Traffic and Urban Congestion: 1955-1970

In 1960, Great Britain still had no urban freeways. But with the ownership of private cars becoming ever more common, the problem of congestion in British cities was unavoidable. Investigating the possibilities of freeways as alleviators of big-city traffic jams, the government-sponsored Buchanan Report was pessimistic:

... the study shows the very formidable potential build-up of traffic as vehicular ownership and usage increase to the maximum. The accommodation of the full potential is almost certainly beyond any practical possibility of being realized. There is thus no escaping the need to consider to what extent and by what means the full potential is to be curtailed.1.

In the decades preceding this study, Americans faced much the same problem with transportation in their cities. But the American plan for dealing with urban congestion in the automobile age was very different. In 1954, President Eisenhower suggested that "metropolitan area congestion" be "solved" by "a grand plan for a properly articulated highway system." In 1956, the House Committee on Public Works urged "drastic steps," warning that otherwise "traffic jams will soon stagnate our growing economy."2.

Confronting the same problem--urban traffic congestion--the British and the American governments responded with radically different solutions. In Britain, congestion in cities was understood to mean an excess of automobiles entering cities. The problem, to British planners, was to reduce relative reliance on the private car in order to allow better movement of traffic. But in the U.S., planners interpreted congestion as a sign that roads were inadequate and in need of improvement. In the face of traffic jams, the British tended to say, "too many cars!" while the Americans would say, "insufficient roads!"

U.S. urban transportation policy was shaped by this tendency, from its origins in the 1940s until the mid 1960s. This essay makes a twin argument. First, the way in which U.S. urban transportation policy was formulated in the 1940s and 1950s precluded the British solution. Regardless of the relative merits of the British and American approaches, discouraging the use of the automobile was not an option American policy makers could consider. The American political culture could consider large scale domestic projects only with the cooperation of the private sector, and in the U.S. this meant largely automotive interest groups.

The second point is that American urban transportation policy retreated from this position in the 1960s. By the 1970s U.S. policy was much more like Great Britain's. In 1975, official Department of Transportation policy recognized the automobile as "a major contributor to . . . congestion," and it urged "State and local communities to rethink some of the highway planning already done so as to determine if a particular highway still offers the best transportation alternative."3. But American cities had already been depending on a freeway-based transportation system by the mid 1960s, and the well established automotive trend was irreversable. The volume of motor vehicle traffic in U.S. cities in 1970 was more than two and a half times what it had been in 1950, while the number of passengers carried on urban rail systems had fallen by two thirds. City bus ridership was down by half over the same period. The establishment of the freeway as the principal transportation system in American cities--and of the private automobile as the primary mode--was an accomplished fact by the late 1960s.4.

The policy changes begun in the mid 1960s came too late to change the overwhelmingly automobile-based urban transportation system. One can deny the significance of the change on the grounds of its tardiness. But an important question remains unanswered: why did federal transportation policy reverse itself and urge a "rethinking" of planned freeway projects? How did planners get from the "insuf-ficient roads" interpretation of congestion to the "too many cars" perspective?

This essay suggests some explanations. In part, the "insufficient roads" view, once implemented, entailed its own demise. Promoters of urban highways acknowledged that "drastic steps" were necessary to allow relatively free movement of automobiles in cities. These steps, to be drastic enough to work, also had to be drastic enough to create controversy and opposition where little or none had existed before. If, as New York's great road builder, Robert Moses, suggested, planners would have to "hack" their way with a "meat ax" to build highways in cities, then they could expect highway opponents to become equally uncompromising in their opposition.5. After a great deal of hacking, local opposition, legal restrictions, and court decisions dulled the ax's edge.

Second, the decentralized organization of the U.S. political system allowed many points of access to policy-making forums for groups opposing specific highway projects, groups opposing the freeway-based urban transportation policy, and groups promoting other forms of urban transit. As early as 1959, San Francisco's city government, under pressure from its citizens, banned freeway projects within its city limits. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, other cities followed San Francisco's lead, fighting projects that were politically threatening.6.

There is little record of state-level opposition to projects, though this is understandable in view of the high level of state control over highway planning. At the federal level, from which most urban highway money came, divergent agendas (such as aid to mass transit, highway beautification, and increased relocation assistance to residents displaced by highway projects) as well as outright opposition to highways on the part of a number of prominent congressmen and senators, served to weaken the original highways-only federal urban transportation policy of the 1950s.

Also important to the change was the increasing insulation of federal transportation policymaking in the 1960s from the interest groups which had virtually