“The widespread support for the construction of the interstate highway system reflected an era when few questioned the benefits of automobile-based mobility. Even urban officials welcomed the penetration of the interstates into their cities, assuming that they would create jobs, improve commerce, and aid in slum clearance. Lewis Mumford, a longtime critic of the encroachment of the automobile into urban life, was distinctly in the minority when he characterized the interstate system as ‘an ill-conceived and preposterously unbalanced program.’ Over time, however, it became apparent that limited-access highways, many of them elevated over city streets, brought urban devastation in their wake. Large areas of homes and shops were demolished to make way for the new highways, and well-established neighborhoods were destroyed when the highways blocked access from one part of the neighborhood to another. And all the while, people living, shopping and working in the vicinity of an urban freeway — many of them racial and ethnic minorities — had to contend with heightened levels of noise, air pollution, and visual blight.”
— Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture (2004)
RE:SOURCES
- Volti, Rudi; 2004. Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology. The Johns Hopkins University Press: p. 107-109.
Also see ‘Ed Cray’s ‘Chrome Colossus’ offers a masterful history of General Motors’
The Mumford quote focuses on the system’s effect on urban areas, and he has a point. Ironically, the railroads did the same thing, on a smaller scale, to cities in the late 18th century. So history repeated itself.
Interestingly, I remember the controversy over Boston’s “Big Dig,” which buried a highway running through the city and replaced it with green space. It was plagued by the seemingly inevitable cost overruns and delays, but I’ve always had the feeling that, as the years go by, people will forget about that and point to how it has improved the look and feel of the city.
Growing up in a southcentral Pennsylvania small town, there is no doubt that the interstate highway system made travelling easier and safer. New opportunities in everything – cultural, occupational and even shopping – were opened up to us when I-81 was completed. So, for us, it was a good thing.
I grew up in California during a time when new highway and freeway construction was at its peak. It’s true that once I-5 went in, the drive from southern California to the Bay Area was quicker and safer. However, I also saw how neighborhoods were devastated by putting a freeway through them. Up in western Washington I-5 was run right through the center of Tumwater, which utterly destroyed its historic downtown and split the town in half. It took decades for that community to regroup — and in some ways it never has. The current “downtown” has a rather sprawling and synthetic quality.
My sense of Mumford’s critique is that he thought that post-war American transportation policy placed too much emphasis on the automobile. That critique has withstood the test of time in a variety of ways. For example, responding to climate change has been made more difficult because our communities tend to lack the compactness and density that makes mass transit and walkability very viable. This isn’t just an environmental issue — auto-centric land use can also be a big problem for people who are not able to drive or are too low income to afford a reliable car to get to work (service jobs are increasingly located far away from more affordable sources of housing).
And freeway construction controversy happened elsewhere as well. Highway 401 in Toronto was built as a bypass back when it was still farmland but then the farmlands had given to suburbs like Downsview and Don Mills. https://www.thekingshighway.ca/Highway401.htm
Toronto and Montreal got their own “freeway revolts” like the cancellation of the Spadina expressway and the Ville-Marie autoroute extension.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060104104532/http://www.torontoexpwy.com/
The original concept of the U.S. Interstate highway system made sense outside of urban areas. Driving between Kansas City and Denver, the Interstate 40 makes all of the sense in the world. Unfortunately, the construction of urban area interstates viewed land acquisition in the same light as taking the land from the native Americans. Most of the rights-of-way were acquired by transportation departments run by white males who viewed blighted neighborhoods and had very little regard for the affected people and their neighborhoods.
Most of the parkways in NYC pre-dated the Interstate highway system. Robert Moses was the man behind the parkways and some bridges of NYC and Long Island. Here a interesting website about it. http://www.nycroads.com/roads/
When looking at urban areas and the interstate highway systems, we have to remember two key facts.
One, technology had been allowing people to move farther away from the center city – and work – before the advent of the automobile. Railroads, telephones and local transit lines had allowed the rich and upper-middle class to begin settling in leafy suburbs in the late 19th century. (That is how Philadelphia’s western Main Line suburbs started.) They no longer had to be able to walk to work. Affordable automobiles extended that opportunity first to the middle class and then the working class. We aren’t going to return to the days when everyone must live a few blocks from their place of employment or only shop at neighborhood outlets. (People aren’t even shopping at the mall that much – they increasingly have want they want delivered via Amazon or the mail.)
Second, the interstate highway system was part of the movement for grandiose public works projects – supported, incidentally, by progressive Republicans (such as Herbert Hoover) and Democrats. They weren’t necessarily supported by free-market libertarians. And those projects weren’t limited to highways.
Those urban highways were part of the entire “urban renewal” effort, which began with the City Beautiful movement. This movement advocated what was then called “slum clearance” in favor of new parks, monuments and parkways. It grew to embrace new government buildings and, eventually, even large-scale commercial projects, such as the original World Trade Center in New York City and the Gallery Mall in downtown Philadelphia. Many of the urban parks we admire today were built after blocks of tenement neighborhoods were demolished.
Entire neighborhoods were bulldozed – and not all of them minority neighborhoods. Through the 1960s, there were plenty of working class and poor whites who still lived in cities, and their neighborhoods were bulldozed by those white male government bureaucrats and elected officials, too. These neighborhoods had one thing in common – they were working class or poor neighborhoods, populated with residents who didn’t have much clout with state and local governments. Properties in those neighborhoods were also cheaper – an important consideration when properties must be either sold voluntarily by the owners, or seized by the government via eminent domain procedures.
Those government bureaucrats who oversaw those projects saw rundown neighborhoods that had seen better days. Those neighborhood weren’t filled with rehabbed, trendy brownstones, luxury apartment buildings, charming bookstores and coffee shops. The buildings were old, rundown and cramped (entire families would be jammed into one small apartment), without much in the way of amenities for local children. There was a very good reason that many people in many neighborhoods were eager to move to the suburbs, and not because they had been hypnotized by Robert Moses or GM.
This article gives a balanced view of the entire debate over urban highways and what to do with them:
https://www.city-journal.org/revamping-interstates-based-on-racial-equity
The “urban renewal” reminds me of some projects like the Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis who was a boulevard of broken dreams.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/myths-pruitt-igoe-myth-9698.html
Urban area interstates also hurt downtown shopping centers by enabling malls in the suburbs, just one more contributor to a situation where city planning lost its traditional importance, replaced by developer planning. Mass transit took a hit too, particularly bus transit.
What a shame, all the carefully laid city plans of the first half of the 20th Century undone by the careless sprawl of the second half. Sure there were winners… the suburbs. But why did there need to be losers? Once upon a time, thoughtfully planned urban growth lifted all but the leakiest ships.
Excellent post!