After World War II, highway boosters mounted an intense effort to finance the construction of new roads and the upgrading of existing ones, as railroads and urban public transportation found it difficult to compete with over-the-road alternatives. Besides promising an end to endemic congestion, delays and traffic jams, highway proponents cited many advantages to be gained from road expansion and construction: a better system of farm-to-market routes, the acceleration of commerce and industry, and a stronger national defense. The "highway lobby" was an alliance of influential players: the automotive industry, farmers and their organizations, truckers, oil companies, highway engineers and the Bureau of Public Roads. Throughout the teens, twenties and thirties, the highway lobby, working through organizations like Project Adequate Roads and the National Highway Users Conference, fought for the application of road and gasoline tax moneys to highway construction and for a system of trunk-line interstate highways. The highway lobby was joined by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, who sought highways as a limitless means of increasing property values. The lobby invoked standard themes of "elbow room," "horizons" and "freedom of the road" in their pamphlets and promotional literature.
In the New York World's Fair of 1939, the General Motors Futurama exhibit portrayed the world of 1960 as completely dependent on the automobile and highway. The exhibit valued speed, extolling the graceful engineering of highway interchanges. Of all "utopian" proposals with corporate backing, this one has come closest to fruition.
In 1944 a national system of Interstate Highways was authorized, but not funded, and finally a complicated financing formula led to the enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This legislation, which was to have a greater effect on America's landscape than any other conscious planning initiative, authorized a 41,000 mile system of Interstate and Defense Highways, of which 5,000 miles were to be urban freeways. For all the endless "horizons" and Conestoga Wagons used in its promotion, the Interstate highway system was among the most centrally controlled and bureacratically directed episodes in American history.
Highway development played a major role in the continuing decentralization of this country's landscape and, naturally, made it possible for the low-density housing model to succeed. At the local level, the traffic engineer gained ascendancy over the designer; after the forties, streets were most often engineered to meet the requirements of traffic, rather than designed with broader purposes in mind. Even residential streets were designed for the passage of large phantom vehicles moving at top speeds. From the size of the interstate to the turning radius of the driveway, traffic engineering had a pervasive effect on American land use.