Churchill’s opposition to the privilege enjoyed by cars and roads was a minority views in the 1920s.
Switzerland also established a dedicated road fund before the U.S., in 1949,
and France created a more modest version in 1951, while West Germany followed suit in 1960, although after 1966 its fuel-tax revenues were increasingly shared with mass-transit projects
(a step the U.S. also took, to a much smaller degree, in 1974).
In other lands, the absence of guaranteed funding has been no impediment to highway construction: many national networks on the interstate model soon followed, some financed by tolls.
The growth in car use and the logic of traffic planners ensured that highway construction would be on the agenda around the world.
But a substantial difference remained: by any measure –in proportion to population, number of vehicles, or national wealth—the U.S. has built far more freeway miles than other lands; and Americas also drive much more.
Even more than the rest of the world, Australia followed American models in highway building, as in much else.
Sydney drew up an ambitions freeway plan already in the 1940s, but had completed only one major road by the 1960s, when the other cities followed suit.
Soon, however fierce opposition killed or stalled a great many of the projects.
Perhaps the success of Australian freeway opponents was partly due to the fact that Australia never managed to establish a dedicated road fund.
Freeway fights in the major Australian cities followed a script quite similar to the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the added complaint that highway planners ware slavishly following American traffic models.
Several familiar themes—the neglect of mass transit and of the natural environment, the reliance on the car and on American experts—found voice in a single protest poem from late-‘60s Adelaide, compose in the ordinary bloke argot of the Australian folk poet C.J. Dennis: