Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways

摘要

While many books set out to understand the current transport context, there are few that provide a thorough analysis of how we arrived at the current situation where the car holds a position of privilege among the range of transport options. Changing Lanes takes an in-depth look at the evolution of highways policy, planning and implementation in US cities over the twentieth century. It explores how highway planning shifted its attention from a predominantly rural focus, where there was little to impede engineering ideals of free moving traffic, to the complexity of the urban domain where entirely new transport problems were emerging. It carefully analyses how the knowledge of the professionals involved was often ill suited to the task and provides a good resource for those seeking to understand the history of transport policy decisions.