Revising Urban History: the Interstate Highway Road Not Taken

In a paper published in this month's Transport Policy, Marlon Boarnet, director of the graduate urban planning program at USC, "outlines a series of lessons that developing countries might learn from America's great road expansion experiment," writes Eric Jaffe. "By far the most compelling is his suggestion that the Interstate Highway System should have been two distinct systems: one running between cities, and another running within them."

By planning, financing, and governing intracity and intercity road systems separately, Boarnet believes the negative impacts of running highways through cities could have been avoided.  

"To be sure, the Interstate Highway System did an enormous amount of good for the United States, but in retrospect the decision to thread it through cities was a great mistake," observes Jaffe.