The open road is a quintessentially American image: in it, we chart the ethos of freedom, adventure, and limitless possibility. Yet only 50 years ago did this image become physically realized, with the passage 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act. The act did much to modernize and expand the transportation network of United States, but it simultaneously exacerbated certain social ills endemic to American society. By focusing on a system of individual transportation to the periphery at the expense of mass transportation within cities, the United States encouraged American suburbanization while eviscerating racially-integrated urban communities. Acknowledging and understanding this outcome is central to fully assessing the legacy of the FAHA.

White Flight
As America reassessed its global standing after World War II, so did Americans re-evaluate their conceptions of the model domestic lifestyle. Cities had grown more congested and racially diverse during the war, as many black southerners and rural whites moved to Northern and Midwest metropolises for factory jobs. With GIs returning from the war anxious to start a family, the moment was ripe for a grand shift in American society. Middle-class whites saw the suburbs as a panacea for the growing ills of city life.

By 1956, demand had accumulated to such an extent for an efficient network of highways linking cities to the periphery that President Eisenhower, shrewdly sensing the popularity of such legislation, steered the FAHA to passage. As Will Kempton, current director of Caltrans, told the HPR, “A key component of the nationwide interstate network was designing the system to link America’s urban centers,” and highways were appealing because they could “carry a lot more people and goods than mass transportation.” The pieces were now firmly in place to open up the suburbs—to some.

The suburban exodus was a windfall for homebuilders and land developers. Tract housing was laid down across the country, linked to city cores by highways. Yet the benefits did not flow equally to all. Suburban movement was impossible for the poor, who could not afford the price of commuting using a car. More importantly, minorities were legally locked out of suburbs through discriminatory housing laws. In Levittown, New York, for instance, the initial leasing contracts prohibited renting to non-whites. Just as whites were benefiting from low-interest mortgages and federally subsidized roadways, minorities were systematically denied access and options for new domestic lifestyles.

Urban Renewal Proves Difficult
The Federal-Aid Highway Act marked the beginning of a decades-long decline of ethnic minorities’ urban neighborhoods. Without the strong tax base of middle-class residents, the quality of schools and other basic public services immediately began to decline. And as services declined, more and more white residents who had stayed were encouraged to move out. The American city, once the safe haven of hope, had become a place of despair.

But the federal government kept building roads. The U.S. invested $50 billion into highways between 1958 and 1971; in comparison, just $50 million was spent annually on bus subsidies in those years. As Thomas Wright, executive vice president of the Regional Plan Association noted in 2002, the FAHA “provided enormous funding for building the Interstates, while, at the same time, mass transit was essentially going bankrupt.”

For those left behind, the FAHA was not a heralding of modernization or improvement, but rather the opposite. The federal government showed favoritism to suburban expansion over urban improvement at every turn. When Great Society programs of the 1960s might have done something for the inner cities, they were reversed just years later. By the ‘80s, the age of the cosmopolitan city had clearly given way to the age of the segregated suburb.

By the early 1990s, however, many Americans were seeing the less positive effects of the FAHA more clearly. Interstates connecting suburb to city were jammed; de facto segregation had drained regions of cultural vibrancy; cookie-cutter neighborhoods lacked a sense of community and individuality. Responding to this, much state transportation funding has devolved to what Director Kempton calls “local decision-making,” allowing for increased funding of light-rail and bus systems. These small-scale efforts of the anti-sprawl movement have shed new light on the fragmented American urban landscape, and on efforts to rebuild it. Still, a half-century of highway dependence—epitomized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956—is proving extraordinarily difficult to reverse.¨ ]]>