The top image shows the result of two inches of snow on the interstate highway going through the center of Atlanta in January of 2014. The snow and resulting ice were paralyzing to the entire interstate system of the metro, at first leaving motorists stranded overnight then putting the entire local economy in a shut down mode, with roads, stores and offices empty. Read a great story about it here. The bottom image shows what happened this week, in February of 2015. What was (as far as we know at this point) a student art project built from a soda can that was taped to an interstate bridge, caused a bomb scare. The interstate was shut down completely for hours, once again stranding motorists. Once by snow and once by art — who knows what it will be next time. Interstate highways: not what was intended The images of the empty lanes are haunting and strangely beautiful, but they are reminders of how strong our reliance is on these highways for personal mobility. Urban issues writer Kaid Benfield wrote a piece a couple of years ago about the origins of the US interstate highway system and the fact that President Eisenhower — who pushed for the system after having seen in WWII the need for routes that push troops and equipment quickly from one location to another — never intended for these to become roads for regular commuter traffic in teh middle of cities. A quote:A memorandum of a 1960 meeting in the Oval Office, available in the archives of Eisenhower’s presidency, makes this crystal-clear:“[The President] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way … and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored.”Benfield goes on to point out that, though the interstates were originally well intended, putting them through cities as a means of conveying daily traffic for all car drivers was a bad idea — these things just aren’t efficient as transport in densely populated areas, as we in Metro Atlanta have found out the hard way.The origins of interstate planning in AtlantaIn the 1946 Lochner plan and the 1952 Up Ahead plan — both containing designs for Atlanta’s transportation future that heavily informed the form of roadways for decades afterward — the interstate highway system was envisioned as a means of transportation and also as an urban growth boundary (also worth noting, the highways were thought of as  counterparts to an expanded public transportation system in that Lochner plan).From the 1998 report “Consequences of the Interstate Highway System for Transit”:Originally, it was thought that the beltway would define the limit of urbanization, but this has not been borne out. by the time the beltway was completed in the late 1960s, suburban development had spread well beyond it in several directions, eliminating the possibility of using it for an urban development boundary.That’s right: Atlanta’s I-285 perimeter highway may have served as a growth boundary that could have helped to shape a more compact urbanized area instead of the “poster child for sprawl.”The reasons that the plan didn’t pan out as intended were, I’m sure, many; included are most probably white flight, a hunger for the quick return of sprawl development in suburban counties, and the federal subsidies for home ownership that benefited suburban middle-class families most heavily. It’s a series of events that has produced a built environment that has come to be accepted as normal by the generations that have grown up within it. But this isn’t particularly normal for human habitats and it isn’t written in stone in Atlanta. We can move beyond dependency on interstates and the sprawling, car-centric places that they help to support.For a region that is constantly growing in population and that is regularly hindered by the current interstate-focused transportation system, the need is clear for an increase in walkable nodes of density, connected by a more balanced range of transportation options that includes cars, bikes, pedestrian infrastructure and mass transit.