In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

135 10 The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Freeway Revolt, 1966–1973 The Freeway Revolt that began in San Francisco in the late 1950s eventually spread across urban America. Citizen activists in many cities challenged the routing decisions made by state and federal highway engineers . By the late 1960s, freeway fighters began to win a few battles, as some urban expressways were postponed, cancelled, or shifted to less onerous alternative route corridors. In a couple of dozen cities—Boston, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. in the East, Memphis and New Orleans in the South, and San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle in the West—neighborhood movements and anti-highway organizations resisted the Interstate expressways that, as one writer vividly suggested, drove “with all the force and lethal effect of a dagger into the heart of the American city.”1 The modest success of the Freeway Revolt of the 1960s is generally attributed to the persistence of grassroots, neighborhood opposition movements around the nation. Those movements no doubt had significant impact. However, the anti-expressway movement also must be located and interpreted within the wider context of the shifting political, legislative , and bureaucratic environment in Washington, D.C., during the 1960s and early 1970s. Transportation policymaking at the congressional level, and especially in the House and Senate public works committees, responded to opposition movements, but also to many special-interest groups with much at stake. The executive branch also engaged in policymaking , as presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon sent key transportation bills to the Congress. Executive and legislative action had important consequences, but this chapter argues that the crucial response to the Freeway Revolt took place at the level of policy implementation. Beginning in 1966, the new U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), through its constituent agencies—the Federal Highway Administration and the Bureau of Public Roads—had responsibility for getting the interstates completed. But DOT leadership balanced that objective against the demonstrated negative impacts of building expressways in built-up urban areas. The first two secretaries of the DOT, Alan S. Boyd and John A. 136 INTERSTATE Volpe, along with high-level federal highway administrators, mediated highway disputes, promoted alternative methods of urban transit, advocated diversion of highway trust funds for other transportation uses, and made crucial shutdown decisions on several controversial urban expressways . Through policy and procedure manuals, federal highway agencies imposed new rules and regulations that curbed many of the excesses of state highway engineers. Key executive branch transportation bills were first written in the DOT. This chapter, then, focuses primarily on how the federal highway bureaucracy responded to the Freeway Revolt and charted new directions on controversial highway matters. Interstate expressway construction took place within a highly contested political arena. Powerful lobby groups representing engineering firms, the heavy construction industry, trucking companies, construction and trucking unions, auto and oil companies—each had a huge stake in interstate highway policy, financing, and implementation. Other interest groups representing mass transit and railroads had a different set of interests, primarily seeking to defend declining forms of transportation in the automobile age. Big-city mayors had their own advocacy organizations —the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors —looking to federal policy on highways and mass transit as alternative means of dealing with massive traffic congestion and rescuing central cities threatened by suburbanization. Through the American Association of State Highway Officials, state highway agencies and engineers sought to shape road-building policy and financing. Urban planners lamented the dominant role of highway engineers in locating and building the interstates . Citizen, consumer, and community groups also challenged federal transportation policy; they organized, lobbied, demonstrated, and litigated on such issues as highway safety, roadside beautification, environmental protection, housing demolition, and neighborhood integrity. All these disparate groups participated in the often-contentious discourse over the details and direction of the nation’s transportation policy, complicating the work of those charged with building the interstates. As the Freeway Revolt reached a high point in the early 1970s, new federal transportation initiatives signaled the way of the future—the diversion of some highway trust-fund monies to other transportation modalities , and the devolution of transportation decision-making from state and federal highway engineers to local metropolitan planning agencies. Federal highway officials paved the way for these significant changes. These new policy directions should be conceptualized as consistent with other key federal urban initiatives of the time—Model Cities and the community action programs of President Johnson’s...

Share