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

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.