"A history of the changing politics and participants related to decision making about and construction of the interstate system in the Twin Cities metro area from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using case studies of construction or expansion projects on Interstates 94, 35W, 35E, 394, and 335, the report identifies three distinct eras in the history of freeway construction in the Twin Cities, and offers conclusions about how politics and the role of various participants shaped the debates about these projects. Includes appendices." -- abstract from website.
This new, expanded edition brings the story of the Interstates into the twenty-first century. It includes an account of the destruction of homes, businesses, and communities as the urban expressways of the highway network destroyed large portions of the nation’s central cities. Mohl and Rose analyze the subsequent urban freeway revolts, when citizen protest groups battled highway builders in San Francisco, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, Washington, DC, and other cities. Their detailed research in the archival records of the Bureau of Public Roads, the Federal Highway Administration, and the U.S. Department of Transportation brings to light significant evidence of federal action to tame the spreading freeway revolts, curb the authority of state highway engineers, and promote the devolution of transportation decision making to the state and regional level. They analyze the passage of congressional legislation in the 1990s, especially the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), that initiated a major shift of Highway Trust Fund dollars to mass transit and light rail, as well as to hiking trails and bike lanes. Mohl and Rose conclude with the surprising popularity of the recent freeway teardown movement, an effort to replace deteriorating, environmentally damaging, and sometimes dangerous elevated expressway segments through the inner cities. Sometimes led by former anti-highway activists of the 1960s and 1970s, teardown movements aim to restore the urban street grid, provide space for new streetcar lines, and promote urban revitalization efforts. This revised edition continues to be marked by accessible writing and solid research by two well-known scholars.
"A history of the changing politics and participants related to decision making about and construction of the interstate system in the Twin Cities metro area from the 1950s to the 1990s. Using case studies of construction or expansion projects on Interstates 94, 35W, 35E, 394, and 335, the report identifies three distinct eras in the history of freeway construction in the Twin Cities, and offers conclusions about how politics and the role of various participants shaped the debates about these projects. Includes appendices." -- abstract from website.
In The American Road Katherine M. Johnson develops a bold new theory for how the American highway system has taken on such outsized scale and complexity by emphasizing the emergence of a powerful administrative apparatus in the American federal system. Established in 1914 expressly to intervene in the congressional debates of the era, the American highway bureaucracy consisted of forty-eight state highway officials acting in and through their self-organized association, the American Association of State Highway Officials. Johnson’s central argument is that this new institution occupied a similar position relative to the American state as political parties and courts did. The capacity to organize across a complex constitutional order enabled it to control the purpose and allocation of federal highway aid for the better part of the twentieth century. Johnson investigates this new conception of the American highway bureaucracy, showing specifically where and how that extraconstitutional authority emerged, expanded, and manifested itself in the legislative history, physical dimensions, and geographical reach of the emerging highway system. The American Road reveals that all of the major highway legislation approved by Congress from 1916 to 1941 was collectively developed and advanced by state and federal highway bureaucrats drawing on the new authority conferred by the system of federal grants-in-aid, which required state legislatures to provide a state matching grant and local governments to relinquish control over decisions of location and design. The capacity to advance their policy aims through both the advice of experts and the will of the states not only secured the new highway program against renewed opposition in Congress in the 1920s but also won the strong support of the motor vehicle industry and set the stage for even more impressive policy gains of the 1930s when highways became the largest category of federal emergency public works. That collective authority, however, required a high threshold of consensus to secure and maintain, producing not just a narrow one-size-fits-all approach to technical issues but also a striking incapacity to respond to changing conditions. Johnson completes her compelling narrative by identifying the source of the interstate highway plan, first proposed in 1939 and finally funded in 1956, in the internal dynamics of and external threats to that extraconstitutional authority.
From animal paths to superhighways, transportation has been the backbone of American expansion and growth. This examination of the interstate highway system in the United States, and the forces that shaped it, includes the introduction of the automobile, the Good Roads Movement, and the Lincoln Highway Association. The book offers an analysis of state and federal road funding, modern road-building options, and the successes and failures of the current highway system. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Shows how highways facilitated the sorting of Democrats and Republicans along urban-suburban lines, polarizing the politics of metropolitan development.
Introduction -- People before highways: stopping highways, building a regional social movement -- Battling desires: (re)defining progress -- Groundwork: imagining a highwayless future -- Planning for tomorrow not yesterday: "we were wrong"--New territory--city-making, searching for control -- Making victory stick: new dreams, new plans, new park
"American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and travel on them dominate the urban landscape. While they have for the most part fallen out of favor among transportation planners and policy-makers who seek more sustainable, less-car dependent modes of travel, the share of urban travel carried by (increasingly congested) freeways today is greater than ever. This book tells the largely misunderstood story about how the United States came to make freeways the centerpiece of its urban transportation systems, and the crucial, and often overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing them about. This book helps readers understand the still-relevant possibilities of roads not taken in U.S. urban transportation planning over the past century, as well as the central role that fiscal politics plays in urban transportation right up to the present day"--
