JB Jackson

Fleeting beauty, then, and occasional usefulness; how much more can be said of many other of our products? When high-minded groups vie with each other in bitter condemnation of the highway developments, devising legal and moral means of destroying them, those two glimpses come to mind. Would it not be better—fairer, that is to say, and more intelligent—to see if the potentialities of these road- side slums cannot somehow be realized for the greater profit and pleasure of all.
A liking for this feature of the human landscape of America should not blind anyone to its frequent depravity and confusion and dirt. Its potentialities for trouble—aesthetic, social, economic—are as great as its potentialities for good, and indeed it is this ambidexterity which gives the highway and its margins so much significance and fascination. But how are we to tame this force unless we understand it and even develop a kind of love for it? We have not really tried to understand it as yet. For one thing we know little or nothing about how the roadside development, the strip, came into being, nor about bow it grows. We know (and seem to care) far too little about the variety of businesses which comprise it. Why is it that certain enterprises proliferate in certain areas and not in others, why are some of them clustered together, and others are far apart ? Which of them are dependent on the nearby town and city, which of them depend on transients ? The modern highway is of course the origin and sustainer of them all, but what a complex thing the modern highway has become; how varied its functions and how varied the public which makes use of it! To the factory or warehouse on its margin it is essentially the equivalent of the railroad; to the garage or service station it means direct accessibility to the passing public. the local businessman thinks of it as a way to reach and exploit the outlying suburban and rural areas, the farmer thinks of it as a way to reach town; the tourist thinks of it as an amenity, and the transcontinental bus or trucking company thinks of it as the shortest distance between two widely separated points. Each of these interests not only has its own idea of how the highway is to be designed and traced; it brings its own special highway service establishments into being. Which of the lot are we to eliminate ? (p. 57-59)