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disastrous, with freeways built through downtowns, creating
enormous congestion.5 In the 1960s, when many cities bought
transit companies with federal help, they stoutly maintained
the downtown orientations of bus routes, so that transit
riders going from suburb to suburb were forced to go through
downtown.
The downtown orientation of transit continued in the
1980s when rail transit became popular. Los Angeles's
freeways, bus routes, and new rail lines are all oriented
around downtown even though downtown provides only 5 percent
of employment in the Los Angeles area.
Another problem was that planners' downtown orientation
led them to build freeways through well-settled and often
historic neighborhoods, provoking enormous opposition. In
1968 the city of Portland, Oregon, published a highway plan
that would have forced 1 of 10 residents to either move or
live right next to a freeway or expressway.
Successful opposition to new highway construction
created something of a crisis in industries grown dependent
on lavish, federally funded interstate highways. Transpor-
tation consultants, engineering and design firms, sand and
gravel companies, and other parts of the construction indus-
try looked around for something else to do.
New Urbanism
As long ago as the 1950s air pollution, congested
freeways, the decline of downtowns, and the supposed steril-
ity of the suburbs led to a growing nostalgia for life
before automobiles. By the 1980s several architects had
developed that nostalgia into what they variously called
"neotraditional town planning" or "New Urbanism."6
In essence, neotraditionalists and New Urbanists decid-
ed that the best way to make Americans less dependent on
cars would be to redesign cities to look as they had looked
before autos were dominant. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, American cities were typified by multifamily
housing, housing mixed together with commercial uses, and
single-family housing on small lots, all connected by
streetcar lines. So high densities, mixed uses, and light
rail (the updated name for streetcars) became characteristic
of New Urbanism.
But New Urbanism reverses cause and effect. The auto-
mobile allowed people to live in lower densities, and forc-