Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

For these suburban cities, the recipe for short-term success became simple: Have the federal government fund a highway along with the necessary bridges and interchanges. Work with the state to fund frontage roads and an arterial stroad network. Tap into development fees and other growth-related revenue streams to pay for collectors. Then allow national developers and the centralized marketplace to provide everything from shopping malls, big box stores, and fast food to residential homes on cul-de-sacs. The current narrative of this boom is that it built the middle class. The less common, but more accurate, insight is that government investments in transportation made many holders of formerly worthless land into instant millionaires while creating a way for communities to experience growth quickly and the macro economy to generate lots of financial transactions. The overwhelming liabilities to service and maintain all of this infrastructure would start to come due a generation later, but in the short term, especially in those decades immediately after the Second World War, it was seemingly a golden age.