Street car running through the Fan district of Richmond, circa 1928.
A couple of blog posts over on Smart Growth for Conservatives shed light on some of the controversies raging within the comments section of Bacon’s Rebellion…
Emily Washington asks in “Urbanism without Government,” if not for the government, who would build the roads? She points to the example of Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia, built around 1700 when Pennsvylania had a barely functioning government that levied no taxes. Elfreth’s Alley was built by adjoining landowners who contributed land for mutual advantage.
(Similarly, more than two-and-a-half centuries later, landowners contributed the right of way for the Dulles Greenway. I would be fascinated to know what role landowners played in constructing privately financed turnpikes in the early 19th century.)
Riffing off Washington’s post, Jim Dalrymple delved into the history of Salt Lake City’s roads, laid out by the Mormon potentate Brigham Young. In “Bad Urbanism with Big Government,” he explains how theocratic big government laid out broad streets and huge blocks that may have served an agricultural society well but are mal-adapted to a post-autocentric society.
This system worked very well in many regards — the Mormons thrived quite well in a harsh desert environment — but, again, it left a legacy of costly and hostile urban design in the 20th and 21st centuries. … Utah seems to support Washington’s thesis: she argues that “laissez-faire urban development” produced the great, economically agile (and privately-created) spaces in the East. Utah shows that when you lose the laissez-faire part of the equation, you can also potentially lose those great places.
I would add that there are other examples of the private sector building roads for public use. The best known, perhaps, were the real estate developers who built street car lines to connect inhabitants of their new neighborhoods with city centers.
Because the United States, like most other countries, followed the path in the early 20th century of governments taking over the financing and building roads, it is difficult for us to conceive of any other way of doing things. These examples show that other ways are at least theoretically possible. Whether they could have effectively served the needs of rapidly industrializing cities with fast-growing cities is worth discussing.
— JAB
