Realignment: Highways and Livability Policy in the Post-Interstate Era, 1978–2013

While federal policy makers have pursued “livable” communities since the late 1970s, they have rarely agreed on precisely what “livability” entailed and how best to achieve it. When U.S. Secretary of the Department of Transportation Ray LaHood promised in 2009 to make livability the hallmark of an ambitious interagency partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency—and, in the process, to undo long-standing patterns of auto-dependency—it appeared that LaHood was poised to shift American transportation policy in a bold new direction. And yet other policies, such as those that govern the alignment of highway interchanges serving super-regional shopping malls, continued to promote the dominance of highway-driven economies. This article demonstrates how the failure to confront historic development patterns fostered by the Interstate highway system undermined LaHood’s campaign for livable communities

Tunnel Vision: “Invisible” Highways and Boston’s “Big Dig” in the Age of Privatization

While most analyses of late-twentieth-century highway policy suggest a shift toward open system design, bottom-up federalism, and the devolution of transportation governance, the history of Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel project, informally known as the “Big Dig,” runs counter to this trend. Though the project emerged in the 1970s during a time of unprecedented citizen activism in transportation planning, ultimately the privatization of political power proved to be the Big Dig’s most important legacy for twenty-first-century urban highway projects

New York State Road Networks and the Transformation of American Federalism

Scholars have long recognized the central role American road building has played in the development of modern European highway networks. While the German autobahn and the Italian autostrade were pivotal in twentieth-century construction, Americans’ pioneering work in urban parkways and interstate highways also offered an appealing model. From the perspective of European transportation planners, Americans embraced road building with exceptional gusto. Little seemed to stand in the way of their engineers, whose actions – at least until the 1960s – appeared to perfectly mirror public desire

A Political Turn: Highways and Mass Transit in American Mobility History

Mark Rose’s Interstate: Express Highway Politics (1979) and Bruce Seely’s Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (1987) signaled the opening of U.S. highway politics as a field for sustained scholarly investigation. In Interstate, Rose examined the political competition among interest groups, such as truck operators, that produced the landmark 1956 highway legislation. Seely’s focus was the road engineers themselves, led by Thomas MacDonald, whose uncanny ability to present themselves as ‘apolitical’ experts paradoxically allowed them to dominate the highly politicized drafting of the main contours of American highway policy. Together these two texts opened a range of questions in U.S. transportation policy, and in the grinding politics through which citizens, interest groups, experts and politicians directed the development of America’s transportation infrastructure.1 Rose’s and Seely’s mode of analysis appeared particularly well suited to capturing the complex ways in which transportation systems and societies shape each other, and, since then, a wave of new highways and transit scholars has built on their insights. This development constitutes a political turn in mobility history, with recent scholarship placing politics, political actors, and political ideology front and center. In 2006, the publication of the deliberately policy-oriented and admirably wonkish text, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century, co-authored by Rose, Seely and Paul Barrett, indicated the durability of a political approach to American mobility history

Radio Regulation Revisited: Coase, the FCC, and the Public Interest

It is now more than forty years since Ronald Coase’s seminal article on the Federal Communications Commission first appeared in the pages of the Journal of Law and Economics.1 The article remains important for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it offered his first articulation of the Coase Theorem.2 Of even greater importance for our purposes, the article literally redefined the terms of debate over American broadcast regulation, in both historical and contemporary treatments of the subject. Focusing particularly on the development of radio regulation, Coase rejected the prevailing notion that the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) served the public interest. Rather, he concluded that its creation had been a mistake, the product of faulty economic reasoning. The complex regulatory apparatus developed under the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and recodified in the Federal Communications Act of 1934 was built on the flawed assumption that scarce resources—in this case the radio spectrum—had to be allocated by government fiat. A more efficient solution, Coase maintained, would have been to allocate the spectrum like any other scarce resource, on the basis of well-defined property rights and a free market guided by the price mechanism. Indeed, this is why he suggested that the spectrum ought to be cut up and sold at auction rather than regulated by the federal government.