The Highway And The City (excerpt)

 

 

·Tuesday, April 12, 2016

 ·Reading time: 2 minutes

 

An excerpt from The Highway And The City, by Lewis Mumford, Mentor, 1961:

 

In order to overcome the fatal stagnation of traffic in and around our cities, our highway engineers have come up with a remedy that actually expands the evil it is meant to overcome. They create new expressways to serve cities that are already overcrowded within, thus tempting people who had been using public transportation to reach the urban centers to use these new private facilities. Almost before the first day’s tolls on these expressways have been counted, the new roads themselves are overcrowded. So a clamor arises to create other similar arteries and to provide more parking garages in the center of our metropolises; and the generous provision of these facilities expands the cycle of congestion without any promise of relief until that terminal point when all the business and industry that originally gave rise to the congestion move ou of the city to escape strangulation, leaving a waste of expressways and garages behind them. This is pyramid building with a vengeance: a tomb of concrete roads and ramps covering the dead corpse of a city. ... The fatal mistake we have been making is to sacrifice every other form of transportation to the private motorcar - and to offer, as the only long-distance alternative, the airplane. But the fact is that each type of transportation has its special use; and a good transportation policy must seek to improve each type and make the most of it.