“Transportation
and Urban Growth – The Shaping of the American Metropolis”
by Peter O. Muller
Focus, Summer 1986, pp. 8-17 by the American Geographical Society.
In
his monumental new work on the historical geography of transportation,
James Vance states that geographic mobility is crucial to the successful
functioning of any population cluster, and that “shifts in the
availability of mobility [transportation] provide, in all likelihood,
the most powerful single process at work in transforming and evolving
the human half of geography.” ...The nation’s largest single
urban concentration today is not represented by the 7 million plus who
agglomerate in New York City but rather by the 14 million who have settled
in Gotham’s vast, curvilinear outer city [suburbs]—a
50 mile wide suburban band that stretches across Long Island, southwestern
Connecticut, the Hudson Valley as far north as West Point, and most
of New Jersey north of a line drawn from Trenton to Asbury Park. This
latest episode of intrametropolitan de-concentration [people moving
from cities to suburbs] was fueled by the modern automobile and
the interstate expressway.
The
emerging form and structure of the American metropolis had been traced
within a framework of four transportation-related eras. Each successive
growth stage is dominated by a particular movement technology and transport-network
expansion process that shaped distinctive pattern of intraurban spatial
organization. The stages are the Walking/Horsecar Era (pre-1800-1890),
the Electric Streetcar Era (1890-1920), the Recreational Automobile
Era (1920-1945), and the Freeway Era (1945-present). As with all generalized
models of this kind, there is a risk of oversimplification because the
building processes of several simultaneously developing cities do not
always fall into neat time-space compartments [not all cities fit
into the time frame].
WALKING/HORSECAR
ERA
Before
1850, the American city was a highly compact settlement in which the
dominant means of getting about was on foot, requiring people and activities
to tightly agglomerate in close proximity to one another. This usually
meant less than a 30-minute walk from the center of town to any given
urban point—an accessibility radius later extended to 45 minutes
when the pressures of industrial growth intensified after 1830. Within
this pedestrian city, recognizable activity concentrations materialized
as well as the beginnings of income-based residential congregations
[groups concentrated together]. The latter was particularly
characteristic of the wealthy, who not only walled themselves off in
their large homes near the city center but also took to the privacy
of horse-drawn carriages for moving out of [wealthy, with carriages,
could move outside the inner city because they had their own transportation]
town. Those of means also sought to escape the city’s noise
and frequent epidemics resulting from the lack of sanitary conditions.
Horse-and-carriage transportation enabled the wealthy to reside in the
nearby countryside for the disease-prone summer months. The arrival
of the railroad in the 1830s provided the opportunity for year-round
daily commuting, and by 1840 hundreds of affluent businessmen in Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia were making round trips from exclusive new
trackside suburbs every weekday.
As
industrialization and its teeming concentrations of working-class housing
increasingly engulfed the mid-nineteenth century city, the deteriorating
physical and social environment reinforced the desires of middle-income
residents to suburbanize as well. They were unable, however, to afford
the cost and time of commuting by steam train, and with the walking
city now stretched to its morphological limit, their aspirations intensified
the pressures to improve intraurban transport technology. Early attempts
involving stagecoach-like omnibuses, cablecar systems, and steam railroads
proved impractical, but by 1852 the first meaningful transit breakthrough
was finally introduced in Manhattan in the form of the horse-drawn trolley.
Light street rails were easy to install, overcame the problems of muddy,
unpaved roadways, and enabled horsecars to be hauled along them at speeds
slightly (about 5 mph) faster than those of pedestrians. This modest
improvement in mobility permitted the opening of a narrow belt of land
at the city’s edge for new home construction. Middle-income suburbanites
flocked to these “horsecar suburbs,” which multiplied rapidly
after the Civil War. Radial routes were the first to spawn such peripheral
development, but the relentless demand for housing necessitated the
building of cross-town horsecar lines, thereby filling in the interstices
and preserving the generally circular shape of the city.
The
less affluent majority of the urban population, however, was confined
to the old pedestrian city and its bleak, high-density industrial appendages.
With the massive immigration of unskilled laborers, (mostly of European
origin after 1870) huge blue-collar communities sprang up around the
factories. Because these newcomers to the city settled in the order
in which they arrived—thereby denying them the small luxury of
living in the immediate company of their fellow ethnics—social
stress and conflict were repeatedly generated [not room toplace
the new immigrants with their own ethnic groups]. With the immigrant
tide continuing to pour into the nearly bursting industrial city throughout
the late nineteenth century, pressures redoubled to further improve
intraurban transit and open up more of the adjacent countryside. By
the late 1880s that urgently needed mobility revolution was at last
in the making, and when it came it swiftly transformed the compact city
and its suburban periphery into the modern metropolis.
ELECTRIC
STREETCAR ERA
The
key to this urban transport revolution was the invention by Frank Sprague
of the electric traction motor, an often overlooked innovation that
surely ranks among the most important in American history. The first
electrified trolley line opened in Richmond in 1888, was adopted by
two dozen other big cities within a year, and by the early 1890s swept
across the nation to become the dominant mode of intraurban transit.
The rapidity of this innovation’s diffusion was enhanced by the
immediate recognition of its ability to resolve the urban transportation
problem of the day: motors could be attached to existing horsecars,
converting them into self-propelled vehicles powered by easily constructed
overhead wires. The tripling of average speeds (to over 15 mph) that
resulted from this invention brought a large band of open land beyond
the city’s perimeter into trolley-commuting range.
The
most dramatic geographic change of the Electric Streetcar Era was the
swift residential development of those urban fringes, which transformed
the emerging metropolis into a decidedly star-shaped spatial entity.
This pattern was produced by radial streetcar corridors extending several
miles beyond the compact city’s limits. With so much new space
available for home building within walking distance of the trolley lines,
there was no need to extend trackage laterally, and so the interstices
[open spaces in between] remained undeveloped. The typical
streetcar suburb of the turn of this century was a continuous axial
corridor whose backbone was the road carrying the trolley line (usually
lined with stores and other local commercial facilities), from which
gridded residential streets fanned out for several blocks on both sides
of the tracks. In general, the quality of housing and prosperity of
streetcar subdivisions increased with the distance from the edge of
the central city. These suburban corridors were populated by the emerging,
highly mobile middle class, which was already stratifying itself according
to a plethora of minor income and status differences. With frequent
upward (and local geographic) mobility the norm, community formation
became an elusive goal, a process further retarded by the grid-settlement
on the distant downtown for employment and most shopping.
Within
the city, too, the streetcar sparked a spatial transformation. The ready
availability and low fare of the electric trolley now provided every
resident with access to the intracity circulatory system, thereby introducing
truly “mass” transit to urban America in the final years
of the 19th century. For nonresidential activities this new ease of
movement among the city’s various parts quickly triggered the
emergence of specialized land-use districts for commerce, manufacturing,
and transportation, as well as the continued growth of the multipurpose
central business district (CBD) that had formed after mid-century. But
the greatest impact of the streetcar was on the central city’s
social geography, because it made possible the congregation of ethnic
groups in their own neighborhoods. No longer were these moderate-income
masses forced to reside in the heterogeneous jumble of row-house and
tenements that ringed the factories. The trolley brought them the opportunity
to “live with their own kind,” allowing the sorting of discrete
groups into their own inner-city social territories within convenient
and inexpensive traveling distance of the workplace.
RECREATIONAL
AUTOMOBILE ERA
By
World War I, the electric trolleys had transformed the tracked city
into a full-fledged metropolis whose streetcar suburbs, in the larger
cases, spread out more than 20 miles from the metropolitan center. It
was at this point in time that intrametropolitan transportation achieved
its greatest level of efficiency—that the bustling industrial
city really “worked.” How much closer the American metropolis
might have approached optimal workability for all its residents, however,
will never be known because the next urban transport revolution was
already beginning to assert itself through the increasingly popular
automobile. Americans took to cars as wholeheartedly as anything in
the nation’s long cultural history. Although Lewis Mumford and
other scholars vilified the car as the destroyer of the city, more balanced
assessments of the role of the automobile recognize its overwhelming
acceptance of what it was—the long awaited attainment of private
mass transportation that offered users the freedom to travel whenever
and wherever they chose. As cars came to the metropolis in ever greater
numbers throughout the interwar decades, their major influence was twofold:
to accelerate the deconcentration of population through the development
of interstices bypassed during the streetcar era, and to push the suburban
frontier farther into the countryside, again producing a compact, regular-shaped
urban entity.
While
it certainly produced a dramatic impact on the urban fabric by the eve
of World War II, the introduction of the automobile into the American
metropolis during the 1920s and 1930s came at a leisurely pace. The
earliest flurry of auto adoptions had been in rural areas, where farmers
badly needed better access to local service centers. In the cities,
cars were initially used for weekend outings—hence the term “Recreational
Auto Era”—and some of the earliest paved roadways were landscaped
parkways along scenic water routes, such as New York’s pioneering
Bronx River Parkway and Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. But it was
into the suburbs, where growth rates were now for the first time overtaking
those of the central cities, that cars made a decisive penetration throughout
the prosperous 1920s. In fact, the rapid expansion of automobile suburbia
by 1930 so adversely affected the metropolitan public transportation
system that, through the significant diversions of streetcar and commuter-rail
passengers, the large cities began to feel the negative effects of the
car years before the auto’s actual arrival in the urban center.
By facilitating the opening of unbuilt areas lying between suburban
rail axes, the automobile effectively lured residential developers away
from densely populated traction-line corridors into the suddenly accessible
interstices. Thus, the suburban homebuilding industry no longer found
it necessary to subsidize privately-owned streetcar companies to provide
low-fare access to trolley-line housing tracts. Without this financial
underpinning, the modern urban transit crisis quickly began to surface.
The
new recreational motorways also helped to intensify the decentralization
of the population. Most were radial highways that penetrated deeply
into the suburban ring and provided weekend motorists with easy access
to this urban countryside. There they obviously were impressed by what
they saw, and they soon responded in massive numbers to the sales pitches
of suburban subdivision developers. The residential development of automobile
suburbia followed a simple formula that was devised in the prewar years
and greatly magnified in scale after 1945. The leading motivation was
developer profit from the quick turnover of land, which was acquired
in large parcels, subdivided, and auctioned off. Understandably, developers
much preferred open areas at the metropolitan fringes, where large packages
of cheap land could readily be assembled. Silently approving and underwriting
this uncontrolled spread of residential suburbia were public policies
at all levels of government: financing road construction, obligating
lending institutions to invest in new homebuilding, insuring individual
mortgages, and providing low-interest loans to FHA and VA clients.
Because
automobility removed most of the pre-existing movement constraints,
suburban social geography now became dominated by locally homogeneous
income-group clusters that isolated themselves from dissimilar neighbors[people
with like incomes clustered together]. Gone was the highly localized
stratification of streetcar suburbia. In its place arose a far more
dispersed, increasingly fragmented residential mosaic to which builders
were only too eager to cater, helping shape a kaleidoscopic settlement
pattern by shrewdly constructing the most expensive houses that could
be sold in each locality. The continued partitioning of suburban society
was further legitimized by the widespread adoption of zoning (legalized
in 1916), which gave municipalities control over lot and building standards
that, in turn, assured dwelling prices that would only attract newcomers
whose incomes at least equaled those of the existing local population.
Among the middle class, particularly, these exclusionary economic practices
were enthusiastically supported, because such devices extended to them
the ability of upper-income groups to maintain their social distance
from people of lower socioeconomic status.
Nonresidential
activities were also suburbanizing at an increasing rate during the
Recreational Auto Era. Indeed, many large-scale manufacturers had decentralized
during the streetcar era, choosing locations in suburban freight-rail
corridors [factories moved out of the central city]. These
corridors rapidly spawned surrounding working-class towns that became
important satellites of the central city in the emerging metropolitan
constellation. During the interwar period, industrial employers accelerated
their intraurban deconcentration, as more efficient horizontal fabrication
methods replaced older techniques requiring multi-storied plants—thereby,
generating greater space needs that were too expensive to satisfy in
the high-density central city. Newly suburbanizing manufacturers, however,
continued their affiliation with inter-city freight-rail corridors,
because motor trucks were not yet able to operate with their present-day
efficiencies and because the highway network of the outer ring remained
inadequate until the 1950s.
The
other major nonresidential activity of interwar suburbia was retailing.
Clusters of automobile-oriented stores had first appeared in the urban
fringes before World War I. By the early 1920s, the roadside commercial
strip had become a common sight in many southern California suburbs.
Retail activities were also featured in dozens of planned automobile
suburbs that sprang up after World War I—most notably in Kansas
City’s Country Club District, where the nation’s first complete
shopping center was opened in 1922. But these diversified retail centers
spread slowly before the suburban highway improvements of the 1950s.
FREEWAY
ERA
Unlike
the two preceding eras, the postwar Freeway Era was not sparked by a
revolution in urban transportation. Rather, it represented the coming
of age of the now pervasive automobile culture, which coincided with
the emergence of the U.S. from 15 years of economic depression and war.
Suddenly the automobile was no longer a luxury or a recreational diversion:
overnight it had become a necessity for commuting, shopping, and socializing,
essential to the successful realization of personal opportunities for
a rapidly expanding majority of the metropolitan population. People
snapped up cars as fast as the reviving peacetime automobile industry
could roll them off the assembly lines, and a prodigious highway-building
effort was launched, spearheaded by the high-speed, limited-access expressways.
Given impetus by the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, these new freeways
would soon reshape every corner of urban America, as the more distant
suburbs they engendered [created] represented nothing less
than the turning inside-out of the historic metropolitan city.
The
snowballing effect of these changes is expressed geographically in the
sprawling metropolis of the postwar era. Most striking is the enormous
band of growth that was added between 1945 and the 1980s, with freeway
sectors pushing the metropolitan frontier deeply into the urban-rural
fringe. By the late 1960s, the maturing expressway system began to underwrite
a new suburban co-equality with the central city, because it was eliminating
the metropolitanwide centrality advantage of the CBD. Now any location
on the freeway network could easily be reached by motor vehicle, and
intraurban accessibility had become a ubiquitous spatial good. Ironically,
large cities had encouraged the construction of radial expressways in
the 1950s and 1960s because they appeared to enable the downtown to
remain accessible to the swiftly dispersing suburban population. However,
as one economic activity after another discovered its new locational
flexibility within the freeway metropolis, nonresidential deconcentration
sharply accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreoever, as expressways
expanded the radius of commuting to encompass the entire dispersed metropolis,
residential location constraints relaxed as well. No longer were most
urbanites required to live within a short distance of their job: the
workplace had now become a locus of opportunity offering access to the
best possible residence that an individual could afford anywhere in
the urbanized area. Thus, the overall pattern of locally uniform, income-based
clusters that had emerged in prewar automobile suburbia was greatly
magnified in the Freeway Era, and such new social variables as age and
lifestyle produced an ever more balkanized population mosaic.
The
revolutionary changes in movement and accessibility introduced during
the four decades of the Freeway Era have resulted in nothing less than
the complete geographic restructuring of the metropolis. The single-center
urban structure of the past has been transformed into a polycentric
metropolitan form in which several outlying activity concentrations
rival the CBD. These new “suburban downtowns,” consisting
of vast orchestrations of retailing, office-based business, and light
industry, have become common features near the highway interchanges
that now encircle every large central city. As these emerging metropolitan-level
cores achieve economic and geographic parity with each other, as well
as with the CBD of the nearby central city, they provide the totality
of urban goods and services to their surrounding populations. Thus the
metropolitan sector becomes a sufficient functional entity, or realm.
The application of this model to the Los Angeles region reveals six
broad realms. Competition among several new suburban downtowns for dominance
in the five outer realms is still occurring. In wealthy Orange County,
for example, this rivalry is especially fierce, but Costa Mesa’s
burgeoning South Coast Metro is winning out as of early 1986.
The
legacy of more than two centuries of intraurban transportation innovation,
and the development patterns they helped stamp on the landscape of metropolitan
America, is suburbanization—the growth of the edges of the urbanized
area at a rate faster than in the already-developed interior. Since
the geographic extent of the build-up urban areas, has, throughout history,
exhibited a remarkably constant radius of about 45 minutes of travel
from the center, each breakthrough in higher-speed transport technology
extended that radius into a new outer zone of suburban residential opportunity.
In the 19th century, commuter railroads, horse-drawn trolleys, and electric
streetcars each created their own suburbs—and thereby also created
the large industrial city, which could not have been formed without
incorporating these new suburbs into the pre-existing compact urban
center. But the suburbs that materialized in the early 20th century
began to assert their independence from the central cities, which were
ever more perceived as undesirable. As the automobile greatly reinforced
the dispersal trend of the metropolitan population, and the distinction
between central city and suburban rind grew as well. And as freeways
eventually eliminated the friction effects of intrametropolitan distance
for most urban functions, nonresidential activities deconcentrated to
such an extent that by 1980 the emerging outer suburban city had become
co-equal with the central city that spawned it.
As
the transition to an information-dominated, postindustrial economy is
completed, today’s intraurban movement problems may be mitigated
by the increasing substitution of communication for the physical movement
of people. Thus, the city of the future is likely to be the “wired
metropolis.” Such a development would portend further deconcentration
because activity centers would potentially be able to locate at any
site offering access to global computer and satellite networks.
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