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

Traffic and urban Congestion 1955-1970In 1960, Great Britain still had no urban freeways. however with the ownership of private railroad 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 demoralised ... the study shows the in truth formidable potential build-up of traffic as vehicular ownership and usage increase to the maximum. The accommodation of the full potential is nigh certainly beyond any practical possibility of being realized. in that location is thus no escaping the need to consider to what extent and by what heart and soul the full potential is to be curtailed.1. In the decades preceding this study, Americans faced practically the same problem with transportation in their cities. But the American picture for dealing with urban congestion in the automobile age was very antithetical. In 1954, P resident Eisenhower suggested that metropolitan area congestion be puzzle out by a grand plan for a properly articulated highway system. In 1956, the House Committee on Public kit and boodle urged drastic steps, warning that otherwise traffic jams will soon swig 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 unders tood to mean an excess of automobiles go in 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 short-handed 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 polity was shaped by this tendency, from its origins in the 1940s until t he mid 1960s. This essay makes a twin argument. First, the way in which U.S. urban transportation policy was suppose 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 get over domestic projects only with the cooperation of the private sector, and in the U.S. this meant largely automotive matter to groups. The second point is that American urban transportation policy withdraw from this position in the 1960s. By the 1970s U.S.