Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 164

companies, construction companies, earth-moving equipment manufacturers,
real estate firms, labor unions, and assorted other business interests supported

the project enthusiastically. The system that eventually materialized over four
decades (mid-1950s to mid-1990s) included even-numbered routes that ran
east-west and odd-numbered ones that ran north-south (Figure 4.11).
The impacts of the Interstate Highway System are di

fi

cult to exaggerate.
Its very construction displaced countless numbers of people in largely minor-
ity, impoverished inner-city communities. Together with the millions of cars
that made use of it daily, it gave birth to a new landscape of industrial parks,
o ce complexes, shopping malls, motels, fast food, and gasoline stations.

Average inter-urban travel times declined by 10 percent within the

fi rst decade.

The new road networks accelerated the flight of manufacturing from the

Manufacturing Belt to the emerging Sunbelt, the suburbanization of people
and

fl

“filtering down” of industry to nonmetropolitan areas. With
the option of both enhanced access to downtowns and life in low-density
peripheries, commuting distances, but not times, for many suburbanites
increased. Highway interchanges became intensive sites of commercial devel-
opment in their own right. The evacuation of the middle class rose to new
heights, with attendant crises for the governments and neighborhoods of the
urban core. The highway system thus completed the long-running transition
of the American city into a completely auto-dependent spatial formation,

fi rms, and the “ fi

Figure 4.11 U.S. Interstate Highway system.