Recent book tracks causes of urban sprawl

Date published: 9/4/2005

H OW DID WE end up with a highway-dependent development pattern that gobbles open land, neglects downtowns and fills roads to the saturation point?

Government policy encouraged it throughout the past 100 years, according to a book published last year by Oxford University Press.

In "Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape," author Owen D. Gutfreund shows how federal transportation subsidies favored rural highway building over any kind of urban transit or even urban road improvements. He describes the neglect of urban transportation and how the 90 percent subsidies for interstate highway construction prompted sprawl and swallowed states' transportation budgets.

From early in the 20th century, popular demand for paved roads--at first especially for bicycles, later for automobiles--prompted government spending on improved roads. However, federal highway grants to the states were marked by a restriction that has steered development away from the cities. Grants were given almost exclusively for rural roads, and the few that were awarded for urban construction often ended up being spent outside major cities because any town of 5,000 or more qualified as urban.

The funding mechanism, moreover, took money out of the cities and spent it in the countryside. Although organizations such as the American Automobile Association and the National Coalition of Highway Users (companies profiting from the highway industry, not a group of ordinary drivers) opposed requiring motorists to pay any of the costs of road improvements, a significant portion of highway construction was funded by gasoline taxes. However, it taxed urban and rural drivers at equal rates while directing the money primarily to construction outside the cities.

The relatively few miles of new highway built within cities often resulted in bulldozed neighborhoods and a flow of traffic that municipalities could not easily absorb, coupled with a demand for parking that took more land off the tax rolls to accommodate auto travel in town. The costs within cities and towns tended to be paid out of general tax revenues rather than any tax related to auto use.

How these policies worked out in practice is shown in three case studies. The author examines in detail how federal highway building affected Denver, Colo.; Middlebury, Vt.; and Smyrna, Tenn.

Denver lost businesses to the hinterlands due to federally subsidized highway and airport construction, and saw a marked decline in its downtown.

Middlebury, a town of modest size, not only lost businesses and residents to the surrounding county but could not get state aid for state roads that passed through the town. That was because matching the federal interstate highway grants consumed Vermont's highway budget. In fact, Vermont could not match all the grants available and so got fewer highways built than it was entitled to.

Date published: 9/4/2005