| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. By Owen D. Gutfreund. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xviii, 297 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514141-5.)
In the century following the introduction of the automobile, Americans spent enormous sums of money expanding and overhauling the nation's transportation network to accommodate the motorcar.... As the states and the federal government invested in streets, roads, highways, and bridges, the citizenry simultaneously flocked to the open land on the urban periphery. These two related trends [laid] the groundwork for the twenty-first century legacy of ballooning municipal debt burdens, deteriorating center cities, incessant demands for capital improvements, and unstable municipal tax bases. (p. 1) To support this argument, Owen D. Gutfreund presents three case studies of varied responses to automobility by decision makers in Denver, Colorado, Middlebury, Vermont, and Smyrna, Tennessee.	1
In an overview chapter, Gutfreund stressed four points. From the beginning, politicians pushed automobility at the expense of public transportation. Many seemingly unrelated decisions affecting urban development had similar effects. Highway funding had a profoundly rural bias. Finally, politicians avoided challenging motorists to pay the actual costs of accommodating their perceived needs.	. . .

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