Highways

Roads and highways are members of a family of workaday subjects, like electric power, sewers, and land management, that have been largely ignored by professional historians although they determine the bounds of many of our urban social patterns. A collection of essays by members of the American Association of State Highway Officials, A Story of the Beginning, Purpose, Growth, Activities, and Achievements of AASHO , Washington, 1964, tells the outline of twentieth-century American highway building. The research of the thirties and its design consequences have been summarized in a little book put out by the U.S. Public Roads Administration, Highway Practice in the United States of America , Washington, 1949; and the consequences of this thinking for today's metropolis are recorded in the designer's handbook, AASHO, Committee on Planning and Design Policies, A Policy on Arterial Highways in Urban Areas , Washington, 1957.

A very interesting literature that promises more systematic and more sensitive design practices for the future was begun by Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City , Cambridge, 1960; and he and his associates have followed on with highway studies: Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road , Cambridge, 1964. A review of the current state of behavioral studies of the effect of physical form on city dwellers is given in William Michaelson, Man and His Urban Environment: A Sociological Approach , Reading, 1970.