• things to along the road
• the sexual revolution
• maps and road names
• pollution and regulation
• urban sprawl
• growth of the gasoline industry--leads eventually to dependence on foreign oil
  
• auto mechanics, used car sales, junkyards
• licensing--who can drive
• law enforcement, speed limits, traffic laws
• insurance
• 
  

How can we divide those up?

• what problems arose, what systems were needed to solve them
  
• social and economic/technological consequences
  
• first and second order consequences
• necessary parts of the system vs. unintended consequences
• near-inevitable unintended consquences: if you have enough automobiles pollution will become a problem
• the choices we make about how to use a technology lead to consequences
  

• how a technology fits with our values affects how fast it is adopted, how it is used, how it develops further
• automobile fits with values of freedom, democracy, privacy

1958 Thunderbird (PEM photo: Dacusville Farm Days)

• roads had begun to be improved for bicycles, but the automobile represented the need for a fundamental shift.  Conflict between the needs of horses and automobiles--a sudden  spurt in horseshoe patents to provide horseshoes that would help horses manage paved roads.
• road maps (and street names) were a consequence of the automobile--the first national road atlas was published in 1927

• Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles opened in 1926 (but it was not limited access)
• the automobile trip culture had developed by the 1920s--motels , campgrounds
• the first gas station was opened by Standard Oil in 1912 ( gas station museum )
• Visits to national parks increased 4-fold during the 1920s.
• The first drive-in movie opened in 1933 in New Jersey--by the early 1950s there were 4,000 of them.
• A&W root beer stands
• The first drive-in restaurant was either Bob's Boy in 1936 or Royce Hailey's Pig Stand in Dallas Texas in the early 1940s (by the 1960s these were haunts for rowdy teenagers and families were looking for another alternative--the chain fast-food restaurant)
• roadside architecture , roadside stores with giant cows , world's largest sixpack , and of course our very own peachoid
• Disneyland opened in 1955--the model for a new generation of amusement parks linked to highways rather than streetcars or trains.

 Los Angeles (slide #3)

• Between 1870 and 1920 New York City expanded from less than a million to 5 1/2 million population and from 22 to almost 300 square miles.  Density also increased in the center city with the invention of the elevator and steel frame construction.
• Urban services--particularly handling garbage and sewage and providing water--had a hard time keeping up.  The first suburban explosion resulted from streetcars.

• This let to a major reform movement around the turn of the century--the Progressives, inventors of urban planning.  By about 1910 they had the ideas of a central business district, zoning, a system of parks and parkways, and planning roads to allow circulation--including the first limited access highways.  These plans were very successful--the value of central property went up and therefore the tax base.
• What did middle class people want?--safety, uniformity, yards, etc.
• The automobile corresponded with American values on independence and privacy.
• To get this people were willing to move further and further out.  In the 1920s Los Angeles opened 3200 subdivisions.
• Planned towns-- Levittowns (first in 1949).  Only in 1960s were proposals for cluster zoning to leave open space successful.
• The attached garage replaced the front porch, and large lots allowed space-wasting one story ranch houses.
• Suburbs were very segregated, not just by race but by income level and often ethnicity (red-lining), also further separated the world of men and women.

 Traffic in Los Angeles, 1949

• California opened its first freeway in 1940.  In 1947 the state passed a law that expanded the 19 miles of freeway to 300 miles ten years later--by 1980 there were 12,500 miles.  54% of the funding came from the state gasoline tax.
• Began as a cold war idea, with the idea that federal funding was needed to have a system that would allow easy movement of troops.  Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 committed the country to spending $50 billion to construct 41,000 miles of interstate highways.  Good deal for the states--the federal gov't paid 90% of the costs.  By 1973 82% had been constructed.
•  engineering marvels of the interstate highway system
• Chain motels displaced the old local motor courts--the first Holiday Inn was opened in 1952.

 the big duck