Interstate Quotes

“The decision for the I-40 route had been made quietly in 1957 at a nonpublic meeting of white business leaders and state highway officials.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Many of those promoting the expressway tear downs are the decision-makers now.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Put another way, road engineers had relied on the supposedly apolitical principles of highway building as their major form of political expression.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Almost all the trouble spots involved local opposition to residential displacement and community destruction.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“BPR and state highway engineers had enormous confidence in their own expertise, but they were unprepared for the upsurge of citizen opposition to the urban interstates.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Inner-city slums could be cleared, blacks removed to more distant second-ghetto areas, central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved all at the same time — and mostly at federal expense.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“By the early 1950s, BPR engineers had seemingly lost interest in the broader implications of highway building and focused instead on facilitating automobile and truck transportation.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“It was quite obvious that neighborhoods and communities would be destroyed and people uprooted, but this was thought to be an acceptable cost of creating new transportation routes and facilitating urban economic development.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“The victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Almost everywhere, the new urban expressways destroyed wide swaths of existing housing and dislocated people by the tens of thousands.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“In postwar America, mass production of automobiles and tract housing signaled the beginning of urban decline and suburban sprawl.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“In April, Adams turned to Bertram D. Gallant and Robert Moses, leading New York road officials, for details of an acceptable plan.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Few public policy initiatives have had as dramatic and lasting an impact on modern America as the decision to build the Interstate Highway System.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“This flexibility meant that local political arrangements influenced the location of urban expressways, thus allowing engineers, truckers, or planners to remodel American cities.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“By the late 1940s, then, city planners based their work on several key assumptions. Decentralization was the source of urban disruption and decay. They would have to slow or reverse the process while the remainder of the city, especially the central business district, was rebuilt. Freeway construction, at whatever scale, was the play a role in the redevelopment and recentralizing process.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989

“Highway building, in their scheme, was a form of social and economic therapy.”
― Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989