Building of the Interstate Highway System Wasn’t Such a National Great Achievement

Jim Flanigan’s column, “Making Postwar America a Land Fit for Heroes” (Jan. 20), makes a good case for planning for the postwar economy. I agree with his main point, but I regret his choice of the Interstate Highway System as a historical model for public infrastructure investment.

Nowadays we often hear the program credited as a great achievement.

This is too charitable. While Europe and Japan were maintaining their railroads and rebuilding their cities, the United States was using the highway program as the engine to destroy its railroads and explode its cities to better accommodate the automobile. In that same period, Japan and Europe, without highway building programs, increased their industrial productivity even more than did the United States.

While true that the highway program spawned an avalanche of investment, it simultaneously caused disinvestment in our central cities and helped create much of the urban malaise that exists today. We are going to have a dickens of a time trying to extricate ourselves from the mess created by our auto dependence.

While we are thinking about Flanigan’s so-called New Domestic Order, we should give some thought to reducing our oil dependence, which has much to do with the events that led to our latest war. Making sure that our next infrastructure developments are better conceived than the interstate highway program should be a major objective.

JOEL WOODHULL

Los Angeles