Analyze The Impact Of Suburbanization In The United States

In Modern America, our cities display a strong physical imprint of automobiles and other motorized vehicles. A parking study conducted in 1960’s California found that over half, around 59% of the ground area in Los Angeles’ central business district was devoted to streets and parking. Our cities are dotted with signals and traffic signs, automobile-oriented businesses, car dealerships, service stations, and more. Equally significant, space allocated for other forms of transportation, like trains, and streetcars, shrank or completely disappeared. For example, sidewalks, which were normally considered necessary to separate pedestrians from various transportation modes, were constructed less often along many urban streets and roads after the invention
While the process of suburbanization began before cars were invented and available to the mass market, and the expansion outwards of urban populations had numerous causes, mass urban sprawl is definitively a phenomenon of the affordable automobile era. Urban sprawl in post-war America did not follow a consistent or clear pattern of outward development, and lead to the scattering of people, businesses, and industries over a broad landscape, with homes, roadside commercial strips, substantial patches of vacant land spaced among homes, and overall a low-density usage of land. Cars became both a force of outwards diffusion, driving suburbanization, and a force of cohesion, bringing together people from greater distances than ever before. The invention of the car lead to urban sprawl at an unprecedented, unseen ever before in history. This process, however, was well underway before anyone had recognized or labeled it. In 1922, approximately 135,000 homes, across 60 different cities had become dependent on automobile transportation. By 1940, that number increased almost 100 times, with 13 million homes leaving people inaccessible to public transportation.In 1920, the average density of urbanized areas was 6,160 people per square mile, and in 1990 that figure was decreased by 40%, only 2,589 people per square mile. While these exact numbers vary
In 1956, the Interstate Highway Act established the foundation for the creation of a network of highways that would extend between either coastline of the United States, placing a greater dependence on automotive travel than ever before. The Highway Trust Fund was established to finance the network of highways, drawing revenues from collected sales taxes from fuels, tires, and the use of large trucks that provided extensive financial coverage of the massive infrastructural undertaking unregulated by the federal government’s budgeting. The highways allowed the middle-class suburban populations of large cities like New York and Chicago to quickly and easily commute to their urban job and back to their suburban home. These highways sometimes cleaved through cities, clearing neighborhoods and developments in their paths. In the 1950’s, Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were thriving, predominantly-black neighborhoods, with hundreds of thousand of residents, businesses and other establishments throughout. However, highways were used as a means to clear these populations from cities, displacing them and scattering them from their homes and hard earned businesses. These highways brough noise, pollution, and traffic to the lower-class urban populations while providing middle and upper-class citizens an easy way in and out of the