When the ICC issued its findings in 1928, its decision was pragmatic but
myopic. Undoubtedly, the commission found, truckers had sharply curtailed rail
freight tonnage. However, the rails gained business in shipping truck
tires, bodies, and truck and auto parts. No harm, no foul. The long-term
implications of its decision—that the railroads' new business consisted
of carrying the coffin to their own funerals—seemed lost on the
commissioners.
[p. 101]
MacDonald adopted a mantra for his campaign: use of public roads is an
inalienable human right, as opposed to use of the private rails, which is a
privilege based on a fare. The principle that access to public roads ought
to be open was old, but not universally accepted. Since the Middle Ages in
Britain, for example, town fathers had maintained the roads that ran
through their towns. American county governments continued the practice.
But this largely involved filling in ruts in dirt roads and keeping them
free of debris. When governments began building sophisticated turnpikes
with hard-packed surfaces and drainage, they commonly charged tolls to
their users. Yet throughout his career, MacDonald steadfastly opposed
charging tolls, even when in the 1930s it would mean going head to head
with the president of the United States.
In 1923, when radio broadcasting was in its infancy, MacDonald took to the
airwaves to address the nation on the similarity of roads and radio.
Listening through the crackling reception of radio's early days, Americans
heard MacDonald intone: "Radio is free as air; and the open road is
symbolic of freedom." At a time when countless Americans felt used and
abused by the private railroads and trolleys, MacDonald did not hesitate to
note that "no corporation controls them [roads] and the only restrictions
on their use are those imposed for the public good."
[pp. 109-110]
Some sections of the country have developed almost without railroads and
others will develop that way. Whole sections of the globe will skip the
railroad age, such as Russia and China. There the future transportation
will flow along the highways and in the air, exactly as it will with us.
[Quoting Henry Ford from a 1931 New York Times column.]
[p. 143]
In 1939, MacDonald sought to bury the toll-highway idea in a report the
size of a small book, arguing that tolls would cover only 40 percent of the
total cost. [...] Yet what the BPR [Bureau of Public Roads] measured was
the volume and nature of trips cars and trucks made on existing
roads. Significantly, what BPR's surveys did not calculate was how
people's habits would change if they had a high-speed, limited-access toll
road to drive on.
[p. 161]
The American Municipal Association (AMA) climbed on the urban [interstate]
bandwagon as well and sough to present a united front to Congress. [...]
Attacking gridlock effectively had now taken a back seat to slum clearance
at city halls, which "exulted" that Washington would pick up 90 percent
of the tab for highways that bulldozed through unsightly slums at the same
time.
[p. 191]
Congress insured that a war-conditioned generation would embrace the
interstate program by naming it "the National System of Interstate and
Defense Highways." Yet as an indication of the true role defense played,
one critic reports that the interstate builders never consulted the
Pentagon about what specifications military transport would require. By the
time the Defense Department advised the highwaymen in 1960 that such
equipment as Atlas missiles called for a sixteen-foot underpass clearance,
2,200 bridges and other roadway structures had already been built to a
fourteen-foot standard.
After the interstate-building program was well under way, the president
also awoke to unexpected realities of the plan he had pushed. On a summer
day in 1959, Eisenhower's limousine was on its way to Camp David, Maryland,
when the president noticed a huge earthen gash extending through the
northwest section of the city. Asking the reason for this massive intrusion
of bulldozers, he learned from an aide that this was his interstate highway
system. Eisenhower recoiled in horror. His interstate concept, borrowed
from the German model, had been to go around cities, not through them.
Amazingly, he had been unaware during the lengthy congressional donnybrook
that the only way the interstates could become a reality in this
increasingly urban nation was to promise cities enough money to eviscerate
themselves.
[p. 194]
A half-century after the demise of the trolley industry, its autopsy
continues. Transportation pathologists disagree strongly about why a mode
that seems so cost-effective today failed to survive. Little questions
exist that the industry had serious problems well before General Motors
(GM) and the bus-line pioneer Roy Fitzgerald took an interest. Yet few deny
that GM and its affiliates conspired to monopolize the urban market for
buses, tires, and petroleum products, if not to monopolize the urban lines
themselves. "So what?" ask some experts, who maintain that factors other
than the conspiracy did the industry in—that people simply made a free
market choice for motor travel.
That argument begs to be examined. The highwaymen worked hard to influence
Americans' choice of travel. Early automobile ads chipped away at a
breadwinner's psychological freedom to choose by invoking moral terms: that
riding the trolleys was "wrong" or "not fair to your children." But
more influential were the policy choices that made railways build and pay
taxes on their own pathways while sparing the rails' competitors from such
burdens. Traveling by road seemed cheaper than using the rails, with good
reason.
And the "free choice" argument presumes that people would opt for motor
over rail travel for all their needs—commuting, shopping, business
travel, recreation. In fact, people often mix modes, commuting to work by
public transit while shopping for groceries and going to the beach by car.
Monolithic decisions about using road or rail are likely only when just one
practical option exists. By removing electric streetcars from city streets
and contracting to forbid their return, those who freely admit they were
trying to reshape urban life insured that cityfolk would have only one real
alternative.
[p. 248]
- 1
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Stephen B. Goddard.
Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the
American Century.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, USA, 1994.
David Pritchard
2007-12-10