Public transit has been in substantial decline since Dwight D. Eisenhower held the presidency and a wave of interstate and highway construction swept the country. The debate on whether this was a universal good or not has been on the rise recently, and today it will be tackled in the Brackety-Ack. Before the 1950s, towns boomed into vibrant and diverse cities centered around train stations and connected by webs of trolley lines. Neighborhoods grew around trolley and bus stops, encouraging people to walk to work, the grocery store, and most other essential services. Roanoke is just one example of rail spurring growth and carrying scores of workers and students to the valley.
Then the Ford Model T began production in 1908, and slowly, as accessibility of the car shifted away from the rich to the everyday person a few decades later, roads were retrofitted to suit cars rather than wagons. The threat of the “metal beast”, as it was often branded in its early days, demanded the formalization of sidewalks and the paving of roads to make way for cars to speed through places where people tended to move more slowly. In the 1950s, Eisenhower sponsored the construction of interstates across the country, with the specific paths of these expansive, fast lanes running through historic neighborhoods in the worst cases.
The speed at which cars travel and the space that they take up drove developers to raze longstanding buildings to create a parking lot. Neighborhoods have grown not in capacity but in the space they take up, making most housing more expensive to build and purchase. The conversation around residential development has begun to shift recently, and the common pattern of building around cars has started to be challenged. The philosophy about what freedom the car provides is a different conversation, but right now, the physical impact of building for cars is something that has influenced how our generation will live for many decades to come. Will we continue to go from one need to the next in a car, or will we find avenues to take in the fresh in our daily commute?
Juniper Rogers
Folks at ‘Noke Editor
