In contrast, Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine recently released a plan to alleviate the state’s congestion problems; his plan contains a hodgepodge of transportation solutions that aim to appease nearly every category of voter (Sun, 2006). Not surprisingly, road building is included in his plans. The persistent myth that it is reasonable and possible to build a way out of congestion continues to prosper. However, past approaches to urban transportation must be reviewed to understand why the myth prospers.
The development of metropolitan areas and their expanding suburbs, specifically in the Washington, DC area, may provide some insight on how the United States’ regional transportation networks have become unsustainable over time. The DC metropolitan area has been historically inclined towards the unsustainable practice of road building, despite a first rate public transportation rail system that generally runs well, even during the busiest rush-hours as shown in Figure 2 (Metro website, 2006). Why is this region one of the most congested urban areas of the United States (TTI, 2005)? What past practices led to congestion and sprawl?
Figure 2. Customers board a Metro train at a downtown station (Metro website, 2006).
The answer may be linked to a switch in transportation network types in the United States.
Jackson (1987) lists the types of transportation systems that led to an expansion of the urban borders at the turn of the century: “most importantly, the horsecars contributed to the development of the world’s first integrated transportation systems…they connected with the omnibuses which provided crosstown service, with the steam railroads which provided longdistance commuting service, and with the ferries which constantly trundled back and forth across the adjacent waterways.” Given the present car culture, it is surprising that the United States had such a history of an elementary but serviceable intermodal transportation network. Why did this original intermodal system disappear?
The road building boom of the 1950s and 1960s explains why the United States shifted away from an intermodal network. Congress passed the Interstate Highway Act in 1956 to build more than forty thousand miles of highways in the United States (Gillham, 2002). This road network is the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and nearly 75 miles of this System are within the borders of the District of Columbia (Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, 1994).
The federal government, justifying the need for the highway system on the grounds of national defense, funded 90% of the cost of construction. However, the majority (i.e., 80%) of the materials used for national defense in the Second World War was shipped via trains; there was already a functioning transportation system of trains when the argument for shipping national defense materials on roadways came along (Gillham, 2002). The highway network stretched across the United States and has since shaped its cities’ landscapes permanently.
Part of the result of reshaping the United States was the increase in suburbanization. Jackson (1987) defines suburbanization as “a process involving the systematic growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of core cities.” Suburbanization is a deeply entrenched tradition for the United States; the Washington, DC area serves as a prime example of United States suburbanization. For example, the DC area is home to some of the United States’ fastest growing suburbs, such as Caroline, Loudoun, Stafford, and King George counties in Virginia; this growth is fueled partly by affordable housing far from the DC city center (McCrummen, 2006). Furthermore, 87 percent of immigrants to the DC region in the 1990s opted to live in suburbs (Singer et al., 2001).
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