The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  It didn't occur to city planners that they might address the predictable obsolescence of even the biggest " superhighway" only by controlling the roadside. Even a 1929 proposal for " a national system of express motor- ways"—a resurrection, yet again, of the old federal commission idea— didn't call for expressways as we know them today.

  But the idea came to them soon enough, and from several directions at once. As a starting date for the modern highway—a starting season, anyway—the early spring of 1930 is a fair choice; that's when a flurry of magazine pieces advocated a new approach to highway building, chief among them an expansive article in the New Republic by New England conservationist Benton MacKaye.

  A tall, rawboned Yankee, MacKaye had turned an idea about a mountaintop hiking path into a magazine article a few years before and had thus sired the famed Appalachian Trail. He belonged to a circle of farsighted friends—architects and planners, landscapers and writers—who in the early twenties had formed the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a grand title for what was actually a casually organized group that got together on weekends to mull the sprawl and overcrowding of America's cities.

  The modern metropolis, as MacKaye and his friends saw it, had grown too big to fulfill its function as a setting for and facilitator of personal interaction. A few generations before, when personal speed topped out at a horse's pace, American towns had tended to be compact, tightly settled, and, barring such obstacles as rivers and hills, roughly circular in layout. Streetcars, far faster than carriages, had lengthened the distance workers could cover on their morning and evening commutes; soon suburbs had sprung up within a short walk of the radiating streetcar lines, so that the settlement resembled the spokes of a wheel. Now the automobile was further pushing the boundaries of settlement. And as the city spread like a stain, it lost its human scale and thus its capacity to enrich. Its shopping and jobs were concentrated in a center that was increasingly taxing to reach. Its homes were overcrowded warehouses stripped of privacy, or suburban cottages metastasizing in the green fringe that had just yesterday represented out-of-town escape. With each passing month, the countryside receded as the metropolis oozed outward, spilling suburb into farm field and city into suburb.

  What was needed, MacKaye and his friends believed, was an altogether new model of urban living—a regional city. The excess population of the bloated metropolis should be skimmed off and relocated to satellite cities, which would be surrounded by greenbelts of parks, farms, and forests. These smaller cities would host the jobs held by their residents, thus eliminating much of the central city's rush-hour madness. And each satellite would have unique amenities necessary to the well-being of the whole region—one might be home to the opera house; another, the ballpark; a third, the best shopping—thus decentralizing metropolitan culture, as well as population.

  Theirs wasn't a vision of today's suburbia. The greenbelts would be inviolate, giving definite edges to the central city and its satellites, limiting their population and physical growth; aimless, amebic sprawl was precisely what the regional city sought to avoid. And ironically, members of the RPAA believed the auto could help usher in this less frenzied, less congested life; properly harnessed, the car could help decentralize overstuffed cities, could foster the wise and efficient use of the surrounding country, could help relocate workers and industries to new settlements " where," as one member put it, " the human opportunities for living are best."

  In 1924, MacKaye and company attempted to turn their talk into bricks and mortar. They couldn't scare up enough cash to build a full-scale regional city, so they opted for a more modest experiment on a weedy chunk of industrial wasteland in Queens: Sunnyside Gardens, a mix of co-op apartments, small houses, duplexes, and triplexes that incorporated the association's theories. Its two-story brick buildings were clustered around playgrounds, greens, and courtyards sequestered from the city's bustle and noise. The target buyers were working people, members of the lower middle class. A small, one-family house went for $883 down and $66.78 a month— " easy for people with average incomes," as the corporation's advertising promised.

  With the success of Sunnyside Gardens, the group got more ambitious. It bought a two-mile-square piece of Bergen County, New Jersey, and set to work building Radburn, the first-ever " town for the motor age"—a regional neighborhood more than a city proper, but incorporating a slew of novel controls on the automobile and its everyday impact. Radburn was built in residential superblocks, at the center of which were open parks. No roads penetrated these superblocks; cars were kept at their periphery on curving streets that branched into short cul-de-sacs, each of which serviced the attached garages of a few homes. The living and sleeping areas of each house faced garden, rather than concrete; both cars and streets were invisible during most of one's day. At those points where a sidewalk crossed a road dividing one superblock from another, it did so via a bridge or underpass. As the American City observed, " Children going to and from school will simply leave their homes by the garden door, pass through to the pedestrian path and thus into the park to school without the necessity of crossing a single traffic street."

  So segregated was foot and motor traffic that standing on the greens, one felt transported to an old country village, an effect heightened by the colonial revival shutters and gable roofs assigned to Radburn's houses, townhomes, duplexes, and apartments. In April 1929 the first were ready for occupancy, and plans were afoot to grow the place into a community of twenty-five thousand. The stock market crash intervened; just two superblocks, room for about a thousand people, were completed.

  Regardless, Radburn had a dramatic effect on the pattern of American life. It popularized such suburban staples as the cul-de-sac and subdivisions of sinuous back streets. And it got Benton MacKaye wondering whether the village's charms could be turned upside-down. If it was possible to build a roadless town, MacKaye thought, why not the reverse?

  MacKaye's New Republic piece, " The Townless Highway," opened by identifying the crux of the problem facing the country's highway planners: " Even our most modern roads, modern in the sense that they have solid foundations and concrete surfaces and banks at the sharp turns, are conceived as mere extensions and widenings of the old-fashioned highway designed for horse-drawn vehicles."

  Naturally, they were deficient—how could they be otherwise? Not only were they built on old buggy trails, their flanks were crowded with food stands and souvenir shops and billboards, each an eyesore, and with parking lots and driveways, each a potential hazard. MacKaye called such roadside development the " motor slum" and damned it as " as massive a piece of defilement as the worst of the old-fashioned urban industrial slums."

  A break from America's equine past, MacKaye wrote, required " a highway completely free of horses, carriages, pedestrians, town, grade crossings; a highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience."

  " We must provide for properly guarded approaches to, and crossings of, the main motor highways at proper intervals," he wrote, and " must take possession of the surrounding right-of-way, keeping it free from haphazard commercial development and obtaining for the benefit of the motorist the pleasant views and aspects of the country, unsullied by the rowdy clamor of billboard advertising."

  What MacKaye was advocating, of course, was a grade-separated, limited-access highway with occasional rest stops, a conceptual quantum leap beyond the so-called superhighways envisioned by most of his contemporaries. It's ironic that the man who proposed the Appalachian Trail was also among the conceptual fathers of the modern expressway, but there it is.

  The article found a receptive audience, because millions of urban Americans could no longer reach the untrammeled outdoors on a day trip; not only was the city's blot spreading ever larger on the land, but the highways themselves had bred a glut of development. When journalist Walter Prichard Eaton drove into the countryside on the road once galloped
by Paul Revere, he found it " a swiftly moving steel and rubber river between banks of ‘hot- dog' kennels, fried-clam stands, filling stations, and other odoriferous and ugly reminders of this progressive age." The roadside clutter was " like having a cinder in your eye," as interior secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur said. Billboards, especially, were a pox; regulated only in Nevada, they'd multiplied elsewhere to blot out a traveler's view from the road, compromise national landmarks, become a community's disgrace. " They are not needed by the public," MacDonald understated, " and are of doubtful value to advertisers."

  MacKaye's despair over the motor slum mirrored that of Raymond Unwin, a British planner and critic of " ribbon development" who concluded that " frontage development can no longer be regarded as compatible with . . . traffic highways." It also coincided with a short February 1930 article in the American City by New York lawyer Edward M. Bassett, who observed that an improved highway stayed that way only a short while: " Even if important grade crossings are eliminated, the driveways, gasoline stations, garages, stores and parked cars cause a great limitation."

  America, Bassett wrote, needed " a new kind of thoroughfare—one which will be like a highway for both pleasure and business vehicles, but which will be like a parkway in preventing the cluttering-up of its edges." No name existed for such a highway, he added, as no such highway existed. With that, Bassett proposed a name: " freeway." He judged it " short and good Anglo- Saxon" that connoted " freedom from grade intersections and from private entrance ways, stores and factories."

  " The Townless Highway" dovetailed with the work of two prominent traffic engineers who share the parentage of the modern expressway. While MacKaye labored on his article, an Austrian expatriate named Fritz Malcher was conceiving his " Steadyflow System," in which major city streets would take the form of divided boulevards, their broad medians crossed here and there by looping turnaround lanes. These boulevards would meet at traffic circles—actually, they were more like diamonds—and the theory was that once in motion, a driver need not come to a stop until he reached his destination. He could reach any address via diamond, boulevard, or turnaround without encountering a traditional intersection.

  Pedestrians would be kept out of the way on grade-separated sidewalks, and houses were clustered around Radburn-style superblocks. " Imagine a city," Malcher wrote, " where the street system permits vehicles to move without obstructions, traffic lights or officers, with automatic regulation of speed and capacity; where pedestrians can walk continuously through the whole city area—no matter whether this be in the outskirts or in the center—without any fear and danger of vehicular traffic ... Such a city ideal we can make come true."

  Malcher set out to fuse his urban Steadyflow to cross-country expressways, so that traffic had a means of leaving his free-flowing city to go elsewhere, and he spent great energy devising high-speed interchanges between the two, most of which were variations on the cloverleaf debuted at Woodbridge, and still look modern today.

  Another visionary was Harvard-educated Miller McClintock, reputedly the first person ever awarded a doctorate in traffic. As head of an auto industry—backed research lab at his alma mater in the mid-twenties, McClintock had counseled several cities on how to cure their congestion headaches, among them Los Angeles, where he'd helped outlaw jaywalking, and Chicago, where, while studying accidents and rush-hour snarls, he'd hit on his " friction theory."

  McClintock had come to see roads as rivers or veins, and traffic as the fluid coursing within them—racing smoothly in some places, slowing to a viscous dribble in others, dammed by obstacles or churning through rapids elsewhere still—its flow determined by the degree to which it was subjected to four " frictions." One or more of these frictions also happened to be the cause of every traffic accident he investigated.

  Street crossings produced intersectional friction, which caused the worst traffic backups and nearly one in five accidents, including the often-deadly T-bone. Medial friction involved opposing flows—a head-on smash-up was one example—and accounted for 17 percent of accidents. Internal-stream friction erupted between cars traveling in the same direction and caused sideswipes, rear-enders, lane-change mishaps; it was the most common source of accidents, at 44 percent. And marginal friction, the cause of one in five smash-ups, happened on or beyond the road's edge, where lurked such potential hazards as boulders and buildings, guardrails, gulleys and bridge abutments, signposts and unlucky pedestrians.

  Eliminating the frictions called for a wholesale redesign of the American road, so that it might better control the speeds it invited. McClintock called his answer a " limited way," with four attributes that would prevent every accident he'd encountered. A dividing island or median strip at least ten feet across would erase medial friction. Grade separations at all crossroads would end intersectional. Closing off access to the road except at occasional ramps, and offering a straight, broad alignment, would knock off marginal; and providing acceleration and braking lanes at those access points would do much to counter internal-stream.

  Other thinkers offered variations on these ideas—each month's science and mechanics magazines seemed to offer something new. Right behind McClintock, in August 1931, a New York planner named Robert Whitten suggested in the American City that a highway need not be townless to work properly; in fact, a limited-access expressway could run right through a city, and do it with less noise and danger to its residential neighbors than the typical arterial surface street. For that to happen, it had to be " so designed and planted," Whitten wrote, " that much of the noise incident to heavy traffic will be dissipated or absorbed before reaching the abutting residential frontages." His recommended tool for minimizing a highway's negative effects: depress the roadway in a broad ditch or put it on an embankment, well above street level. Either would " prove helpful in promoting traffic efficiency, noise reduction, beauty and amenity."

  The same month, MacKaye brought the discussion full circle with a refinement of his earlier article, this one in Harper's Monthly and produced with a coauthor—Lewis Mumford, a New York writer, author, social critic, and fellow member of the RPAA's inner circle. It was an infinitely more elegant work than the original, starting with the observations that on America's overcrowded and underbuilt roads, " a spavined horse could often travel as fast as a 120 h.p. car," and " the only point where the automobile is permitted to come within sight of its potential efficiency is in the factory."

  " Having achieved thousands of miles of wide, concrete-paved highways, having projected many thousands more on almost exactly the same pattern, we lean back complacently in our chairs and fancy we have solved the problems of motor transportation," the essay read, "—although our jammed city streets, our run-down suburbs, our spoiled villages, our devastated tracts of countryside, our country homes that are as quiet and peaceful as boilerworks are all large and ironic commentaries upon our pretensions."

  The pair made a more explicit pitch for two principles of the townless highway: that it always remain outside of large communities and connect to them via spur highways; and that it " be provided with enough land on both sides of the road to insulate it from the surrounding area."

  And they included a melancholy passage that underlined why highways and people made uncomfortable neighbors. " In the days of the horse and buggy the high-road served as company," it read. " As the cart or carriage joggled by, the farmer in the field or the housewife on her porch could hail it; the horse would stop almost of his own accord, and a chat would follow.

  " But once the country road becomes a main highway, filled with fast traffic a good part of the day and even of the night, when the cars themselves are driven mostly by strangers, not neighbors, the whole situation is changed: the road ceases to be a symbol of sociability; it becomes very largely a curse."

  Thomas MacDonald was beginning to sharpen his own thoughts on the roads of the future. He did it in his usual methodical fashion, for the Chief was not an impetuous man. Meetings in his office often fell
silent for long minutes while he weighed a decision, sitting wordless at the conference table, eyes closed, head lowered, pinching the bridge of his nose, deep in thought as his people watched and waited, none daring to intrude. MacDonald believed that small decisions made well would, over time, build unassailable policy, sure direction. And he believed that the essential elements of any good decision were facts.

  The Bureau of Public Roads had been enthusiastic about research from its earliest days. It opened its own testing lab in 1900. A few years later, it set up an experiment station in Arlington, Virginia, where it experimented with various road surfaces and where, after World War I, its tests demonstrated that worn, solid-rubber truck tires were devastating to just about any road, thereby helping to spur the development of heavy-duty pneumatic tires. The bureau had participated in road tests at Bates, Illinois, that proved concrete pavement should be thickest at a road's outside edges, reversing the standard practice of many states and contractors. MacDonald had been among the founders of the Highway Research Board, which would become the country's foremost clearinghouse for transportation study. His old professor, Anson Marston, was the board's first chairman, and MacDonald, a member of its executive committee.