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.City Beautiful planners,designed the spatial relationships as well as the financial protocols and thelogistics of collaboration between different planning jurisdictions, projectingparkway networks as a new framework for transportation between city andcountry.The Bronx River Parkway, outside the New York City limits, for in-stance, was designed to organize utilities and transportation while also ad-dressing issues of conservation and pollution.The Bronx River was cleanedand dredged to build the parkway, and the wide right-of-way purchased forthe parkway would be an obstacle to further pollution.New York City andWestchester County shared the costs and Westchester County provided a newsewer line along the length of the parkway.From 1910 to 1932 land valuesincreased along the parkway by almost 1,200 percent.12 Regional-scale, inter-city parkways also served as the federal government s rehearsals for the long-distance interstate highways.The first federal parkway, legislated in 1928, wasthe Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, and it was followed in 1930 by theGeorge Washington Memorial Parkway and the Colonial National Parkwaythat traveled from Jamestown through Williamstown to Yorktown.Mean-while state and federal partnerships or metropolitan agencies like thoseheaded by Robert Moses in New York City continued to develop parkwaysturnpikes and other intercity highway networks that would also serve asmodels for the Interstate.13Toll Roads and Free Roads and Interregional HighwaysTwo federal reports that would provide the blueprints for interstate highwaydesign were ostensibly initiated in the context of plans for a transcontinentalnetwork.In 1938, Congress charged the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) to studythe feasibility of three east-west and three north-south transcontinental su-perhighways to be operated as toll roads.The BPR s report, Toll Roads andFree Roads, however, was a trial balloon for the bureau s new science of traf-fic engineering.Another pivotal federal report entitled Interregional High-ways (1944), inherited conclusions and data generated by Toll Roads and FreeRoads.Taken together, the two reports recorded the prevailing intelligenceassociated with traffic engineering as well as some of the last alternative|Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks 92proposals to the midcentury interstate highway.The dry bureaucratic tone ofthe reports was essential to their persuasive power, and even when leadingto illogical conclusions the sober, stepwise presentation of engineering ex-pertise was rarely questioned.Using statistical models, the active organiza-tion of automobile movement would gradually begin to reflect the shape ofa population of vehicle owners.The BPR s initial charge to determine the feasibility of long-distancehighways as toll roads proved to be pivotal in the determination of the inter-state highway as an intercity rather than transcontinental system.As pro-posed, the 14,300 mile system would bypass most cities.Through datacollections, however, the bureau determined that neither transcontinentalor semicontinental travel was insufficient to warrant construction of thesehighways as toll roads.Most trips were relatively short and they originatedin cities.There was also a greater likelihood that long-distance travel wouldoriginate in cities.If the highways were to be operated as toll roads, only theareas surrounding the largest cities would provide the necessary traffic tomake the proposal feasible.14 Consequently, the bureau recommended a net-work of free highways arranged as an intercity matrix.The BPR had alreadyaligned itself with the policies of the War Department and the state highwaydepartments in support of a comprehensive nationwide system of interre-gional highways.The recommended plan proposed, not six transcontinentals(14,300 miles), but a 26,700 mile system with the federal government sup-porting more than half the costs.Highway taxes on gasoline would be onesource of funding.This funding scheme was in effect until the legislation ofthe interstate highway in 1956, when the government virtually funded thehighway building project in its entirety.15 The various mappings of the net-work showed the highways entering the center of large cities, and while therewas a some indication that specialized infrastructure would be necessary forurban areas, apart from the mention of terminal and beltlines, there was nodiscussion of what would constitute adequate facilities for handling in-creased traffic.In fact, there was some evidence that the BPR believed thesehighways would address urban congestion.16Another significant highway report, Interregional Highways (1944) wasrequested by FDR to investigate the possibilities of a national interregionalhighway system.Not surprisingly, after studying data from BPR and DefenseDepartment deliberations, the report reached the same conclusion that a na-tionwide system relying on taxation for its funding must serve the 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