While the freeway revolts of the late 1960s and early 1970s are the topic of only one chapter of The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift, they forever changed the direction of urban planning in most areas of this country.

This is a very interesting books that discusses the history of our nation’s highway infrastructure, from the late 18th Century, when there was none, to today. The idea of actually driving from one city or town to another on a marked road, much less a paved one, was a novel concept.

The several iterations of coming up with a uniform national highway system are explored in depth. The idea of building the roads for speed came later, starting with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the 1930s. As part of the New Deal, the Roosevelt Administration toyed with the idea of building a national system of superhighways, but it didn’t get off the ground then because of more pressing domestic issues at the time, along with the uncertainties of war looming on the horizon. Coincidentally, Hitler had built his system of Autobahns in Germany.

After World War II, the Eisenhower Administration revisited the idea of a national system of superhighways, but still for long distance travel. Because of the complications and expense of urban land-taking, urban stretches of freeway came later, and, in fact, some of us are old enough to remember driving merrily along in the countryside, only to be dumped on a city street as soon as one got close to a population center. Sometime in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the idea of using the Interstate Highway System for urban commuter traffic took flight. In several cities, commuters who had moved to the suburbs after the war started making use of parkways, which were never intended for daily commuter traffic, to get to the city center.

This actually shaped many of our cities. Dallas, Detroit, and LA built extensive freeway networks, oftentimes all but dismantling public transportation systems (which, at the time, were run by the private sector–falling ridership made profitability out of question, as well as any reinvestment in new rolling stock or route expansion. The private sector was even threatened on the intercity front. As more and more of the New York Thruway was finished, New York Central rail executives watched their ridership plummet.)

Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland rose to prominence because of her activism in the freeway revolts in Baltimore. The book discusses the havoc wreaked on Leakin Park by the proposed route, the plummeting of property values, and how, despite the freeway not having been built, how the neighborhood declined. (Actually, a 1.39-mile section was built, but it isn’t connected to the Interstate System at all, and now carries US 40 through Baltimore.)

Similarly, in Boston, Frederick Salvucci rose to fame and became Governor Dukakis’ transportation secretary because of his work in the freeway revolts. The 1948 plan called for an extensive network of freeways in and around Boston, and many of the outlying roads, as well as I-93 and the Mass Pike through Boston, were built in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1970, Governor Sargent ordered the Boston Transportation Planning Review, which revisited all the highway projects and replaced many of them with public transportation projects. As far as I know, Massachusetts was the first state that asked to have Federal Highway money reappropriated for public transit projects instead.The I-93 that Boston was left with was a state-of-the-art 1950s hulking elevated highway, which was replaced 40 years later with an even more expensive (but more aesthetically pleasing) underground highway. To this day, the exit numbering has a gap on I-95 near Canton, Mass., where it follows Route 128 to Peabody and the elevated section of I-93 in Charleston still has stubs for “future” ramps that were never built.

There were many others, of course: New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco/Oakland, LA, Milwaukee, South Florida, Tampa, and even the extension of I-84 through eastern Connecticut to Providence (it was instead rerouted to use the old I-86 toward Sturbridge, Mass.)

There were a few freeway revolts many of you have probably not heard of. One was in New Orleans, where people were against having tree-lined Claiborne Avenue destroyed to build an elevated I-10. While the revolt was unsuccessful, later efforts to build a freeway along the riverfront through the French Quarter were successful.

In Memphis, I-40 was to go straight through the city, from east to west. Not only would it have divided the city in two, it would have divided Overton Park in two. That case went to the Supreme Court (Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v Volpe) , ruling that the Department of Transportation had not followed the “feasible and prudent clause” disallowing appropriation for new highways if an alternate route already existed.

And in Little Rock, the Eighth Street Expressway, now I-630, planned in 1955, was finally completed in 1985 following legal review and mitigation efforts, including rerouting the freeway to avoid MacArthur Park and depressing it below grade level.

See you at the service plaza!