Car Country: An Environmental History

4. Motor-Age Geography

125 foUr motor-age geograPhy soaring aUtomobile oWnershiP DUring the 1920s PlaCeD stiff new demands on American roads and streets. Some of those demands challenged basic road technology, prompting road engineers to devise safer, more durable roads. Others challenged the traditional purposes of roads and streets, triggering a host of new ideas about how to adapt the country’s social and economic life to widespread automobile ownership. Faced with exploding numbers of motor vehicles, the engineers and administrators who had steadily gathered road-making authority into their hands during the 1910s shifted their attention during the 1920s toward transforming the country’s mismatched jumble of roads and streets into coordinated systems. Unlike their predecessors , who tended to see cars as a damaging new form of traffic that threatened the durability of improved roads, interwar engineers and administrators tended to see road and street systems as powerful tools for systematically overcoming environmental constraints on transportation and fostering economic development. Despite an almost exponential increase in resources at every level of government, Park and Shop, Washington, D.C., ca. early 1930s. Theodor Horydczak, courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, lC-h814- 1049. 126 || motor age geograPhy however, and despite the growing tendency to see cars and roads as complementary elements of a coordinated transportation system, concerted system-building efforts failed to keep pace with either the expanding quantity or the changing uses of automobiles. As the number of motorists grew in every part of the country—from the broad, crowded avenues of big-city commercial districts to the dirt roads of remote national forests—the flood of automobiles began to dominate all other forms of traffic. Faced with this deluge, urban builders fought to accommodate automobiles as best they could simply to keep street systems functioning, while rural highway builders presided over a construction boom designed to make extensive improvements as quickly as possible. Although administrators and engineers spent tens of billions of dollars during the interwar period addressing the new realities of large-scale car use, they focused overwhelmingly on adapting the existing infrastructure to meet the demands of traffic, not on ambitious attempts to remake the built environment in ways that would unlock the full potential of automobiles to enhance personal mobility. Rural projects, for example, focused on ditching, draining, paving, and widening highways along existing alignments; similarly, cities focused on widening existing streets, imposing new traffic-control regulations, and addressing parking problems. Such projects made life significantly easier for motorists and adapted roads and streets to growing car use, but their purpose remained accommodation, not transformation. Motorists, on the other hand, embraced the new possibilities for personal mobility that automobiles and incremental improvements to the automotive infrastructure created. As networks of smooth roads and streets spread across the country and as cars achieved ever-greater speeds and reliability, motorists gained the confidence to make decisions about everyday automobile use that were largely independent of the environmental constraints that had loomed so large in earlier years. In this context, motorists began to develop a new understanding of the relationship between time and distance—and, by extension, began to envision new relationships with the larger world premised on flexible, reliable mobility. As motorists acted on their new ideas, a cadre of real estate developers, retailers, and various other groups searched for ways to capitalize on growing car-based mobility. Well motor age geograPhy || 127 before engineers and policy makers fully appreciated the implications of new mobility patterns for the nation’s highways, a new geography for the motor age began to emerge—and the seeds of car dependence slowly began to sprout. CatChing uP to Cars The vast road- and street-improvement efforts in the United States between the two world wars revolved around a single fact: the demands of traffic grew much faster than road builders could respond, forcing them into a frantic race to catch up to cars. Three interrelated problems thwarted road and street administrators at every turn. First, car ownership, which jumped from less than half a million to 8.1 million between 1910 and 1920, continued its explosive growth through the 1920s, peaking at 23.1 million in 1929. Car registrations initially declined with the onset of the Great Depression, falling 10.7 percent from their 1929 high to 20.7 million in 1933—but then resumed their steady upward climb, reaching 29.6 million in 1941 (fig. 4.1).1...