Thursday, July 14, 2011

"Or the Cities Will Have to Drive Out the Motor Car"

"Readers may be surprised that the rebellion against highways began in the '50s, usually considered the culminating decade in America's march toward suburbanization and its love affair with the automobile. Swift's nicely balanced assessment acknowledges that 'Americans took to [the car] not only willingly, but with gusto.' They wanted interstate highways and may even have wanted highways through their cities, until the consequences of those roads became apparent."

Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews Earl Swift's Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

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