Federal Urban Transportation Policy and the Highway Planning Process in Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

State highway departments wield a disproportionately great influence on the comprehensive planning process and on patterns of decentralization in metropolitan areas because highways are a fundamental influence on land development and because highway departments control the production of highway facilities from planning and construction to operation. Because of that influence, highway departments have been able to pursue the narrow objective of accommodating traffic despite congressional attempts to redirect transportation goals toward meeting the land-use needs of declining central cities and avoiding the adverse social, economic, and environmental impacts of highways. These adverse effects have included the isolation of central city transit-dependent minorities from suburban employment and the creation of an excessive dependence on gasoline. The inertia of this limited purpose highway program has been sustained by massive federal funding, a bureaucratically embedded and technologically intimidating planning methodology, and a system of federal plan and impact reviews whose major effect has been to expedite the approval and construction of highway projects. These deficient impact analyses and token reviews have deprived the public and elected officials of vital information about foreseeable adverse impacts and have unreasonably restricted their ability to judge highway proposals or make important decisions affecting decentralization.