ENGINEERS AND OBSTRUCTIONISTS
It was enough.
The freeway revolts made highway construction the touchstone of modernity’s traumas, as old ways of life rooted in the land—farms, villages, neighborhoods, parks, even suburbs—were bulldozed at the behest of faceless bureaucrats and swept away in a stream of empty progress.
The freeway’s emblematic character is apparent in Douglas Adams’s celebrated 1978 BBC radio drama (later adapted for novels and films).
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the character Arthur Dent learns, first, that his English home is about to be demolished to make way for highway bypass, and then that the construction of an intergalactic bypass entails the imminent destruction of planet Earth.
Another detail of the story was all too recognizable to contemporaries: opponents were told it was too late to object, since official notice of both the English and the galactic plans had been duly posted in obscures district offices (in the latter case, at Alpha Centauri).
The freeway revolts began as quintessential NIMBY phenomena.
After all, hardly anyone wants a superhighway in their own backyard.
Neighborhood activists seized upon every tool available for them, whether lying down in front of bulldozers (as Arthur Dent did, with typical futility), storming public meetings, hounding bureaucrats with their own rules, or filing lawsuits over procedural issues.
Some tightly knit neighborhoods were able to spring into action quickly.
Elsewhere, the threat of freeway construction probably did a great deal to forge communities, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods.
Highway planners grumbled about these "crank" whose refusal to look at the big picture threatened "to strangle desperately needed progress.
Engineers saw themselves as guardians of the public good against short-sighted and parochial interests.
The head of the Swiss federal highway department warned his colleagues against going soft in the face of resistance: they could be sure that "the great majority of people indirectly affected as well as the users of he road certainly share our belief that there has been enough talk: now it is finally time to build.
Or as a 1956 American magazine article put it: "The dissident minorities who find themselves in the path of this interchange or that expressway can help if they will stop to realize that every foot of the new highways is necessary for the national well-being.
The frustration was understandable: crying "not here!" would do nothing to ease the traffic problems the engineers were charged with solving.
It was, however, precisely the opponents' failure either to grasps or to respect the technocratic logic of the highway program that made them such a threat to it.
Local objections could be brushed aside to build projects "necessary for the national well-being," but the national and international anti-freeway movements outgrew their parochial origins because many people disputed that very necessity.
Well-founded objections to particular routes or projects could be dismisses as quibbles, easily solved by proper design.
When the grievances of the freeway opponents reached the pages of American mass-circulation magazine Life in 1967, its editors did not doubt the necessity of the road: "Do we need all those big highways we're building?
Of course we do, but we also need them to be very nimbly placed in the context of our complicated cities.
After all, highways had long been sold as assets to a community, even as aesthetic improvements.
Anti-freeway activists in many lands now argues that they were nothing of sort.
They also realized that NIMBY cries would do little more than pit one neighborhood against another.
To stop freeway juggernaut, they needed to change national transportation policies by knocking the political and bureaucratic props out from under the highway programs.