Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, the United States desperately needed a program that would keep the economy going. While the war had created jobs and economic output, demobilization threatened to shift the economy right back into depression. The redirection of American industry and capital from war-making into suburbanization created a kinetic growth machine that fueled a postwar boom. We built a new version of America, one centered around the automobile, transforming an entire continent in a generation. Traffic engineers were tasked with making transportation in this newly imagined approach work. To do that, they needed to standardize nearly every component of this system so that it could be recreated, at scale and with urgency, across a vast continent. It is difficult to overstate how monumental an undertaking this was, nor how astounding their success was in accomplishing it.