30 TET AU DU BONE BU la Ein 
Mowbray covers more territory and details devastation over the whole 
country. 
Mrs. Leavitt, who lives in Washington D. C., writes mainly of the East, 
emphasizing havoc wrought in large Atlantic state cities by highway 
construction. Only casually does she refer to ‘‘Chicago’s problems,” neglect- 
ing the great story she could have made of one of the top engineering 
blunders of the century, the routing of the Eisenhower Expressway virtually 
through Chicago’s Loop at street level. 
Above all she stresses the contribution to inner-city problems, which 
include racial disturbances, of highways built through cities where most 
citizens oppose them. An example is Washington, where a vote for rapid 
transit as an alternative to freeways carried, 19 to 1; yet to the highway 
bill passed in 1968, the Congress added a condition requiring the capital 
city to accept the freeways. Resulting road construction there has been de- 
scribed as “putting freeways for white commuters through black’s 
bedrooms.” 
Apropos of all major cities, it is asserted that a helicopter trip over 
any one quickly demonstrates that our auto traffic problem is not the 
result of a shortage of streets but of already having too many. Otherwise 
said, any new freeway leading into an inner-city generates more auto 
traffic than can be accommodated there, thus multiplying rather than divid- 
ing the congestion. The author stresses the fact most of us have probably 
forgotten: when the Interstate Highway System was proposed in the early 
1950s, it was meant for long distance travel only and would therefore by- 
pass all cities. Now a large share of the mileage and the major share of the 
costs are for access freeways and for actual routes into cities where they 
become weapons for strangling those cities. 
Obviously, the author repeats, the solution to urban congestion in all 
our larger cities is the construction of well planned and well engineered 
systems of rapid transit. At present she sees small hope of much being done 
along this line, since the highway trust fund, swollen each year by taxes 
on gasoline, tires and other auto accessories, by existing law can be used 
for nothing but highway construction. Proposal after proposal to use some 
of these billions of dollars for mass transit, and even for relocation of homes 
and businesses destroyed in the building process, and for highway beauti- 
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