unsuitable offspring; the City Beautiful movement that sought to build grand boulevards, plazas, and civic centers, and thereby improve the moral character of those surrounded by such man-made beauty; the creation of the nation’s first national park and forest lands as part of a larger effort to conserve America’s natural resources; and numerous other expressions of what was considered progressive thought.46 However, it is important to note that the progressive movement was hardly a uniform phenomenon. Though heavily promoted by a rising urban middle class eager to replace small-town values with big-city ideals, the old ways continued to exist side by side with the new throughout the progressive era, especially in Connecticut where rural majorities continued to exert antiprogressive influence in the state legislature whenever they could.47
In addition to the megagovernment bureaucracy of the state’s highway program, there were two additional aspects of progressive thinking that proved significant with regard to transportation. The first was the concept of scientific management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. The principles of scientific management were originally designed to promote efficiency in the workplace, but as Taylor was quick to point out, the technique could be applied to the management of any social activity, from business to home to government. At the heart of scientific management was the measurement, quantification, and tabulation of work processes in a well-thought-out scientific manner, along with an analysis of the data collected by a team of technical experts. Through his association with the progressive movement, Taylor’s ideas for the use of technological expertise wherever possible as a means to a better, more progressive society were spread nationwide, and Taylor himself became as popular as Henry Ford.48
The application of scientific management to highway transportation in Connecticut was a natural fit. As early as 1926, the Connecticut Highway Department (in partnership with the federal Office of Road Inquiry, now known as the Bureau of Public Roads) completed its first comprehensive survey of the state’s existing highway system. Wherever possible state engineers applied the techniques of scientific management to the investigation. For instance, the survey included such items as a detailed organizational chart of the Highway Department and its several management bureaus; a year-by-year tally of the state’s increasing motor vehicle registrations in comparison to its total population; an inventory and classification of state highway mileage by type and existing condition; a tabulation of highway revenues and expenditures by town; traffic counts made by field workers at fifty-seven survey stations around the state; and an “O&D” questionnaire given to the traveling public to ascertain the origin and destination of their most frequent trips and the routes they took to get there.49
A third way in which progressive thought impacted the development of the Connecticut highway system was in the area of planning. A logical extension of the principles of scientific management, when applied to highway transportation, was to analyze the years of data collected on various subjects (population, motor vehicle ownership, traffic volumes) so as to recognize trends and to project these trends into future needs. Then, by imposing the projected needs onto the existing highway system, engineers could estimate what if any improvements might be required and how much they might cost. As the survey itself stated, “The establishment of scientific plans of highway development … requires a careful analysis of highway traffic, the trend of its development, and its distribution over the highway system.” In the past, the study noted, highway engineers were handicapped by “the lack of precise knowledge of the character and amount of the traffic using the various roads.” No longer. The very purpose of the survey was “to provide a basis for the scientific planning of highway improvements in Connecticut.”50
The Connecticut Road Survey of 1926 was the first progressive view of Connecticut’s future highway needs. Connecticut Highway Department
The scientific management of transportation improvements represented a major shift in the way highway engineers approached their job. No longer would engineers be lagging behind in their work, trying to solve yesterday’s problem only after congestion had become apparent. Using the tools of scientific management, they were now able to look ahead ten, twenty, or more years into the future, identify potential problem areas, and estimate the cost of the highway improvements needed to provide an acceptable level of service. The culmination of this application of scientific management to highway improvement was a turn away from solving today’s problems to providing for tomorrow’s needs, and from now on a kind of futurism would pervade the work of highway engineers—and not always in a sensible way. As we shall see, scientific management was hardly a foolproof methodology, especially when applied to a single-minded highways-only transportation policy.
The Impact of Automobility
The advent of automobility allowed families to move out of crowded urban centers into surrounding rural towns, created a profession of city and town planners looking for progressive ways to shape this emerging urban-suburban environment, and challenged the sustainability of the state’s existing railroad, steamboat, and trolley services.
TO THE SUBURBS: RESETTLING THE LAND
With the advent of automobility and the proliferation of good roads, residents who were overcrowded into urban centers around the state began to move outward into the open spaces that existed on the fringes of most cities, resettling the Connecticut landscape yet again.
It is important to recognize that the move to the suburbs typically associated with the postwar boom of the 1960s did not begin in the 1960s. It did not even begin with the construction of controlled-access highways into city centers in the 1940s. In fact, it began with the building of interurban trolley lines in the late nineteenth century, which provided the means for those who could afford it to leave Connecticut’s crowded cities for nearby rural areas. At the same time that the proliferation of tall buildings, elevators, the telephone, and the department store concentrated economic activity in an urban core, the trolley doubled, even tripled, the effective size of many urban areas by providing radial access to the core from ever greater distances, allowing the dense population of the walking city to spread out along the direction of each streetcar line. (Steam railroads provided a similar opportunity even earlier, but to a lesser degree; their station stops were farther apart.) Indeed, streetcar companies encouraged this first wave of suburbanization by constructing lines into open country and charging a fixed five-cent fare, which relied on volume, as opposed to a zone system, where fares increased with the distance traveled.51
Other factors, too, made the move out of the city to the suburbs feasible in the early auto age, including the development of lighter, timber-frame housing that replaced heavier post-and-beam construction. This modern, balloon-frame house was quicker and easier to build, which translated into lower home prices. In addition, towns and cities themselves stimulated the move to the suburbs by their willingness to extend urban services—paved streets, water and sewer lines, police and fire protection—into outlying areas at public expense, thereby subsidizing the increase in land values along streetcar lines and encouraging the subdivision of rural lands. It should be noted, however, that the movement of affluent and working-class citizens to the periphery of the city was not historically inevitable. It was the product of market forces, government policies, and new technologies, in particular a combination of affordable housing and cheap, convenient transportation. Suburbanization was a uniquely American phenomenon unlike, for example, the European experience.52
Suburbanization in Connecticut began in earnest in the 1920s, the decade that automobility first became widespread. And the automobile, together with the extensive road network provided by megagovernment highway agencies, changed the pattern of resettlement significantly from what it had been in the streetcar era. The automobile made it possible for those exiting the city to go almost anywhere they wished with street access. No longer dependent on a linear trolley line for travel to the city, the move to the suburbs now became omnidirectional, the only restraint being the time it
