While Robert Moses and his pupil across the U.S
were hard at work destroying city neighborhoods
to make space for expressways and parking lots,
Jane Jacobs wrote about the admirably intricate
web of lives taking place in cities.
Some of the coolest neighborhoods today, e.g.
Greenwich Village, NYC, owe their survival to the
experience of preservation movements that brought
out works like "Life and Death of Great American Cities.
1961: President Kennedy recommended a bill of $500 million for urban mass transit systems. The highway lobby, otherwise known as the road gang, did not raise objections to this bill because money was to be withdrawn from the general revenues rather than the Interstate Highway Fund.
Jane Jacobs published Life and Death of Great American Cities. It was partly based on her experience with the movement for the preservation of Greenwich in NYC against Robert Moses’ destruction plans. In this book, she offered new perspectives to look through in terms of viewing the admirably complex life forms that took place in cities. She also exposed the destructive pattern of construction plans proposed and managed by powerful technocrats like Robert Moses.
The 1950s and the early 1960s witnessed many mass campaigns that were formed to resist expressway constructions and the further dismantling of public transportation systems. Some of them were partly successful but most were defeated by the colossal powers that were behind the highway lobby.
1962: Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. It delved into the indiscriminate use of industrial and agricultural chemicals and their consequences. Her book became quickly popular among environmentally concerned milieus and influential in their actions.
1964: The Urban Mass Transit Act of 1964 passed. This, in a sense, was a reflection of the partial success of the above-mentioned urban movements. “The act authorized $375 million in 1964 to be spent over three years for this [mass transit] purpose. In 1966, section 4(f) of the Federal Highway Act of that year prohibited building federally funded highways in parks, wildlife refuges, and historic areas unless no other reasonable alternatives could be found” (Gillham 49). This act also resurfaced the concept of a balanced transportation system.
1966: The U.S. Department of Transportation was created.
Despite some minor successes, the highway lobby (made up of automobile and truck manufacturer, oil and refinery companies, asphalt and concrete suppliers, trucking companies, unions in all related fields etc.) had the hegemony over the U.S. transportation policies.
1969: The National Environmental Policy Act passed. “It required that all agencies contemplating any action take into account environmental impact, adverse effects, alternatives to the proposed action, relationships between short term uses and long term productivity, and irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources” (Dilger 69).
Naturally, these requirements had direct implication on highway construction projects. Moreover, this act provided a prototype for some later acts, such as Clean Water and Clean Air Acts of the 1970s.