Curing Congestion: Competing Plans for a Loop Highway and Parking Regulations in Boston in the 1920s

Abstract

In the 1920s, traffic congestion was one of the primary issues concerning urban planners. At the time, traffic mitigation efforts boiled down to a fundamental conundrum: was the solution to traffic congestion more roads or more rules? This article chronicles the debates over traffic congestion relief in downtown Boston during that period, analyzing the two radical, competing proposals of roads, in the form of a major new surface thoroughfare called the Loop Highway, versus rules, in the form of stricter parking regulations. The article analyzes the debates over these proposals and the reasons why the city adopted neither approach. While politics had its hand in dooming the proposals, poor planning played a central role as well. The lack of a comparative analytical framework for evaluating the competing “roads” and “rules” proposals gave detractors the ammunition to oppose either approach on the grounds that the alternative approach would be superior.