastructure projects.

Tennessee Valley Authority flooded some valleys.

There was the town of Butler, Tennessee that's now underwater today, but on the other hand, railroads made towns.

Even Atlanta, Georgia, did not exist until a railroad was put through.

California high-speed rail has faced a lot of organized opposition from communities through which the infrastructure would have to pass.

Especially if you live in California's Central Valley, you might not be very interested in a rail project that might seem like it's really serving the Bay Area resident or the Southern California resident but not you, and yet it's your land through which this railway has to pass.

Woman: Right here is gonna be the high-speed rail train, and up there is the ramp for where the cars and everything's gonna drive.

When I move here, there was grapes.

The farmers who had it was my neighbors and they always have clean, and nice, and beautiful.

Now it's just empty lot and people working every single day here.

Only I can see, construction.

That's all I can see.

Here in Fresno, we find the perfect house for us.

With my husband Norberto.

We've been married for 30 years.

We worked together for 20 years doing gardening.

We had a dream that one day we have a little place to be and retire here.

It was beautiful, we had nice neighbors, and we had 3 children here.

Woman: While the construction is going on, it's really disturbing.

The house shakes.

The whole mirror just fell down and it just broke.

The water pressure in the showers are just, like, really awful.

It doesn't work almost at all.

Man: And we didn't have this problem before they started sucking a lot of water.

With all the noise that this new train is gonna produce right here, since it's so close to us, how much movement is it gonna make to our foundation of our house?

And most likely, we're not gonna be able to live here anymore.

We're gonna have to relocate.

We don't know what happen in 10 years or 15 years, because the rail train and the high speed for the 260 mile.

260 mile's a lot, you know.

I think the hardest part is definitely seeing the difference on how we used to live and our life here compared to now, which is really sad, obviously, because we used to love living here.

The reason you buy a house is because you like the neighborhood.

You enjoy the way that it is and you were trying to buy into decades of a future that you saw yourself and your children maybe even growing up into having.

I think it's reasonable for people to bear some level of construction annoyance in order to get access to transit.

I don't think it's reasonable for communities to be forced to lose their homes with no compensation.

Patterson: We ripped up people's lives.

Their homesteads, their treasured place where they've raised their children.

And high-speed rail has not only bulldozed through, but they've also left large swaths of ground that they own, and those are turning into homeless camps, garbage dumps, and trying to get the High-Speed Rail Authority to clean up its own property's been very, very difficult.

This land's been in our family for probably 120 years.

My great-great-great- grandfather built those silos.

My great-great-grandfather built these warehouses.

And it feels like these outside entities in San Francisco and Los Angeles don't take that into consideration.

We're just a line on a map to be drawn over.

My name's James Weirick.

I'm a retired Marine officer and I served as a lawyer in the Marine Corps.

And now I take care of my family farm and family business.

California High-Speed Rail and Tutor Perini, their prime contractor, had been storing pipes on our property, large enough that a person could live in them.

For two years, they had just seized our land.

And during that time, homeless people were living in the pipes.

And for two years I was blown off.

They say, "Oh, yes, we understand the homeless problem," and they did nothing to remedy it until it finally culminated in the homeless burning down one of our warehouse.

That pile of sand is what is left over from a warehouse that's been in our family for generations.

It burned to the ground.

They've never offered any compensation.

This is such a huge bureaucracy that you can't penetrate it.

I can't believe how just a regular homeowner or farmer in the valley would deal with this.

I'm a Marine.

I'm a lawyer.

I worked on Capitol Hill.

I was powerless to stop them.

It's like we've been invaded.

That's been the worst part of it.

Just the feeling of this outside entity just swallowing us up.

Man: If you're able to define progress as what is the greater good for the greater number of people, there is going to be a cost, but the high-speed rail project is an opportunity to connect dense congested cities with small, rural towns in a way that would be better for everyone.

That's why I support high-speed rail and I hope that the impact be minimized in ways that are fair and equitable, that are different from the paltry forms of compensation that were given in earlier decades and earlier generations.

Brown: If you have a river, towns form along the river.

If you have a train, towns form along the train.

Well, the high-speed rail will have that same impact in building up communities, and can bring back rural areas in a very powerful way and also help people find decent housing without having to mortgage their entire wealth and income forever.

Many people would say, "Well, if you're gonna "build all these infrastructure projects, "it's gonna be more people traveling around, it's gonna be more carbon emissions."

How do you make certain that what you're gonna do is not gonna be detrimental to the environment?

The key is to create a lot of alternatives that are better for emissions and better for congestion.

Yes, we may need to improve a bridge or a highway that you might drive your car across, but while we're at it, we should also create a great passenger rail or transit option, or bike path so you don't have to bring a car.

♪ ♪ Woman: My name is Desrae Ruiz.

I am an ironworker apprentice.

Currently I'm working on the California high-speed rail.

My husband, he's an ironworker.

My two brother-in-laws are ironworkers.

I have 3 uncles, ironworkers, and 8+ cousins who are ironworkers.

And I'm the only female within the family.

These are gonna be exposed out of concrete, and these are gonna be inside concrete.

Ruiz, voice-over: Being on this project, I feel like it is something big to be a part of.

I've seen the different phases it takes to build the structure.

As an ironworker, we put in reinforcing steel.

It holds together the concrete.

So, if you were to think of your body, the reinforcement is like your bones.

It's gonna allow for things to be moved across the girders.

I do feel like we tradespeople are building America day by day, because it does take construction to build America.

You wouldn't have things like the Golden Gate Bridge, the bridges in New York.

All of those are ironworkers and tradespeople putting it together.

Just like everything great does, it's gonna take time.

And we're doing it in a way that we get it done, but safely.

Because once we're done, we're gonna have millions of people on it.

One thing that doesn't tend to be appreciated about large infrastructure projects when they're being conceived and constructed is that--it's basically building a new template for the future to emerge from.

You put a new route down in the middle of geography, that route being there is going to start to reshape everything around it, even if you don't know exactly how, but it will happen.

When you look at the most dynamic points in American history, they're times of great change.

Change is the foundation of what makes a vibrant and economically successful landscape.

Without it, we're robbing our own futures, by creating a situation that is unsustainable.

Norton: I think it takes helping people reimagine their futures, like at the New York World's Fair in 1939.

And we need that kind of inspirational vision of an attractive future.

It's not enough to frighten people about the very real threat of the climate emergency.

Instead of that, why don't we apply the lessons of General Motors Futurama to find the future that we really need, and find out what we can really build and really afford to maintain, and really actually want as well.

Building big things well isn't just something that happens in America.

It's part of what we do as Americans, part of what it means to be an American.

♪ Holden: I think the Golden Gate Bridge symbolizes a can-do spirit that America is known for.

It was quintessentially American because there were so many obstacles that confronted it.

Engineering obstacles.

Nothing like that had ever been built.

Economic obstacles.

It was in the middle of the Depression.

And it required vision.

You needed to look at the future and see that the automobile was really gonna be the mode of transport.

We need a little more of that today.

I would like to see that optimism return to the United States.

There are a lot of countries where a single piece of infrastructure, think the Eiffel Tower, symbolizes not only the city that it's in, but an entire country.

In the U.S., we're blessed with many, many of those, from the Hoover Dam to the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate and more.

The Golden Gate, there's something unique about it that just says this is what a great American bridge looks like.

Goldberger: We love to build, and we love the idea that something great was here before us and will be here beyond us.

They represent an arc of time that is greater than any of us as individuals will experience.

And so, they connect us to the past and to the future.

And they're also very beautiful.

♪ Toy: We as Americans have the power and the ability and the talent to create marvels in this world, and the ingenuity to do it.

So, I think about, what's the Golden Gate Bridge of the future?

What might that be?

What new technology or new ways of seeing or doing or being can help us advance from one place to the next?

And the Golden Gate Bridge literally was helping people go from one location to another.

I absolutely think Americans still have the ability to think big and to create transformative projects.

I really think that the sun has not set on American ingenuity.

Rubenstein: The fact is, Americans are still capable of innovating and building for the future.

Look at Internet infrastructure or advances in telecom or the James Webb Space Telescope.

We are connected digitally as well as physically.

It's not just about the magnitude of our biggest projects, it's about the reach of our broadest visions.

And that happens often one stretch of road, one small airport, one bridge at a time.

♪ Rubenstein, voice-over: The Golden Gate Bridge stands as a reminder that we are united by the connections we have forged, by the audacity of our dreams, and by our ability to make those dreams a reality.

♪ ♪ Announcer: Explore more about "Iconic America" at pbs.org/iconicamerica.

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"Iconic America" is also available for download from Amazon Prime Video.

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