The transportation industry in the United States is still steeped in a myth about cities and highways, especially the Interstate Highways.[1] The myth goes something like this: the Interstate Highways were intended to be a system for intercity (or interstate) travel, but they had unintended effects for cities because they became used inappropriately for travel within urban areas. I think of this myth as the dance of the intended and unintended, but perhaps @capntransit recently put it better: the story of “Saint Dwight and the legend of the True Original Interstate Highway System that was Good and Pure.”[2]
I’m aware that I am dispensing here with the usual detached tone of historical scholarship. I have spent most of the decades of my professional life within or on the fringes of the transportation industry, defined here to include both the public and private sectors. I’ve lived inside this myth for much of my career. As a historian, I’ve watched the evidence mount, challenging the myth. However, the myth still serves its purpose: it prevents the industry from having to directly confront the sins committed in the name of the Interstate Highways, most significantly against Black Americans.
A Tragic Work of History
I have traced the problematic work of history back to a policy brief written in 1976. I am going to start by using the version published in 1997, when the study was no longer positioned as a work of policy analysis, but of history. In addition, the 1997 version is the one I read and taughtwhen I was teaching transportation planning in the 2000s.
The publication is Edward Weiner, Urban Transportation Planning in the United States: An Historical Overview, Fifth Edition, USDOT (1997). It reads like a heavily annotated timeline and focuses on landmark studies and descriptions of federal laws and regulations. The first thing one notices is the silence on the impacts of urban expressway construction on Black communities. Indeed, it contains very little social analysis at all. Even the word “minority” does not appear until Weiner summarizes the executive order issued by President Clinton in 1994 on environmental justice.[5]
Weiner, however, went beyond convenient silence. He actively constructed an alternative history that advanced the myth. He made his case for the dance of the intended (only travel between, not within, cities) and unintended (all the negative consequences) through presenting “summaries” of what would have been in his time dusty reports locked up in specialty libraries. The summaries prepare the ground for arguments such as this one on the urban crisis of the 1970s:
These older communities and central cities were severely distressed economically and limited in their ability to address these [economic] problems themselves. It was recognized that the federal government had contributed to these problems with programs that had unintended consequences.[6]
Weiner’s deployment of the words “intended” and “unintended” will not be subtle.