The Post-Interstate Era

Abstract

This essay highlights key themes of the five essays that comprise this special issue of the Journal of Planning History on the post-Interstate Era. It outlines in broad strokes the role of highway engineers and politicians in planning and financing the Interstate Highway System. The Interstates had a positive impact on economic growth and automobility, yet citizens groups in many cities challenged route decisions that destroyed neighborhoods and damaged sensitive environments. By the early 1970s, when the Interstate System was mostly completed, Congress opened up the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit alternatives. However, our authors emphasize the persistence of conflict over transportation planning and policy. Construction of late-developing Interstate segments in cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota and Huntsville, Alabama revived the freeway revolt, but unsuccessfully. Highway planners and policy experts developed controversial new strategies for moving traffic, as in Boston’s “Big Dig,” or for creative transportation financing, as with the Chicago Skyway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. By the end of the twentieth century, planners and politicians in some cities sought to reverse poor route decisions of an earlier era by tearing down elevated freeway segments most judged ugly, onerous, and unnecessary. In the twenty-first century, the engineers, planners, and politicians who control the Interstate Highway System face new challenges as the aging highway infrastructure requires rebuilding and retrofitting in an era of economic decline and political cost cutting.