Car Country: An Environmental History

3. Building for Traffic

65 three Building For traFFiC in nineteenth-CentUry ameriCa, the name John l. mCaDam was synonymous with the idea of hard-surfaced roads, so much so that improved roads were said to be “macadamized” and roads with stone surfaces were said to be made of “macadam.” The Scottish road expert had gained fame early in the century for building smooth-surfaced highways in the area around Bristol, England, using construction methods that eschewed the heavy stone foundations used by older road engineers in favor of well-drained soil foundations covered with multiple layers of small crushed stones. Held together by a clay or stone-dust binder and tightly packed with heavy horse-drawn rollers, his stonesurfaced roads seemed to defy the destructive effects of the weather, creating the standard to which early good-roads reformers aspired. “Roads must be built to accommodate the traffic,” wrote McAdam, laying out a basic principle of road building, “not the traffic regulated to preserve the roads.”1 As the good-roads cause entered the motor age, this seemingly simple axiom took on a host of new meanings—many of them unanticipated by McAdam himself—as automobiles proliferated on the nation’s roads and streets. In rural America, where Trying to cross Fifth Avenue, New York City. From Dosch, “The Science of Street Traffic ” (1914): 402. 66 || Building For traFFiC the good-roads gospel had taken root, many communities made significant progress after 1905 toward overcoming long-standing environmental barriers to easy overland movement by ditching, draining, and dragging their earth roads, thus creating smoother, drier routes between their fields and the local railroad stations that connected them to the larger world. In this work they enlisted the aid of state and federal road-building experts, whose skill and specialized knowledge helped rural communities maximize meager local resources while building technically sound roads. As improved roads began to spread across the countryside, growing crowds of motorists began to follow, creating a range of problems for farmers and road builders alike. Motorists joined the good-roads cause in large numbers, giving it new vitality and political power— but their growing presence also sparked a contentious new debate over the relative importance of the farm-to-market roads that had long been the movement’s focus and the continuous, long-distance tourist roads that urban motorists favored. By 1916, when Congress passed the Federal Aid Road Act—thus committing federal money to building rural roads for the first time—the competition between farm-to-market advocates and tourist-road advocates had created tensions that thoroughly divided the good-roads movement. Were the new federally funded roads supposed to accommodate the needs of farmers or motor tourists? Meanwhile, in large American cities that had already taken great strides toward securing cleaner, smoother streets, rising volumes of traffic posed a variety of pressing new questions. With a dense and diverse mix of pedestrians and vehicles threatening to choke all movement on downtown streets in big cities, a broad consensus emerged that something had to be done. Yet just what ought to change, and how, was a subject of intense disagreement. Pedestrians, horse-drawn wagons, streetcars, and abutting property owners held competing interests, and decisions that helped one almost invariably hurt another. By the time automobile use began its spectacular rise in the 1910s, making already poor conditions worse, two main approaches to dealing with the onslaught of traffic had congealed. One focused on changing people’s behavior, hoping that if everyone would only follow a simple set of new rules, the problems and perils of Building For traFFiC || 67 heavy traffic could be resolved. Others focused on altering the streets themselves, hoping that physical changes might ease the flow of traffic and make streets safer for everyone. Following McAdam’s simplesounding command to accommodate traffic, it turned out, was not quite so simple. In both rural and urban America, the contentious disagreements over how best to accommodate traffic were resolved as much on cultural terms as on technical ones. McAdam’s argument that roads “must” be built for traffic was itself open to challenge, and both farmers and urbanites who disliked the effects of growing traffic —and especially automobile traffic—rebelled against the changes. Yet McAdam’s maxim ultimately carried the day because the values and priorities of American road activists shifted, especially among those who exercised administrative control over roads. Whereas road reformers in the late...