Have you ever wondered why one of the most engineered, constructed, and congested of all urban features is called a parkway or a freeway?  Have a look at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of two interchanges in Los Angeles— Highway #1 and Highway #2 at www.edwardburtynsky.com/ under Oil, Transportation, and see if the ‘state of nature’ or some visions of the abstraction encompassed by the term ‘freedom’ are uppermost in your thoughts.

 

 The answer of course is historical.  According to an article in the latest issue of Access, a periodical published by the University of California Transportation Centre, the origins of these names date back to the late 1800s.

 

In exploring how the interstate highway program in the United States managed to “decisively [shape] both intracity travel and American cities,” the article begins by reviewing the history of planning for cars in cities.  In the first three decades of the 20th century, auto registrations rose from 8,000 to 22 million. Municipalities struggled on their own to fund the street networks required to respond to this “tidal wave of automobiles.” A small group of planners and engineers—Harland Bartholomew, Charles Cheney and John Nolen—pioneered the “operational fixes like widening and standardizing streets, eliminating jogs and dead ends, installing traffic signals, funneling traffic onto main thoroughfares, and segregating different types of traffic (i.e. streetcars, autos, trucks, and pedestrians).”

 

As these congestion relief measures lost their effectiveness, another approach was proposed based on network designs for recreational motoring that, in turn, reached back into the late 19th century when real estate developers “discovered that access to parks could boost property values.”  Roads that linked the developments in the expanding industrial cities to the surrounding open spaces were called ‘parkways’ and had two compelling design features.  Access to them was limited which meant disruption from slow-moving vehicles “unpredictably entering and exiting the traffic stream” was minimized, and collisions were reduced. Also, they were separated from the cross streets which allowed for higher speed travel and more vehicle capacity.

 

Urban transportation planners adapted these two features into a proposed new superimposed road network that they thought would permanently solve urban traffic woes by enabling the “relatively free movement of vehicles”—hence the name ‘freeway.’

 

Although the freeways envisioned were modest —four lanes, 45 mph speed limits and small simple interchanges—compared with the eventual constructions, they also included denser networks of highways that would disperse traffic while still cutting “with the urban grain, not against it.”  They even incorporated multi-modal features like medians for public transit.  But, they also preferred gridiron rather than radial layouts for more effectively “dispers[ing] traffic across rapidly decentralizing cities.”