Traffic and Urban Congestion: 1955-1970 :: American America History

Traffic and Urban congestion 1955-1970In 1960, Great Britain still had no urban freeways. But with the self-command 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 account shows the very formidable potential build-up of traffic as vehicular self-will and usage increase to the maximum. The accommodation of the beneficial potential is almost surely beyond any practical possibility of being realized. There is thusly 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 aforesaid(prenominal) problem with transportation in their cities. But the American plan for transaction 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 roadway system. In 1956, the House Committee on Public Works urged forceful steps, warning that otherwise traffic jams will soon stagnate our increase 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 construe 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 numerous cars while the Americans would say, insufficient roads U.S. urban transportation constitution was shape by this tendency, from its origins in the 1940s until the mid 1960s. This essay makes a copulate 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 municipal projects only with the cooperation of the private sector, and in the U.S. this meant largely automotive interest groups. The jiffy point is that American urban transportation policy retreated from this define in the 1960s. By the 1970s U.S.