In the freeway era, a later generation of skeptics had to raise the issue anew.
In 1949, the planner Theodore J. Kent predicted that a proposed freeway in the San Francisco Bay area would be "hopelessly overcrowded and choked by the time it is completed.
The next year, another American planner, Walter H. Blucher, roundly denounced traffic engineers for their failure to take account of induced traffic--to little avail.
Only in the 1960s, as highway critics began to band together, did the theory of induced traffic became well known.
The fact the Lewis Mumford had been preaching about it for years probably prompted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1960, to detect an increasing awareness that " to do nothing more than build bigger highways only produced bigger traffic jams".
He could point to many cases in which new roads seemed to be full almost from the day of their opening.
The promised reductions in traffic congestion and commuting times either failed to materialize, or were short lived.
Highway construction and traffic seemed to be advance in a vicious circle.
A famous but typical example is the Long Island Expressway, the major highway built to speed commuters from that growing suburban region into New York City.
Soon after its first segment opened in 1958, drivers stuck in its chronic traffic jams began to call it the "world's longest parking lot.