The landscape of rural America has been profoundly influenced by social, cultural, and economic changes. The rural roadscape is a visible text of these changes, and the transportation palimpsest a cultural text of the American ideal of mobility. This article briefly examines the growth of the presence of the automobile and the automobile's role in changing the face of rural America, with an emphasis on the aesthetics of the roadscape. In the late twentieth century, a concern for the visual environment has become an important part of environmental assessment, and selected aspects of roadside visual pollution, particularly signs, are examined, especially as they relate to federal and state legislation concerning billboards. Lastly, public and private sector efforts to preserve and enhance cultural and historical rural landscapes, through such measures as the designation of scenic roads, is presented as an example of more holistic transportation planning.
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References
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1. A national survey conducted for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association noted that “63 percent of those surveyed thought the American dream `was the freedom to live where you want to.' ”Leo V. Mayer, “Agricultural Change and Rural America,”The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 529:84, n. 4 (Sept. 1993).
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2. William Least Heat Moon, Blue High-ways: A Journey into America (New York: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 5.
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3. John B. Rae, The American Automobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
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4. According to a 1919 U.S. Department of Agriculture survey of over 10,000 rural women, “the automobile contributes materially to community life by reducing the distance factor.” Cited in Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 142.
5.
5. Karl Raitz, “The US 40 Roadside,” in The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 291.
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6. Council on Environmental Quality, 1970, as noted in Mollie Ridout, “Scenic-Beauty Issues in Public Policy Making,” in Environmental Aesthetics, ed. Jack L. Nasr (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 434.
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7. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 65-70.
8.
8. John Jackle, “Landscapes Redesigned for the Automobile,” in The Making of the American Landscape, ed. Michael P. Conzen (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 301.
9.
9. Peirce Lewis, “The Landscapes of Mobility,” in National Road, ed. Raitz, p. 6.
10.
10. Michael Renner, Rethinking the Role of the Automobile, Worldwatch Paper 84 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 1988), p. 46.
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11. Grady Clay, Real Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 129.
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12. As noted by Grady Clay, “Many family incomes depend on back and front yards stacked with trading goods.”Grady Clay, Close-Up: How to Read the American City (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 134.
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Conversely, another observer argues, “The strip is a place where every American can feel at home...because it is so familiar, so standardized, so universal—and so placeless!”John Fraser Hart, “The Bypass Strip as an Ideal Landscape,”Geographical Review, 72:219 (Apr. 1982).
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reprinted in Wilbur Zelinsky, Exploring the Beloved Country (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), p. 277.
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For a popular-culture view, see Karal Ann Marling, The Colossus of Roads: Myth and Symbol Along the American Highway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
16.
16. William Whyte, The Last Landscape (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 300.
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17. Charles E. Little, Greenways for America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 126.
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18. Community activists have pursued efforts to reduce the amount of liquor advertising in neighborhoods of poor and minority residents, as reported in Harry Goldstein, “Billboard Liberation,”Utne Reader, no. 48, p. 46 (Nov.-Dec. 1991).
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19. Chief Justice Warren Burger, in Metromedia, Inc. v. City of San Diego, 453 U.S. 490 (1981).
20.
20. General Outdoor Advertising v. Department of Public Works, 193 N.E. 799, 815-16 (1935).
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21. 453 U.S. 490 (1981). For a fuller discussion of the complexities of this case, see Kenneth T. Pearlman, “Aesthetic Regulation and the Courts,” in Environmental Aesthetics, ed. Nasr, pp. 476-492.
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22. U.S. General Accounting Office, The Outdoor Advertising Control Program Needs to Be Reassessed: Report to the Chairman, Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, [1985]), p. 17.
23.
Ruth Norris , “Beauty and the Billboard,”Audubon, 87:94 (July 1985).
24.
ibid., Control of Outdoor Advertising: Orientation (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994).
25.
25. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 192.
26.
The shaping of the viewer's experience is discussed in Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted,” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), pp. 91-113.
27.
27. Heritage Task Force for the Hudson River Valley, Scenic District Management Plan for the Mid-Hudson Historic Shorelands Scenic Area, prepared by Robert M. Toole, Harvey K. Flad, and Robbe Stimson (Albany, NY: Department of Environmental Conservation, 1983).
28.
28. According to a survey by the National Scenic Byways Clearinghouse, as of 1996, 37 of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico had programs in place.
29.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Trust for Public Land have jointly sponsored guidelines in David H. Copps, Views from the Road: A Community Guide for Assessing Rural Historic Landscapes (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995).
30.
30. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 269.
31.
31. Peter Blake, God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
32.
32. Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways.
33.
33. Thomas L. Daniels and Mark B. Lapping, “The Two Rural Americas Need More, Not Less Planning,”APA Journal, p. 285 (Summer 1996).
