when engineers began laying out highways authorized under the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act they faced land regulations that were inadequate for the task...planning had always been tied to municipalities and no metropolitan planning agency existed anywhere in the US at that time...in effect, there were no bodies empowered to allocate cross-jurisdictional land for highway use...municipalities were both reluctant and ill-prepared to cooperate...the '56 highway act was amended in 1965 requiring cities with more than 50,000 people to create transportation planning agencies, but for the first decade, the interstate program faced multiple jurisdictions for intracity construction...
of course, antipathy for the urban poor meant that they would bear the brunt of the costs and suffering associated with such highway construction...levelling 'blighted areas' became a transportation principle considered a 'public' contribution rather than an act of social irresponsibility...the interstate highway program coincided with cutbacks in public housing and, after 1965, power was handed over to administrative bodies of mixed government and business interests...the class and racial injustice marks a society in which government is supposed to aid private property rather than allocate land for the common good...for some reason, I doubt that the magazine was concerned with this situation...Michael Hoover