townless highways for the...

TOWNLESS HIGHWAYS FOR THE MOTORISTA PROPOSAL FOR THE AUTOMOBILE AGE

BY BENTON MAC KAYE AND LEWIS MUMFORD

ITIS a commonplace to say that. the automobile has revolutionized

modern transportation. But thetruth of the matter is that this revolu-tion has not got beyond the Kerenskystage. The motor car has taken theplace of the horse-and-buggy, and themotor bus has wiped out the street carin many sections of the country; butmotor car and motor bus are stilllargely crawling along in the ruts laiddown by earlier habits and earliermodes of transportation.

When one says crawl one meanscrawl. There is scarcely a town in thecountry where, at least on two days ofthe week, the traffic does not become asnarl and a nuisance; there is scarcelya street leading to a school where, un-less the motorist does crawl, he may notkill a thoughtless child (a loss thatoffsets the gain from improved methodsof treating such a scourge of childhoodas measles); there is hardly a majorcrossing or a bottle-neck on our modernhighways where, in the daily confusion,a car may not be wrecked or a bodymaimed in someone's impatience tomove swiftly where movement is almostimpossible. Like the fly, the motoristbuzzes his wings vigorously; but his feetare stuck to the flypaper of the old-fashioned highway: a spavined horsecould often travel as fast as a 120 h.p,car.

Even in the open country, when thecars at last begin to make a little speed,

the adaptation of the motor car tocivilized ways of life is still incomplete.There is the scorching ugliness of badlyplanned and laid out concrete roadspeppered with impudent billboards;there is the vast, spreading metropoli-tan slum of multiple gas stations andhot-dog stands; and on the throughhighways there is the conflict betweenspeed, safety, and pleasure. The Octo-ber revolution of the automobile,which will effectually transform thephysical means of life and make possi-ble a higher type of civilization, hashardly begun.

What has been responsible for thebackwardness of the automobile? Aglance at the development of the rail-road will perhaps give us some notion.When the locomotive was invented itarrested attention as an entirely newkind of contrivance. Except in thedesign of the original coaches, therewas no temptation to compare Stephen-son's Rocket with a stagecoach. Fromthe beginning, the steam locomotivetraveled on rails: a special kind of roadwas laid down for it. In order toprevent its wider and more untram-meled use, the British House of Parlia-ment passed a law making it necessaryfor a locomotive used upon the high-ways to be preceded by a man wav-ing a red flag. Had it not beenfor this law, England might haveendured the evils and nuisances ofthe motor age two generations be-

848 HARPER'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE

IIfore they actually came into existence.The internal combustion engine,

which gave us the automobile, wasunfortunately first attached to aninnocent-looking carriage. The firstautomobiles were in fact called horse-less carriages; and even those of usnow in middle age can remember atleast the stamps of the Buffalo Expo-sition of 1901, with the chauffeurperched high on the seat of an old-fashioned four-wheeled cab. So slowlyand insidiously did the motor car makeits way that, at the beginning, no onethought of putting it on a new kind' ofroad. The first effect of the car was tobring a growing demand for filling upthe gullies in the dirt road-gullies andruts that the old-fashioned buggy hadtaken without a blink. Then came ademand for a binder that would lay thedust, and after that came road-widen-ing, for the motor car could not turnout so easily into the weeds or ditchesbeside a narrow road. Finally arosethe demand for a better surface, andin the last decade the smooth, well-graded concrete road with the bankedturn and the center division has comeinto existence. .

Having achieved thousands of milesof wide, concrete-paved highways,having projected many thousands moreon almost exactly the same pattern, welean back complacently in our chairsand fancy we have solved the problemsof motor transportation-although ourjammed city streets, our run-downsuburbs, our spoiled villages, ourdevastated tracts of conntryside, ourcountry homes that are as quiet andpeaceful as a boilerworks are all largeand ironic commentaries upon our pre-tensions. Laying roads is one thing,and making movement on them safeand swift and pleasant is another.At present the only point where theautomobile is permitted to comewithin sight of its potential efficiencyis in the factory.

Where have we fallen short? Ourchief mistake has been that we havenot had the acumen of Uncle Harvey,who never saw an automobile. Backin 1892 Uncle Harvey said to one of us,"My boy, I'll make you a prophecy-the railways of the future will be quitedifferent from the present, for insteadof riding on trains each household willhave its own family locomotive."

The fact is that in designing our ncwroads we have continued to provide forhorseless ca~riages; whereas in ac-tuality we are confronted by a kind ofvehicle completely different from thecarriage, something much closer to thesteam locomotive. It is no use for usto assert innocently, as does theUnited States Government Report onthe highways of Connecticut: "It is aninteresting fact . • . that many of thepresent Connecticut trunk lines are notonly in the same general location butoccupy the identical rights-of-wayupon which the old turnpikes werebuilt." That is just the nub of thedifficulty. We have tried to adapt theinstruments of one age to the demandsof another. This is what we do, it istrue, when we are thoughtless enoughto put an electric-light bulb into an oillamp or a colonial candlestick; but indealing with the automobile the resultsare not quite so innocuous. The loss ofefficiency, the loss of life, the destruc-tion of beauty, the dulling of pleasurethat attend the spread of motor trans-portation call for a thorough re-orienta-tion. When we try to travel swiftly inthe old ruts we are ditched.

Now, if we had been thinking of thefamily locomotive instead of the horse-less carriage we should have profitedby both the good points and the mis-takes of the railroad age. The chiefmerit of the railroad was that it createdan independent system of transporta-tion which, for the most part, did not

TOWN LESS HIGHWAYS FOR THE MOTORIST 849

even parallel the existing system ofhighways. The roadbed was speciallydesigned for the new type of vehicle; aspecial right of way was created; large

.tracts of land were laid aside for yardsand terminals; stations and junctionswere specially designed with facilitiesfor storage and switching, and on thebigger systems the local tracks wereseparated from the express tracks.

The defects of the original railwaysystem equally merited study: they hadmuch to teach the motor age. Thepassage of railroad tracks and railroadyards at grade through. the center ofthe community is a blight and an ob-struction: once done, it requires manythousands of dollars to undo; and in themeanwhile, the man-hours wasted, theproperty that has been ruined byfront-ing the tracks, and the loss of li~es allmount up to an incalculable butplainly dreadful total. The othergreat menace of the railroad is thegrade crossing. Where the railroadcrosses a main artery, it should do so,we see now, by a bridge or a cut.With other weaknesses of the railroad,such as the neglect of feeder lines andthe consequent deterioration of theinaccessible back country, one need notdeal here: the transformation of therailroad line into a closely articulatedmotor mesh is one. of the importantcontributions of the motor age itself.

Once we have grasped the essentialnotion of the automobile as a privatelocomotive, the example of the railroadwill give us a clue to its proper treat-ment. It must have a related butindependent road system of its own,and this system must be laid down soas to bring into use all the potentialadvantages of the automobile for bothtransportation and recreation. Thismeans a kind of road that differs fromthe original turnpike, from the railroadand, above all, from the greater partof the existing automobile highways.One can perhaps characterize it best by

calling it the Townless Highway, todenote its principal feature-the di-vorce of residence and transport. Butthis phrase does not cover all theaspects of modern road planning, asopposed to the muddle and chaos ofthe past: so let us examine one by onethe various parts of the new system.

III

Let us first consider the motor roadas a long-distance form of transporta-tion. Following the existing networkof roads, we have in the past putthrough our highways from one largeurban center to another. We all knowthe results of that process. All thetime that is saved in the countrystretches is lost once the car enters thecity streets: the bigger and more im-portant the trunk road, the larger andmore cluttered the town, the greateramount of time that is lost. Sinceaviation fields are naturally on the out-skirts of the city-where they willremain unless the autogiro completelysupplants the existing types-this clog-ging of the motor roads also diminishesthe success of aerial transportation.One can fly from Philadelphia toNewark as quickly as one can come inby car from Newark to Times Square.

Our cities sometimes make feebleattempts to accelerate through trafficby routing it off the main avenues.But the first principle of the townlesshighway goes a long step farther: itrequires that the highway avoid passingthrough the town. The demand forthis kind of planning has already comefrom the motorist and is being metby the more progressive highway engi-neers. Take Federal Route No. 1along the Atlantic coast, from Eastport,Maine, to Miami, Florida. Plans arein the making to relocate several sec-tions of this route so that instead ofgoing through the big cities along theAtlantic Coast it will pass them by on


the inland side. Other plans wouldconnect these revised sections byrevised locations between cities. Andso, by these two awkward back steps,Route No.1 would be relocated fartherinland and turned from an old-fash-ioned turnpike into what it should havebeen from the beginning-a townlesshighway.

The by-pass, or belt-line, is part ofthe big regional plan for New YorkCity and its environs, as envisagedby the planners of the Russell SageFoundation; it is likewise part of thePhiladelphia Tri-State Plan, and ofthe Boston Bay Circuit project. TheState of New Jersey has put throughan almost complete system of suchby-pass highways. More than oncethis sort of plan has been opposed bynear-sighted business men, againsttheir own better interests. In at-tempting to keep long-distance trafficon their own Main Street, they wouldnot merely congest avenues that arealready congested, with tourists andtravelers who are not in the mood forshopping, but they would make accessto their own district almost impossibleto the local shopper-who wouldthereby be tempted to travel by trainor motor to some larger center.

Intelligent highway planning wouldprevent such a reckless misuse of lo-cal thoroughfares. Local traffic needsample parking space, as the Sears Roe-buck stores have been intelligentenough to discover and to provide forin the layout of their new buildings;through traffic, on the other hand,should go completely outside a town,be it big or little. This is a funda-mental maxim of sound motorwayplanning. Where it is forgotten onlyconfusion and congestion can result.

If the passage of a trunk-line high-way through a town is against the bestinterests of the shopkeeper and mer-chant, what shall we say of its relationto the suburban center and to the

village? Here the case is even moreemphatically against it. Already peo-ple are demanding to be rid of theendless stream of gasoline locomotivesthat pass under domestic windows-the private locomotive, pleasure car, ortruck, with its hum, its dust, its ex-haust, its constant threat to the lives oflittle children who have for the mo-ment escaped the eye of their mothersand nurses, to say nothing of grownadults, confronted by much greaterhazards on the peaceful highway thanthe bold highwaymen who terrorizedthe Pony. Express. The demand forrelief has been increasing in volume;let us take one state--Massachusetts.

In the famous little village of Deer-field the Connecticut River thorough-fare was relocated eastward, both torelieve the residents of a nuisance andto preserve one of America's trulycolonial towns, in effect almost an his-toric museum. In Harvard, Massa-chusetts, a main road from Worcesternorthward was put through the villagecenter before its residents had awak-ened to its cacophonous possibilities.Very soon after, a vigorous local move-ment started to demand its relocationoutside the village. Meanwhile thenext village of Still River was askingwhy the heavy traffic should passbefore its doors-and the logical answeris another relocation. From Fitch-burg, a city of forty thousand, hascome the demand to relocate the"Mohawk Trail" from Boston toTroy, New York, by making a by-passsouthward, and so relieving the in-tolerable congestion of Main Street.

This sort of demand from the smalltown and village is important, and itpoints to an interesting fact. In thedays of the horse and buggy the high-road served as company. As the cartor carriage joggled by, the farmer in thefield or the housewife on her porchcould hail it; the horse would stopalmost of his own accord, and a chat

TOWNLESS HIGHWAYS FOR THE MOTORIST 851

would follow. But once the countryroad becomes a main highway, filledwith fast traffic a good part of the dayand even of the night, when the carsthemselves are driven mostly by stran-gers, not neighbors, the whole situationis changed: the road ceases to be asymbol of sociability; it becomes verylargely a curse. We know a suburbanreal estate man who suddenly becameaware of this fact. His propertyadjoined a large through highway; andthinking in terms of the old-fashionedroad of the past, he had put the highestvalues on the corner houses that wereon the highway. It turned out thatthese houses were the last to be sold,and they did not sell until their priceswere reduced. Living on a trunkmotor road is like living on the rail-road. More and more the sensibleproperty owner is shying off the wideand handsome highway. He wants totravel on it, not to settle there.

IVUnfortunately, the by-pass is not by

itself the solution of the problem ofmotor transportation. As our roadsdevelop now, the usefulness of theby-pass is checkmated by the road-town-sometimes called the motortown or the motor slum. We refer tothe familiar row of frontage develop-ments-the peanut stand, the hot-dogkennel, the dewdrop inns, the super-fluous filling stations with their cutwhisky and applejack and their cut-price gasoline, and the smear of badlydesigned bungalows which make upsuch a large part of what on Sundayswe prayerfully call the great outdoors.

What is the use of a road's by-passinga town, only to find that the road itselfhas turned into a town-and a cheap,nasty town at that? This is the ques-tion that confronts the motorist whochooses the car instead of the railroadbecause he likes to be in the country;

it is the question that the city dwellerruefully asks himself each Sunday ashis car follows the slow procession outof the town that never, somehow, nomatter how far away he manages tosteal, escapes into the open country.This mean frontage or ribbon develop-ment is not merely an Americanproduct; they have the same eyesore inEngland. Mr. Raymond Unwin, thechief consultant on the Greater Londonplan, after a thorough investigationcondemns this development on threecounts: it is unsafe, it is inefficient, andit is destructive of the amenities. Toall of this one can only say Amen.How will an intelligent road programmeet this situation?

So far American opinion has notgiven much attention to the factors ofdanger and inefficiency in this roadsidedevelopment: the danger that comesfrom the too-numerous entrances andexits from roadtown, and the ineffi-ciency of duplicating equipment or ofproviding it at the wrong points. InAmerica we have been most aware,perhaps, of the distressing lack ofamenity, the hasty, sordid, shantytownlook which used to be characteristic ofpioneer mining towns in the midst ofa quick boom.

The first way of meeting this, bycompetitions designed to improve thelooks of hot-dog stands or filling tanks,has very little to commend it; chaoswould still be chaos, though each of thebadly related units were as fine in itselfas the Parthenon. A second wayshows a little more realistic sense of thesituation; it takes the form of attempt-ing to "get there first" by obtainingopen spaces along the wayside in theform of public parks and forests. TheState of Massachusetts got there firston the Mohawk Trail up the east sideof Hoosac Mountain in the Berkshiresby purchasing the wayside land as aState forest: on the other hand, theState allowed roadtown to get there


first by neglecting to purchase thesummit and the west side of the moun-tain-the result being a developmentthat differs only in its primitive back-ground from the purlieus behind Scol-lay Square. At the present time thesame race is starting on the new high-way over the Taconic Range. InNew Hampshire a campaign has beenstarted to secure gifts of public wood-lands along the wayside. But the onlysatisfactory way of guarding againstthe roadtown slum is that taken by, forexample, the Bronx River and West-chester County Parkways-providingno place on the road system for itsexistence.

This brings us to the second impor-tant principle of modern motorwayplanning. Not merely must the motorroad make up an independent systemwhich by-passes the existing towns; itmust be provided with enough land onboth sides of the road to insulate itfrom the surrounding area, whetherrural or urban. There are variousways of obtaining this land: some havebeen explored, others have just beenprojected. In Massachusetts the sug-gestion has been made to zone the landa certain distance back from the motorroads on exactly the same principle asis now applied to the zoning of urbanland. This would perhaps do awaywith that early speculation in suburbanand bungalow sites along main high-ways which now encourages slumdevelopment and leads to an earlydeterioration of the rural quality of theenvironment. But perhaps the mostimportant and feasible means is theacquisition by purchase of a ruralstrip on each side of the main high-way as a necessary part of its originaldevelopment.

The through road must be a park-way. This would increase the originalcost of such roads, but the increasedvalue of the neighborhood tends tooffset the original cost of the road itself,

and where parallel roads exist, it tendsto do away with slum development,since the value of the land lifts it out ofthe cheaper forms of exploitation. Ifthe further expense of this methodcounteracted the tendency to spendmoney lavishly on aimless and unim-portant highways, not demanded eitherby traffic or the beauties of the naturalscenery, this would be all to the good.The wastes of bad planning and ex-travagant planning which we nowcheerfully pay for to-day would prob-ably more than pay for the cost ofnecessary and efficient planning on thelines here suggested.

vBut the planners of effective motor-

ways cannot rest content with by-passes and an improved wayside en-vironment, much though these wouldcontribute by themselves to the speedand pleasure of the run. This is onlya part of the revolution to be effectedby the motor car. Both of thesemeasures are working backward towhat this revolution demanded in thefirst place: a roadway located quiteapart from the towns with a waysidefree from the eyesores of town growth:in short, a townless highway. Both ofthese measures are schemes for buildingthis highway backward. Better thatway, of course, than not at all.

Nevertheless, such hindsight is ex-pensive. Has any definite project yetbeen undertaken which recognizes allthe implications of the motor revolu-tion? Yes; there is at least one. It isa town in New Jersey near Paterson,which has been built by the CityHousing Corporation, a limited divi-dend company, and has been workingsuccessfully for over two years. Itsname is Radburn. Seen near at hand,Radburn is merely a fairly closelybuilt up suburban town, of well-planned but very modest houses, sur-


rounded by an unusual amount ofcommunal open space in the form of acommunal park. One can wanderover its pedestrian paths for half anhour, perhaps, before one is suddenlystruck by the fact that one has notcrossed a road and has not seen anautomobile. Or, on tne other hand,one may drive up and down the con-crete highways and lanes of Radburnfor an equal time before realizing thatone has not encountered a pedestrian-has not even had him for company onthe sidewalk, if only for the reason thaton the motor avenues no sidewalk hasbeen provided for him. What is thesecret of this unique sense of safety andfreedom of movement?

By going up in an airplane or bylooking at an aerial map of this littletown one discovers that one has been ina new kind of city-a town deliber-ately built for the motor age. In anordinary city the streets form a con-tinuous system, and wherever thestreet goes, through traffic can go, too.Not so in Radburn. In Radburnthrough traffic is confined to thethrough avenues; from these mainavenues, which define the Radburnsuperblocks, there stems a system ofmotor lanes each of which comes to adead end. The greater number of resi-dences can be reached only by motorlanes, and no car is tempted to enter amotor lane unless the driver hasdefinite business there. Such a townwas unthinkable before the coming ofthe automobile; the motor car notmerely makes it thinkable, but ex-pedient and necessary.

By dedicating the wide throughavenues to through traffic, by likewisededicating the narrow local motorlanes to local traffic only, the two dif-ferent purposes are automatically sep-arated. Result: quiet homes and fastmotor travel, not by ignoring theadvantages of motor transportationbut by boldly facing them and provid-

ing for them. Where pedestrian trafficmust cross motor traffic within thegreat superblocks that make up theresidential sections, the deadly gradecrossing is eliminated and a bridge oran underpass separates the two sys-tems: they cross but very rarely meet.Since playgrounds, a school, and othercommunity facilities are provided ineach superblock, no child need evercross a traffic artery on its way toschool or to the playground; indeed,the housewife who goes to market onfoot is equallysafe.

The insulation of highways fromresidential neighborhoods and the con-nection of these two elements by sidelanes are a necessary complement inurban planning to our modern systemof transportation. It is only by such abold and radical departure in theplanning of new cities or the extensionof old ones that the congestion broughtby motor transportation can be per-manently relieved. If every city wereside-Ianed within its limits, and if itwere itself connected with the maintrunk routes by side lanes, the conges-tion and danger that now make motortransportation so inefficient would belowered. How much they would belowered it is impossible to estimate.In smaller centers like Radburn bothitems would probably approach closeto zero. The side lane in motortransportation corresponds to theswitch in railroad systems: it is theonly orderly way of entering a mainline.

Harvard, Massach usetts, which hasalready been cited, is considering a planfor being side-laned. This will showhowthe principle concerns the externalrelations of the town as well as itsinternal planning. The proposed Har-vard plan is to relocate the main roadnow going through the village, toestablish a mile away on the new mainroad a separate group of buildings, astation for gas, food, rest rooms, and


VIother needed roadside utilities, and toconnect this wayside station by meansof a side lane with the old residentialvillage of Harvard Center. The sta-tion here, you will note, correspondsexactly to the railroad station. Theprincipal function of such a station istransport and commerce, not residence;and the motor car has dispensed withthe need, slow as we have been toacknowledge it, for the "two minutes'walk" to the station-in two minutesone can go a mile with a timorous driverand a new car!

The side lane would not in this casebe a blind alley; for it would connectwith other local roads. This would betrue of the planning of such lanes inexisting towns and villages generally.The point to remember is this: it is onlyby a deliberate separation of local andthrough roads, of traffic and residentialfunctions, that the motor road itselfcan attain its maximum efficiency inthe number of vehicles served at thehighest safe speed, and that the com-munity can attain its maximum effi-ciency as a place for living, recreation,sleep, and the care of the young. It issheer habit that makes us expect tolive on through roads: that was con-venient and efficient only when thehorse was our quickest means of trans-portation and when, lacking concretesurfaces and motor plows, it wasimpossible to clear the country roads ofsnow. The speed of the automobilehas increased our effective radius atleast tenfold. To be a mile from amain highway by automobile is to beno farther away than five hundred feeton foot. Separating through trafficfrom local traffic by side lanes notmerely increases safety but increasesthe total speed of a journey. Turningoff is a quicker way of reaching thecenter of a city, all other things beingequal, than remaining on a main high-way that attempts the hopeless task ofgoing through.

There is still, however, one problemthat remains to be taken care of: thatis the road between the stations. Toconcentrate the roadside services indefinite units, instead of letting themdribble inefficiently along its entirelength is an important step; the nextis to follow the example of the railroadand keep the road itself absolutely free.

It is physically impossible on a rail-road for the rolling stock to enter thetrack between switches. Since noother vehicles can enter, there is nooccasion for frontage development, andsuch does not occur between stationsexcept by some chance unrelated to therailroad. On the other hand, the basiccause of frontage development on theordinary motor road is that vehiclescan enter and depart at any point.This makes for the danger, the ineffi-ciency, and the impaired amenitiespointed out by Mr. Raymond Unwin.But every motorist is his own authorityon this subject: he knows what a haz-ard crossroads are, how his foot movestoward the brake as he approachesintersecting streets, how often he hasalmost sideswiped another car in theeffort to avoid a careless driver slippingout of an unsuspected gas station.

Plainly, then, the fewer the intersec-tions the safer and faster will it be forlong-distance traffic. The only way todispose once and for all of roadtown isto make it physically impossible toenter or leave the motorway except atproperly planned stations. ChairmanEdward Bassett, of the National Coun-cil on City Planning, has suggested thissimple device and given it the name ofthe freeway. On high-speed arteries,the stations on these freeways wouldundoubtedly be at considerable dis-tances apart-perhaps as much as tenmiles or more-and ordinary trafficwould usually cross the express road bythe overpass or the underpass.


The Townless Highway would, likeRadburn, recognize the motor revolu-tion and attempt to meet at everypoint the new situation it has raised.None of the principles embodied in theTownless Highway is altogether new oruntried: the main element of unique-ness in the proposal is the putting of allof them into a coherent plan. TheTownless Highway would be, like therailway, an institution in itself, a sys-tem. It would always be a throughhighway and not a local road. It mustfollow its own lines of topography. Itmust be based upon motor-age prin-ciples, not stagecoach methods or evenrailroad methods, much though we canlearn by imitation or avoidance fromboth of these. It must disregard allprevious turnpikes and local roads,unless these by chance should be suitedto its special purpose. It will avoidtowns big and little, not by dodgingaround them via by-passes, but byfollowing the less developed territory.It would have its stations adjacent tothe several towns within this territory,the two in each case being connected byside lanes. Between stations the roadwould constitute a freeway.

In connection with the planning ordesign or regulation of each of thesefeatures various problems would, ofcourse, arise. Should the stations bedesigned as part of the highway andcontrolled by some regional authority?Should they be built and owned bythe government--or merely planned?How are we to prevent slum townsfrom springing up around the stations,as they tended to, seventy-five yearsago, around the new railroad stations?These are all important and difficultquestions; but we cannot go into themhere.

Let us rather try to picture the work-ing out of the main elements in the sys-tem as they would touch the motoristhimself. He awakens after a goodsleep: the rumble and wheeze of long-

distance traffic is at least a mile fromhis residence. He glides out with hiscar on to the relatively narrow localroad, which need no longer be wideenough to take care of the heavy cross-country traffic, and he remembers,with a smile, how his local tax bill hasgone down since the assessment for thewidening of these local roads has beenremoved and the tax for their upkeephas gone down with the decreased wearand tear. He heads his car for thenearest station on Route No. 1. Whenhe reaches the station he remembersthat he is low on gas. As he pauses fora minute to have his tank filled up hewatches a group of tourists eating theirbreakfast on the veranda of the well-equipped restaurant which has sup-planted the half a dozen greasy hot-dogincubators that used to be scatteredover the roadside. The food at thisparticular station is good enough toacquire a local reputation, and oftenpeople come out from town for a shoredinner; the restaurant itself, turnedaway from the road, looks out on to apleasant vista of fields and salt mead-ows. He now approaches the road,but he must wait for the lights tochange before he can turn in from thelocal road. Now he is off; in a minutethe car is doing close to sixty on theflat stretches where the curves have allbeen smoothed out. With no dangerof anyone suddenly cutting across,with no officiousadvertiser begging himto halt and change his tires or hisunderwear, or to patronize a hotel inthe town he has just left, with unob-structed right of way and unobstructedvision, our motorist has less anxietyand more safety at sixty miles an hourthan he used to have in the old road-town confusion at twenty-five. Eventhe intersections do not mar hispleasure: they are far enough apart towarrant traffic lights, and unless thered signal is set-in this respect weare at last getting abreast of the rail-


road I-he speeds past the crossingblithely.

The motorist reaches the countryquickly; he sees the country when he isin it. Whether he is traveling forsheer pleasure or to get somewhere, hismajor purposes are served by theTownless Highway; the motor car hasbecome an honor to our mechanicalcivilization and not a reproach to it.When our motorist arrives at hisdestination he is still smiling and fresh;he has been irritated neither by threat-ened accidents nor by unexpecteddelays nor by tedious battles with thecongestion of Main Street, attemptingto rival all the mistakes of Fifth Avenueand Broadway. This is not utopia anymore than the efficiency of a limitedtrain on a fine railroad is utopia: it ismerely intelligence, effectively applied.A civilization that can achieve theTwentieth Century or the BroadwayLimited will not be content forever towallow in the confusion and chaos of

antiquated motorways and all theirugly accompaniments.

How shall we achieve the TownlessHighway? The most feasible means,perhaps, would be through Federaldirection. Let the Federal aid law of1916 be brought abreast of the planningneeds of the nineteen-thirties. A sim-ple proviso would do it. Let the Fed-eral moneys flow to the States, as now,for weaving together a national systemof motor thoroughfares-provided thatthe specific principles here outlined beapplied to such thoroughfares withineach State. This would be a genuinerecognition of the motor revolution.For the helpless and bewildered effortsof the past, good though they were inintention, it would substitute a con-scious and well-directed intelligence,capable of assimilating all the lessonswe have learned in fifteen years. Thatwould be the October revolution of theautomobile.

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