It’s a typical Wednesday spring evening in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. I’m off to pick up some books at the main library in Salem Square. At 7:30 pm, the weather is still warm, no need to wear a jacket. What a perfect evening to be out and about for a walk! Yet, less than a handful of people are walking the street as I drive past city hall. Stores are predominantly closed. Even in the library, there are few patrons, the librarians congregating around the information kiosk discussing the latest movie. Downtown Worcester after office hours is mostly dead. Why is this the case?

Today, I'd like to take a look at the federal policies and spending priorities that have shaped the explosive growth of auto-centric suburbs and the implosion of cities across the country. Worcester was just one city that became a casualty in this larger national shift.

Towards an Auto-centric Nation

The choices we are able to make on how we will get around today (will we drive, walk, take the bus or train?) were impacted heavily on June 29, 1956, the day that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway and Defense Act, legislation funding a trust to build over 47,000 miles of highways nationwide. This large public works commitment funneled over $70 billion to build roads with only one percent — less than $1 billion — going to sustain neglected rail lines.

This bias in American transportation funding favoring automobiles and trucks over public transit was due in large part to the increasingly powerful role of the lobbying of automobile manufacturers. In 1943, the American Road Builders Association funded primarily by General Motors, became one of the largest lobbying groups in the country advocating for massive highway construction. Indeed, Lucius Clay, a board director of General Motors, actually chaired the committee appointed by Eisenhower to shape the 1956 Interstate Highway legislation.

This was not the first time that automotive corporate interests choked out competition from public transportation. In the 1920s, over 85% of urban residents nationwide used streetcar lines for transportation. In the subsequent decades, the lines grew less profitable, and private companies relinquished ownership to municipalities. By 1946, General Motors and eight other automobile manufacturers had bought and were dismantling streetcar lines in eighty cities, replacing them with their own manufactured buses. The scores of newly built suburbs post World War II were also designed to promote the use of private automobiles. Suburbs zoned for single use (residential, commercial, retail, industrial uses separate from each other) required the daily use of road vehicles to go to work or shop and return home. In the suburbs, if one does not have access to a car, one experiences a bit of a “social death”.

Let’s ponder what this all could mean. Perhaps urban dwellers at the time wanted their own patch of grass in the suburbs and a car with roads to get them there. Or, perhaps, corporate profit-making interests of the automotive industry shaping federal spending priorities, promoted a physical landscape where a car became a necessity just to live and function. Compare the American style of development to the development agenda in Europe after World War II where spending was directed to re-building compact, highly dense cities with heavily funded public transportation systems including light rail, subways and bus lines.