Bested by a Bass: The Westway War and the Highway Program

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 237-241

237

Bested by a Bass:

The Westway War and

the Highway Program

By Oliver Houck

Fighting Westway : Environmental Law, Citize n Activism, and the

Regulatory War That Transfor med New York City, by William W.

Buzbee. Cornell Universit y Press. 312 pages.

From the January/ February 2015 issue of The Environmental Foru m.

President Eisenhower, the story goes,

was coming in from Camp David when

he was stopped by large construction

machinery in the road. Asking his driver about

it, he learned that the federal highway admin-

istration was funneling a new interstate into

Washington, D.C. Eisenhower, a scal conser-

vative, is said to have been appalled. It was a

little late for t hat, however. e federal high-

way program was underway and there would

be no stopping it, anywhere, for decades. en

came Westway.

e National Defense Highway System, as

it originally was called, wa s sold to the presi-

dent by his old friend Charles Wilson, CEO of

General Motors and secretary of defense dur-

ing the recently ended war. GM had two challenges selling cars in those years,

one being a highly successful rail and trolley system in urban areas (the Los

Angeles network alone served 200 million riders a year over nearly 400 miles

of track). e second was inadequate roadways through the countr yside.

Wilson persuaded the federal government to fund rural highways as

national defense measures, modeled on the German autobahns, and in secret

agreements with other auto-related industries solved his trolley problem by

buying up urba n systems across the country, tearing out the rails, and con-