Customer Reviews

Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape

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This book delivers detailed, thorough insight into how federal and state highway policies affected cities of varied size and circumstance. Its excellent historical background reminds us why twenty-first century cities and their transportation are facing the challenges they are today.

So many social and cultural ills can be connected to the role the car has played in American society. From millions of deaths and millions more serious injuries, to whole cities being torn apart by freeways to pollution and global warming. It is a devil's bargain we have eagerly and happily embraced. And it was planned.

That is the strength of Owen Gutreund's book, "20th-Century Sprawl." He makes it clear that it wasn't just the automobile companies that created the dystopian world we currently inhabit. Early on in the 20th century, there were auto enthusiasts, free road advocates and visionary bureaucrats who seized on the automobile as a way to remake America and boost the economy.

One of the most critical aspects of this zeal in favor of "automobility" as he calls it, was tax policy. On the one hand gas taxes and license fees were stipulated for use only to build highways. On the other hand, revenue was collected from sources that didn't involve the motorist or the industrial interests that favor them. However, that money was frequently earmarked for highway construction. Meanwhile, public transit got little government support and was typically for profit businesses that had the deck stake against them.

The book's opening chapters are its best, focused on these issues exclusively. The remainder of the book looks at three case studies, Denver Colorado, Middlebury Vermont and Smryna Tennessee. Mr. Gutfreund looks at how government aided and abetted autmobility at the expense of the greater society in three different types of environments. In the details of how these cities and towns grew and expanded their highway systems, the author loses track of how and way governments so favored highways and lost this reader in minutia. The many extraneous details make the connection murky.

After reading this book, you will know why we should change the way we are building our cities, and the way we are living.