Mr. Coderre said he believes the federal government needs to be the leader in this field of transportation technology.
I had our analysts produce a report on the last 200 years of transportation inventions that people actually use. This report demonstrates that, aside from making military purchases, government has had almost no role in producing the technologies that people use to move themselves around and that in almost every case, transportation technology has been invented and commercialized exclusively by the private sector. The only major exceptions appear to be for space and the military. In the military it was done through purchases that created a demand pull, not through R and D programming.
That historical insight guides the way to the next generation of breakthroughs, so my opening question is a broad one, but I'm asking you to answer as succinctly as you can.
Is government really the leader in innovation, or, in fact, is it private sector entrepreneurs?