Freeway Controversies and Their Implications for Transportation Planning: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, A Case Study in a Small Metropolitan Area by Robert M. Donnelly, July 1975

Highway controversies and anti-highway coalitions have emerged in the 1960's and 1970's to inhibit the powerful institutional forces of highway construction in America. The Federal Aid to Highway Act of 1956 established the $27 billion highway trust fund to finance some 40,000 miles of construction as part of the national system of interstate and defense highways. 0nly twenty-four members of the House of Representatives voted against the measure. Auto manufacturers, truckers, oil producers, steel manufacturers, and cement makers had effectively committed the federal government to spend $5 billion annually on the construction of new roads. Planning and construction of these facilities was to be carried out by the states and their subdivisions under rigid guidelines established by the Bureau of Public Roads