How highways wrecked American cities

The Interstate Highway System was one of America's most revolutionary infrastructure projects. It also destroyed urban neighborhoods across the nation.

The 48,000 miles of interstate highway that would be paved across the country during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were a godsend for many rural communities. But those highways also gutted many cities, with whole neighborhoods torn down or isolated by huge interchanges and wide ribbons of asphalt. Wealthier residents fled to the suburbs, using the highways to commute back in by car. That drained the cities' tax bases and hastened their decline.

So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them?

The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism.

[bartekisbad]

in Europe, 95% of the time motorways go around the city (bypass/ring)

[ayush]

When you don't play cities skyline

[seamusmckeon]

This is why urban planning needs to take the people in mind, not the cars.

[CassandraBankson]

*The home my grandfather grew up in was plowed to the ground and paved over highway 5 in CA. I never understood why, until now.*

[kojimayuhay]

That's what happens when you let car companies decide the layout of your city

[Areegatoe]

In Australia, if they have to go through the city, they go underground.

[goPistons]

I lived in Miami for a few years (I'm from Santiago, Chile), and coming back to Santiago-which isn't a role model for pedestrian friendly cities by any stretch-was so liberating. I could actually interact with so many other people, and as a teenager, it gave me the freedom to go around and get to know my own city. Car centric cities are just so depressing.

[squagwag]

In Ireland, highways (or motorways as we call them) go around cities. It might take a little longer to get into the city or town, but it helps traffic in the town out providing a route around. And also it preserves the cities.

[eepmeep]

They should have been introduced to the marvellous idea of 'ringroads'.

[vikashkthakur]

Seems most of USA’s structural problems arise from lobbying

[kenrose]

And today they're all crowded and always under construction

[JK-gutl]

America in 1950s is like that rich kid who developed a drug habit. So much economic power, yet so reckless.

[buddhatw]

Fun fact, when automobiles first appeared on roads of course they had to share them with pedestrians, horse and carts etc., after a spate of car's running over pedestrians the car industry ran a campaign to vilify pedestrians for been reckless on the roads they had used to walk on for thousands of years, guess who won.

[AdrasHoriaGaming]

thats why i dont dezone in simcity 4 lol

[collinparsons]

Car travel is incredibly inefficient in dense areas. You can never build enough highways to completely eliminate congestion above a certain density. The problem was that the auto industry wanted to convert previously established cities where travel was based around walking and streetcars into cities where travel was entirely based around car travel, and largely they succeeded. The only US city with a car ownership rate below 50 percent is NYC. NYC was almost entirely designed and built around its extensive subway system, and there was no way to try and reverse it because of how ingrained it was in how the city functioned.

The auto industry promoted suburbanization initially, because they knew it was going to raise the car ownership rate, putting more money into their pockets. They endlessly lobbied the government to support development in that way and tried to portray it as "the best way to live" and a symbol of status. They succeeded in getting most people to think that way, and it sort of just perpetuated to today. Try and find any scientific evidence that raising children in a closed off McMansion where they rarely are out in public and see the outside world is better than being in a city.

[abirch]

The moral is-in Cities Skylines, build your roads and highways FIRST and then zone the place!

[emvv]

Quite possibly the most disruptive and damaging decision ever made to the quality of human life by the US government since the genocide of the Native Americans. you don't realize how horrendous and miserable American city life is until you visit Europe. North America is truly awful.

[phuturephunk]

This is basically the story of the South Bronx. The Cross Bronx Expressway could have followed a different course that took it through more industrial sections but it basically went right through integrated historic neighborhoods because nobody gave a crap about the residents there....And yeah, many of them were non-white. The moniker of "Urban Renewal" has always had a tinge of either "Minority Removal" or "Integrated Neighborhood Removal" to it. James Baldwin gave a really good talk on this and it was heartbreaking.

[CptnJCFG]

Great motion picture! Can you guys do one about how the auto industry also destroyed public transportation in cities like LA?

[bshinn]

They also used the argument that it made it easier for military to move around the nation easily and quickly