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That was the motivation for the interstate system at a national level, but not the reason access freeways were put directly through the center of a number of ci
by _delirium 7y ago
That was the motivation for the interstate system at a national level, but not the reason access freeways were put directly through the center of a number of cities. There's not much military usefulness in something like the I-345 spur that cuts through downtown Dallas, or the now-demolished Cypress Street Viaduct through Oakland. If you just wanted a national road network, it would've been cheaper to bypass dense urban areas. Those kinds of urban freeways had more to do with postwar planners' ideas about the future of housing/working/commuting.
- afarrell 7y agoWe're discussing the decision-making of people in the US in the 1950s, correct? If communists take control of a dense urban area and throw up barricades to block the more narrow streets, there is military usefulness in having a freeway passing through that urban area. It is also theoretically useful in case of a railway strike.
- pjc50 7y agoThis was the 1950s. If it was even slightly conceivable that Communists would take a city somehow, after an amphibious landing across a distance the world had never seen, and the city had not already been reduced to rubble by incoming ICBMs or strategic bombing, it would have been destroyed by a stay-behind nuclear mine.
- panzagl 7y agoThe communists would have been internal- beatniks and what not.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoThe Communists were big on revolution. As in, from the inside, done by the workers of the target country themselves, usually with a lot of foreign help but no full-blown foreign invasion. It may seem implausible now, but many countries had already fallen to revolutions, and it was not unreasonable at the time to think it might happen in the U.S.