Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways

7. Conclusion and Epilogue: Urban Highways and the American City

7 Conclusion and Epilogue: Urban Highways and the American City The Road Not Taken In the middle of the twentieth century, the construction of a new generation of high-capacity roads for American cities should have been viewed as a sophisticated synthesis of transportation planning, land-use planning, urban design, and environmental planning, guided by a strong and welldeveloped understanding of how cities work. If cities are a problem of “organized complexity,” as Jane Jacobs argued, then their evolution must be guided by a “pattern language” commensurate with that complexity.1 Also, planning for roads and public transit should have been completely integrated into a single process of city design. Unfortunately, this did not happen in the United States between 1930 and 1970. Instead, a narrow mode of highway planning was substituted for multimodal transportation planning, and we are still struggling with the consequences. A nationwide highway system connecting major American cities was a logical development of modern transportation technology. It is hard to imagine the American landscape without interstate highways. But we need to make a distinction between the high-speed connecting routes between cities—these are the true “interstate” components of the system—and the extensions of the interstates into and around the centers of American cities . Trying to use interstate highways and other freeways so heavily as an internal mass transportation system for cities has been a major failure of public policy. The political and economic power of the auto–oil–highway lobby, the convenience and allure of the automobile, cheap energy, the triumph of Modernist urbanism over traditional city patterns, and a funding scheme that allowed state highway engineers to dominate urban freeway planning during this crucial period—all of these contributed to the creation of a distorted transportation system that will remain resistant to change 210 Chapter 7 for many decades to come. Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford were correct in the 1960s when they resisted the urban freeway juggernaut and set forth alternatives to the massive construction of freeway mileage within American cities. The “motorization of American cities” began long before the construction of the interstate highway system.2 The wide-ranging mobility offered by the motor vehicle, the decline of transit, and the accelerated production of low-density suburban landscapes had already created a new urban pattern by 1956, when the interstate highway system finally received adequate funding. But the urban interstates amplified the powerful forces that were redrawing the maps of metropolitan America and laid down the armature for new layers of urban growth. Half a century later, rising energy costs, the threat of global climate change, and intractable congestion now call into question the wisdom of such a one-sided pattern of urban transportation.3 However, we remain “locked in” to this mode of city building through inertia, habit, congealed design standards, legislative gridlock, and the sheer political and economic power of the industries associated with freeways. This will be difficult to change. After World War II, a vast body of knowledge about the creation of compact, mixed-use, and transit-oriented human settlements was discarded in a vehement rejection of any urban planning ideas based on the traditional city.4 Lewis Mumford described this pervasive attitude as follows: For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old. This may be good for a rapid turnover in business, but it is bad for continuity and stability in life. Progress, in an organic sense, should be cumulative, and though a certain amount of rubbish-clearing is always necessary, we lose part of the gain offered by a new invention if we automatically discard all the still valuable inventions that preceded it.5 Engineers, Modernist architects, planners, politicians, and the wider public gradually accepted the idea that the new transportation technologies of the twentieth century required radically new urban patterns that were in many ways the inversion or opposite of what had gone before. Motor vehicles came first; pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders were left aside. Instead of finding creative ways to accommodate motor vehicles while preserving the many benefits of traditional city form, the old was replaced with new templates keyed to the private automobile. Between 1955 and 1975, conflicts over urban freeways erupted in dozens of American cities, reflecting and eventually changing the legal and regulatory environment for large infrastructure projects and successfully Conclusion and Epilogue...