Paved Roads & Public Money. Richard DeLuca
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Connecticut Highway Department
The scientific management of transportation improvements represented a major shift in the way highway engineers approached their job. No longer would engineers be lagging behind in their work, trying to solve yesterday’s problem only after congestion had become apparent. Using the tools of scientific management, they were now able to look ahead ten, twenty, or more years into the future, identify potential problem areas, and estimate the cost of the highway improvements needed to provide an acceptable level of service. The culmination of this application of scientific management to highway improvement was a turn away from solving today’s problems to providing for tomorrow’s needs, and from now on a kind of futurism would pervade the work of highway engineers—and not always in a sensible way. As we shall see, scientific management was hardly a foolproof methodology, especially when applied to a single-minded highways-only transportation policy.
The Impact of Automobility
The advent of automobility allowed families to move out of crowded urban centers into surrounding rural towns, created a profession of city and town planners looking for progressive ways to shape this emerging urban-suburban environment, and challenged the sustainability of the state’s existing railroad, steamboat, and trolley services.
TO THE SUBURBS: RESETTLING THE LAND
With the advent of automobility and the proliferation of good roads, residents who were overcrowded into urban centers around the state began to move outward into the open spaces that existed on the fringes of most cities, resettling the Connecticut landscape yet again.
It is important to recognize that the move to the suburbs typically associated with the postwar boom of the 1960s did not begin in the 1960s. It did not even begin with the construction of controlled-access highways into city centers in the 1940s. In fact, it began with the building of interurban trolley lines in the late nineteenth century, which provided the means for those who could afford it to leave Connecticut’s crowded cities for nearby rural areas. At the same time that the proliferation of tall buildings, elevators, the telephone, and the department store concentrated economic activity in an urban core, the trolley doubled, even tripled, the effective size of many urban areas by providing radial access to the core from ever greater distances, allowing the dense population of the walking city to spread out along the direction of each streetcar line. (Steam railroads provided a similar opportunity even earlier, but to a lesser degree; their station stops were farther apart.) Indeed, streetcar companies encouraged this first wave of suburbanization by constructing lines into open country and charging a fixed five-cent fare, which relied on volume, as opposed to a zone system, where fares increased with the distance traveled.51
Other factors, too, made the move out of the city to the suburbs feasible in the early auto age, including the development of lighter, timber-frame housing that replaced heavier post-and-beam construction. This modern, balloon-frame house was quicker and easier to build, which translated into lower home prices. In addition, towns and cities themselves stimulated the move to the suburbs by their willingness to extend urban services—paved streets, water and sewer lines, police and fire protection—into outlying areas at public expense, thereby subsidizing the increase in land values along streetcar lines and encouraging the subdivision of rural lands. It should be noted, however, that the movement of affluent and working-class citizens to the periphery of the city was not historically inevitable. It was the product of market forces, government policies, and new technologies, in particular a combination of affordable housing and cheap, convenient transportation. Suburbanization was a uniquely American phenomenon unlike, for example, the European experience.52
Suburbanization in Connecticut began in earnest in the 1920s, the decade that automobility first became widespread. And the automobile, together with the extensive road network provided by megagovernment highway agencies, changed the pattern of resettlement significantly from what it had been in the streetcar era. The automobile made it possible for those exiting the city to go almost anywhere they wished with street access. No longer dependent on a linear trolley line for travel to the city, the move to the suburbs now became omnidirectional, the only restraint being the time it took to commute back and forth from a home in the suburbs to work and shopping opportunities in the city.
In Connecticut, the impact of automobility on the movement outward from city to suburb after 1920 can be seen in the increase in population of small towns around the state adjacent to larger cities. One of the largest transformations took place in the town of West Hartford, whose 1920 population of 9,000 grew to 34,000 by 1940. Similar if less dramatic growth occurred in numerous other communities around the state, where population growth over the decades previously measured in hundreds of persons now commonly numbered in the thousands. For example, from 1920 to 1940, the population of Waterford increased from 4,000 to 6,600; Farmington, from 3,800 to 5,300; Stratford, from 12,300 to 22,600; and Hamden, from 8,600 to 23,000.53
The percentage of the state’s population living in Connecticut cities peaked in 1920 at 63 percent. Thereafter, the percentage declined at a slow but steady pace, as towns that had been rural and agricultural in character, continued to grow more quickly than the state’s urban core. The process of suburbanization that began in the 1920s would accelerate in the postwar decades, so that by the year 2000, with the state’s total population having increased (fourfold) to 3.4 million, only 37 percent of Connecticut residents would live in cities. By any measure, it was one of the most amazing transformations of the Connecticut landscape in history—and it was automobility (the automobile plus megagovernment-sponsored highway building) that made it possible.54
There was recognition among engineers and city planners as early as the 1920s that the dispersal of population from Connecticut cities represented more than just a move to the suburbs. They began to see how the movement of people out of the cities created a new political entity on the landscape: the region, a multitown locality that reflected the economic interdependence of the newer suburb and the older city. It can be said that the idea of regional planning took hold in 1922 with the creation of the Committee on a Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs in New York City. Over the next decade, this group surveyed the growth needs of not only the city itself but adjacent portions of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut as well. Their work sparked early planning efforts in Fairfield County. It would take several decades for the concept of regional planning to spread to the whole of Connecticut, but in the end it is this process of regionalization, creating a new political entity out of city and suburb combined, and not suburbanization alone, that best describes the transformation of the Connecticut landscape in the twentieth century.55
CONNECTICUT CITIES: ORGANIZING THE LAND
Even as the move to the suburbs was underway, Connecticut cities began to adopt progressive cures of their own to lessen the ills of urban living for those left behind. By beautifying public places and rebuilding urban centers in a neoclassical style, the progressive reformers believed they could inspire higher moral values among the populace. The first expression of the Beaux Arts style in America—named after the school in Paris where architects were trained in such designs—was at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and the concept of city planning in the Beaux Arts style was soon adopted by many American cities, including Chicago in 1896, Washington, D.C., in 1901, and San Francisco in 1906. With impetus from the City Beautiful movement, the city of Hartford created the nation’s first City Planning Commission in 1907, and other Connecticut cities soon organized similar commissions: New Haven in 1910, Bridgeport in 1913, and New Britain in 1915. By 1946, twenty-seven cities and towns in Connecticut had planning commissions.56
While the planning process helped cities focus on the need for open spaces to provide relief from urban life, and wider streets to accommodate faster-moving automotive traffic, the long-lasting contribution of early city planning was in the concept of zoning, or dividing up the landscape according to how the land was to be utilized. Zoning typically restricted each parcel of land in a community to a specific type of use—residential, commercial, or industrial—while establishing building lines and height limits to control the size and location of structures on the building lot, and street lines to delineate the location of new roads. The first zoning laws in the Northeast