Planning for Cars in Cities: Planners, Engineers, and Freeways in the 20th Century

Abstract

Problem: When the First National Conference on City Planning took place in Washington, DC, 100 ago, the delegates failed to foresee the consequences of automobility and suburbanization, but in other ways they were remarkably prescient. They stressed the importance of the linkage between transportation and land use, understood that transportation facilities must be harmoniously embedded in the urban fabric, and viewed transportation investment as a way to direct growth, revitalize flagging areas, and link jobs and housing. Since transportation planners in subsequent decades kept this vision alive, envisioning a network of context-sensitive urban freeways fully integrated into the urban milieu, why is this not what was built?

Purpose: We consider the history of U.S. urban transportation planning over the past 100 years, to explain the evolution and legacy of the single most important transportation development of the past century save automobility itself: the emergence of the urban freeway.

Methods: We reviewed primary and secondary material, including plans, manuscripts, newspaper accounts, and scholarly articles and books.

Results and conclusions: We argue that the method used to fund interstate highway development put federal and state highway engineers in charge, and this affected highways' location and design. State highway engineers imposed a narrow, traffic-service-oriented vision on metropolitan freeways that focused on maximizing vehicle throughput and largely ignored other urban concerns. With too little advance thought, overbuilt, sparse, ring-radial networks were routed through neighborhoods in cities around the country, often at great social and environmental cost. Though the system has undeniably conferred great benefits in terms of enhanced mobility, the costs have been high as well. Recent years have seen a return to the early planners' perspective, stressing the social, environmental, and aesthetic impacts of transportation facilities and interactions with land use.

Takeaway for practice: A century-old vision of coordinated transportation and land use planning has resurfaced in practice, but in the meantime politically expedient decisions about public finance have had unanticipated, but profound and long-lasting effects on projects, travel, and urban form.

Research support: Portions of this research were funded by the University of California Transportation Center and the University of California, Los Angeles Academic Senate.

Keywords:

• urban freeway
• planning history
• transportation

Notes

1. The plan called for a variety of street types, each dedicated to a specific traffic-carriage or property-serving function, including through-traffic streets, transit thoroughfares, a regional parkway network to facilitate intraregional travel, and a truck “speedway” to connect the industrial areas near the CBD with the port (Olmsted et al., 1924).

2. Desire lines represent the shortest paths between traveler origins and destinations. They were a product of the earliest origin-destination surveys and were frequently used as an aid in making transportation facility planning decisions (Brown, 2006).

3. These include: reducing time and vehicle operating costs for users, improving flexibility in trip scheduling and making, lowering product prices due to reduced shipping costs, improving business productivity and reducing prices by cutting shipping and storage costs, increasing retail competition, enabling more trips with net private benefits per trip for the travelers, improving destinations (by providing access to better stores, health care, and social, leisure, and recreational facilities), expanding residential freedom of choice, expanding employment opportunities, and improving access for emergency vehicles.

4. These three acts are: the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) of 1998, and the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) of 2005.