Title of dissertation: ABSTRACT WASHINGTON'S MAIN STREET: CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT ON THE CAPITAL BELTWAY, 1952-2001 Jeremy Louis Korr, Doctor of Philosophy, 2002 Dissertation directed by: Professor John L. Caughey Department of American Studies This dissertation combines approaches from cultural landscape analysis, ethnography, and planning history to study the Capital Beltway in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. as both a physical artifact and a social institution. Drawing on interviews, survey data, fieldwork, and documentary research, I explore the ways in which the Beltway, its creators and users, and its surrounding natural landscape have affected each other over fifty years. Three research methods underlie this study. First, I introduce an analytical framework for odology, geographer J.B. Jackson's term for the study of roads, focusing on the beliefs and values roads reveal and create, dynamics of power and access, contributions to normativity, issues of conflict and consensus, and effects on individuals' lives and identities. Second, I develop and apply a detailed fieldwork model for cultural landscape analysis, building on previous efforts in cultural geography and material culture studies. Third, I draw on and analyze the dynamics and results of a Web survey. The dissertation provides the first detailed discussion of the Capital Beltway's development and construction in Maryland and Virginia, drawing in part on interviews with ten of its original engineers and beginning with an overview of the origins of beltway planning in the United States. It examines the Beltway's effects on individual lives, communities, and the broader metropolitan Washington region, concentrating on conflicts and perceived inequities created by the Beltway's construction, and on both states' efforts to pursue their own agendas and also to redress residents' concerns over the fifty years covered. The study addresses both physical and cognitive manifestations of the Beltway, exploring how the road exists in the minds of the people who use it and how its material and conceptual iterations combine to play an integral role in their lives. It also analyzes how the Beltway serves concurrently as a template through which individuals and groups promote their values and beliefs, as a venue of conflict and community, as a vehicle for the creation of a distinct regional identity, as a site of negotiation between public and private space, and as a site for mediation and compromise in inter- jurisdictional cooperation. WASHINGTON'S MAIN STREET: CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT ON THE CAPITAL BELTWAY, 1952-2001 by Jeremy Louis Korr Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2002 Advisory Committee: Professor John L. Caughey, Chair Professor Marie Howland Associate Professor Virginia W. Beauchamp (Emeritus) Associate Professor Mary Corbin Sies Lecturer James R. Cohen Copyright by Jeremy Louis Korr 2002 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has been a long time in coming. It began when an electrical engineering graduate student (now professor), Mark Montroll, gave his two-year-old nephew a Rand McNally road atlas. Almost three decades later, I still have the dog- eared atlas, marked on every page by crayon tracing the best routes from one place to another as I saw it through my eyes at the time. The lure of studying roads gripped me at the time and never let go. Several community groups gave me the opportunity to present portions of my research in progress and to receive feedback from members of the metropolitan Washington community. I am grateful to Karen Lottes and the Montgomery County Historical Society, Susie Eig and the Chevy Chase Historical Society, Al Carr and the Kensington Historical Society, Dan Tobocman and Machar: The Washington Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, and the Village of Chevy Chase Section #5. Washington-area media outlets were generous in helping me publicize my research efforts during my Web survey phase. I appreciate the contributions of the Washington Post (Bob Levey), Baltimore Sun (JoAnna Daemmrich), Montgomery Gazette (Jessica Leshnoff), Greenbelt News Review, Bowie Blade-News, WRC-TV (NBC 4; Joe Krebs), Maryland Public Television, and WMAL-AM. For their assistance in my documentary research, I thank Anne Turkos of the University of Maryland, College Park archives and Maryland Room, Carol Piper of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission archives, Richard Weingroff of the Federal Highway Administration, Deborah Young of the National Capital 11 Planning Commission, Bill Barnard of the Maryland State Highway Administration Library, Bob Vay of the George Mason University Special Collections, Anita Ramos and Brian Conley of the Fairfax County Public Library's Virginia Room, Ken Lantz of the Virginia Department of Transportation, and Nancy Caldwell of the UMCP Libraries Periodicals and Microforms collection. This study is informed in large part by the many components of my graduate training. For their enlightening seminars in transportation planning and its environmental and social impacts, I am grateful to Michael Shelby (then with the Environmental Protection Agency) and the late John Hummel (then with the Maryland Department of Transportation). I thank Jim Cohen for his comprehensive introduction to planning history and Hasia Diner for the opportunity to begin extensive historical research using local repositories. Along with Jim, I appreciate the contributions and insights of the other members of my committee, John Caughey, Mary Corbin Sies, Marie Howland, and Virginia Beauchamp. I have been fortunate to work with John and Mary since 1994-95, learning more about ethnography, life history research, cultural landscape analysis, material culture studies, and suburbia than I could have imagined existed. I am particularly grateful for Mary's 1998 seminar in interdisciplinary research methods and bibliographic instruction and John's 1998 seminar in ethnography and American culture, in both of which I was able to take substantial steps in early phases of this project. I also appreciate Mary's assignment of early versions of my cultural landscape model to guide her graduate seminars' fieldwork projects in 1997, 1999, and 2001 . lll On the transportation front, I am indebted to the past and present staff at the Maryland State Highway Administration and the Virginia Department of Transportation who opened their memories, offices, and bookshelves to me. Craig Hinners of Midasco, the company which in 2000 held the contract to repair and replace BGS's (Big Green Signs) on interstate highways in the western half of Maryland, provided the most unique memories of my research by inviting me to tour the inside of a variable message sign and to join a Midasco crew dismantling a set of BGS's at the Central Avenue interchange in Prince George's County after midnight on a freezing February morning. Patrick Zilliacus and Scott Kozel offered endless informational support on all matters of transportation. Scott's website at covers many of the area highways I wish I had had space to cover in this project but didn't. I am indebted to Patrick for his careful reading of and suggestions about the draft of this manuscript. Tim Davis and Zachary Schrag served as helpful resources for background on Washington's parkways and Metro, respectively. This dissertation incorporates several projects-within-a-project. One mini- project was the development of my cultural landscape fieldwork model, earlier versions of which were presented at several professional conferences; separate acknowledgements for that part of the dissertation appear in Appendix A. Developing my Web survey required a set of special skills I had to acquire from nearly scratch. For helping me do that, I am especially grateful to John Cordes and Jenny Thompson for sharing with me the survey instruments from their own dissertations, Jamie Spriggs and David Silver for teaching me the HTML in which I later composed my own survey, and the three waves of pilot testers who offered constructive critiques of early drafts of the lV survey: alpha tester Lillie Ransom, beta testers Zachary Schrag and Debra DeRuyver, and gamma testers Peggy Wolf, Naomi Jacobs, Sarah Caughey, Carrie Sanidad, Misha Bernard, Meghan Davidson, Debbie Carpel, Maura Pierce, Lee White, Ben Werner, Rich Sanidad, Alexandra Griffin, Amy Greenstein, Arie Hager, and Michael Fox. Daniel A. Turner and Maureen Sullivan assisted me with locating Internet usage statistics. During the period I worked on this project, I could not have hoped for a kinder and more supportive set of colleagues than my friends in the College Park Scholars program. It has been a pleasure to serve as assistant and later associate director for the American Cultures program under Lillie Ransom, who worked with me for eight consecutive semesters to make sure I had time to complete this project in addition to fulfilling my responsibilities to the program. Other members of the American Cultures faculty team-Jo Paoletti and Jane Dusselier-have been equally supportive. For their enthusiasm toward my project and many hours of conversation on all things pedagogical and scholarly, I thank my many other colleagues in the College Park Scholars program, especially Kathy McAdams, Beth Pattison, Asim Ali, John Cordes, Wendy Whittemore, and Shelley Sperry. Within the Department of American Studies, I am indebted to staff members Valerie Brown, Claudia Rector, and Missy Waters for their many fonns of assistance. My graduate classmates' contributions to my development as a teacher and scholar have · been invaluable. I am grateful especially to Diana Turk, Nicole De Wald, Greg Wahl, Bruce Johansen, Debra DeRuyver, Kelly Quinn, David Silver, Psyche Williams-Forson, V Ed Martini, Sarah Dangelas, Donald Snyder, and Jenny Thompson for inspiring me and helping me grow in many ways. For spiritual sustenance, I thank the contra dance community in Washington and New England, Ben Hole for his Israeli and international folk dance programs, my musical companions in the group Michael's Boat (Charley Montroll, Norm Braveman, Jules Asher, and Rocky Korr), Charlie Maiorana's tri-weekly folk singing circle in Northwest D.C., and my colleagues, teaching assistants, and students at the Children's School of Science in Woods Hole, Mass. I also appreciate the opportunity to have officiated intramural contests at UMCP for twelve years for Campus Recreation Services as a member of the Maryland Student Officials' Association; it has been a privilege to work under Jeff Kearney, Tricia Losavio, and Andrea Thompson, all of whom generously accommodated my research and teaching responsibilities. This project would literally not have been possible without the assistance of my informants and survey respondents. I am grateful to the many individuals, too numerous to name here, who invited me into their houses and private lives. Special thanks go to survey respondents #8, 28, 43,204,216,244,266,267,270,272,311 , 315,325,355, 404,436,442,460,471,488,493,495,560,568,569,572,577,580,589,and596for offering such welcome encouragement to a graduate student they didn't know personally. I also thank Liz Donaldson, Jean Johnson, Eileen Joyner, Richard Schuman, Dorothy Sucher, Material Culture, and The Washington Post for granting me permission to reprint their materials. My family has always been a tremendous source of personal support. For their love, for their irreverence, and for being there for so many years for and with me, I Vl thank Charley, Kimmy, Andy, Barbara Anne, Sarah, Elliott, Toby, Frank A., Frank J., Anna, Sally, Steven, Johnny, Marky, Leslie, Heidi, Gene, Glenn, Nicky, Jennah, Jon, Wendy, Alain, Lauren, Wilma, Al, Aaron, Liat, Wynne, Cindy, Phil, Jonathan, Adina, Marc, Michael, Nelima, Mimi, Carl, Russell, Pam, Craig, and Max. Rachel and Josh are two of my best friends as well as my role models; I could not be prouder to have them as my sister and brother. Special thanks also to Marky and Leslie for financial support in procuring the software I used in the course of this project. Christine Broussard, my partner in life, gave me much-appreciated encouragement during the writing stage of this study. Thanks to her patience, our relationship survived early periods in which I hopscotched all over the Washington area conducting interviews, then hibernated while transcribing them. I am grateful for her love, support, and willingness to endure my endless excitement over road-related minutiae. Finally, I wish to acknowledge five outstanding teachers who are largely responsible for my reaching this stage in my professional and personal development. Three of them played a key role in my intellectual development in 1991, during my first and second years as an undergraduate. In spring 1991, as a disenchanted and somewhat directionless freshman, I was challenged by Lois Vietri's seminar in American Government and its four extensive research papers. Lois's feedback on my papers encouraging me to consider graduate school meant little to me at the time, but later gave me the confidence to apply to graduate programs. I have enjoyed working as her colleague in recent years while she has been the director of the College Park Scholars Program in International Studies. In vu summer 1991, Jennifer Gaines of the Woods Hole Historical Collection (Mass.) generously opened her facility's archives to an undergraduate interested in uncredited and unsupervised local history research; I thank her for her patience, for taking me seriously, and for working with me on other projects in later years. And in fall 1991, Virginia Beauchamp's honors seminar on Maryland history set my professional career in motion; from that class, my first piece of roads scholarship-a 20-page history of U.S. 1 in College Park-won a $50 prize and a place in the Prince George's County Historical Society's archives. It has been an honor to have Virginia as a mentor for the last eleven years, including as a member of my dissertation committee, as I have continued my research into other components of the area's transportation network. I have incorporated many lessons learned from Virginia, Jennifer, and Lois into my teaching, research, and academic service. Lastly, I dedicate this dissertation to the two teachers from whom I have learned the most in all walks of life. Bonnie and Rocky Korr offered nothing but encouragement through the duration of my graduate studies. This project would not have been possible without their generous assistance in room, board, transportation, and so much else. I appreciate their constructive comments during the course of my research, and will not forget to mention, as per my father's suggestion, the mammoth bones and the Native American artifacts found adjacent to the Beltway, even though these discoveries did not fit into the main text of the dissertation. 1 My parents' love and passion for their family, 1 See Charles H. LeeDecker, Brad Koldehoff, and Cheryl A. Holt, Excavation of the Indian Creek V Site (18PR94), Prince Georges County, Maryland, Final Report (Philadelphia and Washington: Wallace Roberts & Todd and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 1991 ). vm interests, and work have helped make me who I am today. I thank them, and everyone else previously listed in this section, for their support. IX TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES XIV LIST OF TABLES xv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xvI CHAPTER 1: "A Tangible Presence That Has Affected Us in Many Ways": Studying the Capital Beltway 1 Shortcomings of Existing Analysis and Scholarship 4 What is Odology? Building Toward a Study Model 11 Guiding Questions 20 Organization 29 CHAPTER 2: "Most of Those Involved ... Are Dead": Selection and Implementation of Study Methods 33 Cultural Landscape Analysis 35 Documentary Analysis and Planning History 41 Ethnography 44 Web Surveys: Reversing the Traditional Dynamics 49 CHAPTER 3: "There Was Just No Easy Way to Get Anywhere": Washington's Transportation in the 1950s 66 America's Beltways 67 Postwar Metropolitan Washington 75 Getting Around 80 Washington's Other Beltways 90 CHAPTER 4: "A Huge Wedding Ring for Metropolitan Washington": The Corning of the Capital Beltway 101 The Washington Circumferential Highway in Maryland 109 The Capitol Ring in Virginia 131 Before the Opening: Playground and Racetrack 141 Closing the Circle 145 CHAPTER 5: "This Was a Nice Place:" Conflict and Anger 154 The Disappearing Parkway 160 Living by the Beltway 186 CHAPTER 6: "I Arn Being Raped by VDOT:" Virginia's and Maryland's Struggle for Consensus 208 Pedersen's Paradox: Neither Answer is the Answer 216 The Old Dominion Paradox: A Planning Process Both X Inclusive and Exclusive 238 CHAPTER 7: "A Deer Doesn't Stand a Chance": Good Calls, Bad Calls, 10-45s, and the Physical World ofl-495 271 The Nature of the Beltway 272 The Material Culture of the Beltway 289 Living on/with the Beltway 313 Who's Missing 337 CHAPTER 8: "The Beltway Alone Will Keep Me From Returning:" The Capital Beltway and/in Individual Lives 349 The Web Survey Respondents 350 Is the Beltway Safe? 363 Coping With the Beltway 372 CHAPTER 9: "Surrender Dorothy:" The Beltway's Roles and Effects 382 In the Loop: The Beltway as a Pawn 383 Battleground and Community 399 Public or Private Space? 422 Stirring the Jurisdictional Soup 428 A Catalyst for Development? 440 CHAPTER 10: "What the Pave Meant": Coming Full Circle 454 Summary: Significance of the Capital Beltway 455 Looking Back and Looking Forward 463 APPENDICES Appendix A: Cultural Landscape Fieldwork Model Appendix B: Web Survey FIGURES WORKS CITED XI 476 511 520 530 LIST OF FIGURES 1. Washington, D.C. metropolitan area 520 2. 1952 design for the Capital Beltway in Montgomery CoW1ty, Md. 521 3. 1950 Washington, D.C. regional plan showing three ring roads 522 4. Fort Drive, 1952 map 523 5. 1955 progress report of highway construction for Montgomery and Prince Georges CoW1ties, Md. 524 6. 1952 design for the Capital Beltway in Prince Georges CoW1ty, Md. 525 7. Contractors for construction of Maryland portion of the Capital Beltway 526 8. 1964 Capital Beltway map 527 9. Geology of Washington metropolitan area 529 10. "Beyond the Beltway" 530 11. 1961 map of residential development in Washington area 531 Xll LIST OF TABLES 1. Cultural Landscape Study Model (2002 Revision) 36 2. Sources for Finding Out About Web Survey 54 3. Transportation Funding Programmed for Fiscal Year 2001 in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia 340 4. Extent of Identification Disclosure for Web Survey 352 5. Residence of Respondents by State 353 6. Residence of Respondents by County or Autonomous City 354 7. Residence of Respondents by City or Town 355 8. Status of Vehicle Club Membership 358 9. Age of Respondents in 2000 or 2001 359 10. Gender of Respondents 359 11. Race of Respondents 360 12. Highest Level of Education Achieved 360 13. Annual Household Income, in Dollars 360 14. Employment Status 360 15. Modes of Transportation for Non-recreational Purposes 361 16. Primary Purpose of Beltway Use 362 17. Geographic Distribution of Beltway Use 362 18. Primary Distance of Beltway Travel 362 19. Expressions of Displeasure on the Capital Beltway 373 20. Personal Activities on the Capital Beltway 374 21. Additional Personal Activities on the Capital Beltway 424 Xlll AAA AASHTO BPR CCFD COG EA EIS EPA FHWA HOT HOV HTML !-(number) ICC KVFD LOS MSP MTA MdTA M-NCPPC NCPC LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS American Automobile Association American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Bureau of Public Roads (U.S.) Chevy Chase Fire Departments (Metropolitan Washington) Council of Governments Environmental Assessment Environmental Impact Statement Environmental Protection Agency (U.S.) Federal Highway Administration High Occupancy/Toll High Occupancy Vehicle Hypertext Markup Language Interstate highway route (number) Intercounty Connector Kensington Volunteer Fire Department Level of Service Maryland State Police Maryland Transit Administration Maryland Transportation Authority Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission National Capital Planning Commission XIV NCPPC NEPA NPS SRC SHA TPB TDM TSM URL U.S. (number) VDH VDOT VMT VSP National Capital Park and Planning Commission National Environmental Policy Act National Park Service State Roads Commission (Md.) State Highway Administration (Md.) National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board Transportation Demand Management Transportation Systems Management Uniform Resource Locator United States highway route (number) Virginia Department of Highways Virginia Department of Transportation Vehicle Miles Traveled Virginia State Police xv CHAPTER 1 "A TANGIBLE PRESENCE THAT HAS AFFECTED US IN MANY WAYS": STUDYING THE CAPITAL BELTWAY Vic Sussman wrote in The Washington Post in 1989: Relatives are flying in from East Podunk this tourist season, and they say they want to see the real Washington. Don't bother dragging them on ritualized pilgrimages to marble monuments and sleek museums. They're looking for the down and dirty they've heard so much about-the naked aggression, the power plays, the wheeling and dealing, the ferocious tooth-and-nail jockeying for position and leadership. They want to see ... the Beltway. Why not? Our homebrewed Indianapolis 500 and giant parking lot is Washington's Grand Promenade, a circuit of decaying concrete and robust development linking homes and jobs in our booming international capital. As a tourist attraction, the Beltway symbolizes our very lifeblood, the politics and bureaucracy we thrive on: an unpredictably dangerous highway to everywhere and nowhere, a hellish road paved and repaved with good intentions and a sprawling, endless loop that daily flings us out into the world as crazily as it brings us home. Late. 1 As Sussman indicates, the Capital Beltway serves as more than a generic interstate highway. The 64-mile loop (shown as I-495 in Fig. 1), 42 miles in Maryland and the balance in Virginia with a sliver over the Potomac in Washington, is a commuter route, a throughway for long-distance travelers, and a traffic-jammed "parking lot" during certain hours of the day. But there is more than that. After all, the New Jersey Turnpike is not simply an eye-glazing toll road; to many it symbolizes its entire state, and has 1 Vic Sussman, "The Best and Worst of the Beltway," Washington Post Magazine, 21 May 1989: 27-28. 1 entered the nation's vernacular through song and story.2 The Capital Beltway, too, has taken on a life of its own beyond anything its creators might have expected. The history and characteristics of the Beltway underscore the significance of roads as cultural artifacts. Material culture studies scholars attempt to understand cultural systems by looking at the dialectic relationships between humans and objects; cultural landscape analysts, as I will explain in Chapter 2, focus more broadly on the dynamic tensions between humans, objects, and nature. In both of those approaches to analysis of American culture, roads play a surprisingly important but often overlooked part. Roads are, for example, integral components of the American landscape and of people's daily lives. They reveal and create certain beliefs and values, they offer access and opportunity to certain segments of the populace while withholding them from others, and they affect the environment, and are affected by it, in myriad ways. Still, historical and cultural scholarship has given minimal attention to the significance of roads. Recent decades, as we will see, have witnessed the emergence of the specialty field of odology, the study ofroads, with published works including Karl Raitz's The National Road, Andrew Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland's Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, and several books about U.S. 66.3 2 For examples, see Andrew Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland, Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 15 5-1 71; and Hank Steuver, "What Exit?", Washington Post, 5 August 2001: F 1. 3 The term "odology" derives from the Greek "hodos" (road). See Karl Raitz, ed., The National Road (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Andrew Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland, Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Works on U.S. 66 include Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); and Quinta Scott and Susan Croce Kelly, Route 66: The Highway and Its People (Norman, Ok.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 2 Yet these few studies that have taken a cultural and historical approach to roads have focused on highways with nostalgic value and have ignored other types of roads, including less picturesque, urban, utilitarian expressways. This is an oversight. As I demonstrate throughout this study, the Capital Beltway is a highly significant, complex cultural artifact as well as a key social institution. Almost from its inception, the Capital Beltway took on the informal designation of "Washington's Main Street," even though its physical presence in the District of Columbia spans all of a few hundred feet.4 Paul Dickson notes that the Beltway has influenced not only the physical appearance of the Washington region, but the mindsets of its inhabitants as well: The Beltway is not just another 65 miles of gray and green interstate highway but a tangible presence that has affected us in many ways, including the way we think .... It has also changed the way we describe and think about where we live. Before the Beltway, people said they lived so many miles from, say, the Federal Triangle or downtown Alexandria.5 Similarly, demographer George Grier said of the nondescript Beltway, seven years after its 1964 opening, that it "may well be far and away the most important physical alteration in the physical structure of metropolitan Washington during the present 4 See, for example, Martha Angle, "Road Built as D.C. Bypass Has Become a Main Street," Evening Star, 21 March 1966: A-1; and Larry Van Dyne, "Getting There," Washingtonian, May 1990: 203-4. Joel Achenbach argues that a more accurate metaphor would be "Washington's Baggage Claim": "No one likes it but it always draws a crowd. Every moment you are there, you are tense, expectant, fearful of disaster. It's a conveyor of things, operating in two modes-functional and dysfunctional" (Achenbach, "A Loopy Birthday to the Beltway at 30," Washington Post, 17 August 1994: B 1 ). 5 Dickson, 10. 3 century-a force which will influence patterns of growth for at least the remainder of the century, and perhaps longer."6 This single road unites and divides the Washington region in multiple ways. It structures the lives and decisions of thousands of area residents, resonates nationally as a political icon, and has even generated its own psychological disorder. Despite these and the Beltway's other effects on the region and beyond, scholars and planners have for the most part taken the Capital Beltway at face value-as a venue for vehicular traffic- and have not explored its more complex relationships with individuals, groups, and the Maryland and Virginia landscapes. Shortcomings of existing analysis and scholarship Conventional wisdom-that is, the picture painted by the major media and usually encountered in conversation with members of dominant segments of the Washington area population-has it that the Capital Beltway is simply a key highway, the road which has defined the Washington metropolitan area and which is the most important method of travel between the suburbs. Despite the traffic, in this view, the Beltway is still an invaluable resource. All hell breaks loose when, for example, the Beltway's Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac River shuts down for an accident; angry drivers and the American Automobile Association (AAA) forcefully criticize the delays, the assumption being that life in the region is disrupted when expected routines 6 [George Grier,] "Washington: A Beltway is creating new patterns which increase the independence of the suburbs from their parent," City 5:1 (January/February 1971): 46. 4 on the Beltway are interrupted. The Beltway, it would appear, unites and defines greater Washington, as first evidenced by happy letters from area drivers shortly after the road opened in 1964, who found they could access more sites in the suburbs in much faster time. Yet while these observations are accurate, the situation is much more complex. The Beltway does not unite the region smoothly. Despite its single name, the Beltway from its inception has really been two separate roads, in Maryland and in Virginia, representing at least two distinct philosophies of planning. Drivers have generally been willing to overlook the differences between the two roads for the sake of the convenience provided by the full loop, but these contrasts have loomed large since the beginning and remain a critical factor today: for example, Maryland's and Virginia's current plans for traffic mitigation call for conflicting numbers of lanes to be added in each state (and for a possible rail line along Maryland's portion only), a plan which would guarantee bottlenecks on the bridges between states. The schizophrenic Capital Beltway further serves simultaneously as Interstate 495, a highway serving local drivers, and Interstate 95, a link in the north-south expressway spanning the East Coast. Fulfilling either function alone would be a challenge given current levels of traffic. When the Beltway tries to do both, long-haul truck drivers become frustrated at the commuter flow, locals flare at the giant tractor- trailers in their way, and transportation officials find themselves constantly challenged to reach a fair balance. Even the local drivers have no love for each other, frequently spewing venom about the abysmal driving skills and complete lack of etiquette of their fellow commuters. In many ways, the Capital Beltway approximates more the "down 5 and dirty" battleground Sussman depicts rather than the regional "unifier and definer" suggested by Maryland Rep. Steny H. Hoyer.7 On the one hand, the Beltway is a product of engineering. It is an asphalt oval circumscribing the District of Columbia; the lanes closer to the city with clockwise traffic comprise the Inner Loop, while counterclockwise traffic travels on the Outer Loop. Four lanes run in each direction for much of its 64 miles, expanding to as many as six (on the Outer Loop between U.S. 1 and 1-95 in College Park) and shrinking to as few as two (on the Inner Loop between MD 355 and 1-270 in Bethesda). Steel guardrails and concrete Jersey barriers run intermittently adjacent to the shoulders. The median ranges from grass with steel guardrails in Prince George's County, Md., to Jersey barriers in Montgomery County, Md., to Jersey barriers topped with green cylinders, meant to shield opposing traffic from glare, in northern Virginia. Some half- dozen forms and colors of sound barriers sporadically line the outer edges of the Beltway's right-of-way, which is otherwise marked by chain-link fences except at interchanges. Aside from its drawbridge in the middle of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge spanning the Potomac River, the highway in its physical sense is not particularly different from other Interstates. On the other hand, the Beltway has affected the nation's capital and the general Washington region in profound ways since its opening in 1964. "The objective of the Washington Beltway," a British transportation planner notes, "was simply to remove through traffic, but in fact it has had the effect of totally altering the manner in which 7 Quoted in Stephen C. Fehr, "Beltway at 25: The Road Most Traveled," The Washington Post, 17 August 1989: Al. 6 the city operates. "8 As we will see, the Beltway's effects on regional development, policy, and personal life decisions have been anything but negligible. Further, the Beltway is perceived in vastly different ways by different individuals and groups of people, and in fact represents the nexus of multiple and constantly changing meaning systems. Even the road's physical form is problematic; the engineers in Virginia and Maryland who originally designed the highway literally conceived their respective portions of the loop as two different roads, as I will show. Yet surprisingly, despite the Beltway's regional and national significance, it has been given little attention by the academic community. Publications focusing on the highway are mostly studies of traffic, land-use impact, and environmental impact, while sociological or more multi- faceted treatments of the road have been limited to a few shorter articles in newspapers and magazines. The Beltway seems to fall through the cracks of the existing historical and geographical literature. Key works on Washington emphasize the city itself and address the suburbs only secondarily ( or were published too early for the Beltway to be included); accordingly, they tend to mention the Beltway in passing if at all.9 Maryland 8 R.J. Brown, quoted in R.F. Kirby, "The Washington Beltway" and "Discussion," in D. Bayliss, ed., Orbital Motorways: Proceedings of the Conference Organized by the Institution of Civil Engineers and Held in Stratford-upon-Avon on 24-26 April 1990 (London: Thomas Telford, 1990), 116. 9 Washington D.C. currently lacks a comprehensive, up-to-date historical reference; recent scholarship has approached the city with specific objectives which have not lent themselves to coverage of the Beltway. Thus Howard Gillette Jr.'s Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) traces Washington's racial history in great detail but bypasses the Beltway and, for the most part, the suburbs. Keith Melder's City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Washington, District of Columbia, 2d ed. (Washington: Intac, 1997), a high school textbook which currently serves as a de facto general historical reference, allots several paragraphs and photos to the Beltway but 7 and Virginia historians, in turn, focus on more quintessentially Maryland and Virginia areas (Baltimore, Annapolis, Richmond, Newport News) and generally bypass the capital suburbs because they are more of a Washington phenomenon. Because the Beltway is in fact a suburban entity, one might expect histories of Washington's suburbs themselves to treat it in depth, but the existing histories of Prince George's and Montgomery Counties in Maryland, for example, are not scholarly and do not treat any given subject in depth, though they do at times give a superficial introduction to the Beltway. 10 Because Washington historians have left alone the suburban Beltway and regional suburban historians have published little at the scholarly level, academic coverage of the Beltway is virtually nonexistent. That is not to single out the Beltway: the roads and highways of the Washington region in general have received little academic attention from cultural and historical perspectives. Among the exceptions are Timothy Davis, who has written extensively on the federal parkways winding through the area's stream valleys, and Larry Van Dyne, whose detailed essays for the Washingtonian magazine together comprise probably the most thorough published treatment of Washington's suburbs and regional highway network. 11 In his master's thesis and in a subsequent article, Leland White studied in includes no scholarly apparatus to facilitate further research. Frederic M. Miller's and Gillette's Washington Seen: A Photographic History. 1875-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) emphasizes in its epilogue suburban development and some of the Beltway's effects, but only to 1965. 1° For representative examples, see Jane Sween, Montgomery County: Two Centuries of Change (Woodland Hills, Ca.: Windsor, 1984), and Alan Virta, Prince George's County: A Pictorial History (Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1984). 11 Timothy Mark Davis, "Mount Vernon Memorial Highway and the Evolution of the American Parkway," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1997; Davis, "Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, Washington, DC: The Evolution of a Contested Urban 8 depth the controversial history of Interstate 66, linking Washington with the Virginia suburbs to the west. 12 Two decades of citizen protests led to the 1973 cancellation of several key Interstate highways in Washington; a comprehensive study of those freeway battles has yet to appear, but partial coverage is provided by Howard Gillette Jr. and by Jane Freundel Levey and Bob Levey. 13 Except for White's study of 1-66, most of this work has concentrated on highways within or very close to the city of Washington itself, as has most regional historical scholarship. And yet, as Van Dyne writes, [t]he District of Columbia- for all its status as national capital with its museums and theaters, its grand Mall and somber memorials-has long ceased to be the place where most Washingtonians live. The 'burbs-so often held in low esteem by university professors and novelists-are where most members of the middle class live, either by preference or because it's the best option they can afford. 14 As of 2000, Van Dyne notes, almost 90 percent of the 4.6 million residents of the Washington metropolitan region lived, and nearly all of the region's Fortune 500 firms were located, outside the city, both strong measures of suburban ascendancy. 15 Landscape," Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 19.2 (Summer 1999): 123-237; Van Dyne, "Getting There," 122-129, 201-211. Sara Amy Leach has also published a shorter article on the federal parkways; see Leach, "Fifty Years of Parkway Construction in and around the Nation's Capital," in Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, ed. Jan Jennings (Ames, Ia.: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 185-197. 12 Leland J. White, "Dividing Highway: Citizen Activism and Interstate 66 in Arlington, Virginia," Washington History 13.1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 52-67. 13 Howard Gillette, Jr., "A National Workshop for Urban Policy: The Metropolitanization of Washington, 1946-1968," The Public Historian 7 .1 (Winter 1985): 15-27.; Bob Levey and Jane Freundel Levey, "End of the Roads," Washington Post Magazine, 26 November 2000: 10-17, 24-26. I have also written several unpublished papers on the freeway protests, housed in the Community Archives at the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library. 14 Larry Van Dyne, "As Far As The Eye Can See," Washingtonian, February 2000: 61. 9 But academic study of cultural and historic Washington stubbornly lingers in an earlier age in which the city did dominate the region in many ways. This framework was once a reality: into the late 1940s, the District of Columbia continued to absorb at least as many residents as did the suburbs, and the prospect of business decentralization was laughed off. 16 The failure to acknowledge the suburbs' contemporary role relative to the city of Washington is one reason for the absence of the Capital Beltway from Washington scholarship. Another is that the Beltway is just a road, and not a very likable one, as journalist Paul Dickson writes: Not many people love or even much like the Capital Beltway, because it is a sterile, high-speed, often nightmarish convenience, an endless exit ramp without the seedy, carnival-like atmosphere of, say, Route 1 or the scenic charm of a Rock Creek Parkway or Skyline Drive. Nor does it have the romance of a former Indian trail or overland stage route. It was born in [the twentieth] century as a bypass around Washington to speed those to the north of us to destinations to the south of us and vice-versa. Some people hate it outright, though others find it's something they've become accustomed to but have little affection for, like overshoes. 17 A Greenbelt resident explains that the Beltway doesn't go anywhere ... it's very utilitarian. [Y]ou wouldn't get a song like Route 66 about the beltway-you know what I mean? [A]nd there's the whole lack ofroad art, cheap hotels, and diners that other highways have ... driving the beltway is like driving through the middle of your living room. 18 15 Ibid., 61-62. 16 Gillette, "A National Workshop," 8-9. 17 Paul Dickson, "Capital Beltway: The Medium and the Message," Evening Star and News Sunday Magazine, 10 June 1973: 10. 18 Beltway Survey #189. More detailed discussions of this survey and its numbering scheme appear in Chapters 2 and 8. 10 The Beltway is, indeed, gritty, and does not have the nostalgic draw of the Route ls and Route 66s which inspire their own fan clubs. "It is unlikely," one journalist writes of the entire 1-95 corridor, including the Beltway, "that anyone will ever care to preserve a piece ofl-95 for a museum, as the Smithsonian Institution did ... with a stretch of the old Route 66." 19 But such comparisons miss the point: even purely utilitarian roads can be culturally and historically significant. Geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson made this last point in his published essays. However, he did not explain clearly how such roads are significant, or how their significance might be studied. My study, therefore, is inspired by two gaps in scholarship. The first is a gap in content: for reasons including the ones covered earlier, neither Washington nor Maryland nor Virginia scholarship substantively addresses the role of the Beltway in the region's social, cultural, political, and economic framework. The second inspiration is a gap in theory and method relative to roads. In short, Jackson made a convincing case for the cultural study of roads, but chose not to answer the most obvious follow-up question: how do you do that? What is odology? Building toward a study model J.B. Jackson (1902-1996), a maverick geographer and founder of the journal Landscape, has for decades been widely quoted on myriad aspects of the study of the American landscape. But through his career he was notoriously vague and loose with his assertions and suggestions-probably intentionally so, given his anti-academic 19 Randy Kennedy, "I-95, A River of Commerce Overflowing With Traffic," New York Times, 29 December 2000: B6. 11 streak.20 I have not been alone in my frustration that, in his decades' worth of articles and books exhorting readers to recognize the significance of the landscape and to go out and study it, Jackson rarely spelled out how he expected his readers to do it. This was the case both for general landscape study and for specialized study of its components, including its roads. I began to address the first of these lacunae-how to study the American cultural landscape in general-in 1995, by developing an interdisciplinary fieldwork model ( drawing heavily on Jackson's own work) which served as the foundation of my master's thesis in 1996 and was published separately in 1997 .21 In subsequent years, I have significantly expanded the study model based on further research and on feedback from several conference presentations. A revised version of that theoretical and methodological framework informs this study of the Capital Beltway, and is introduced in the next chapter and presented in detail in the appendix. 22 20 Patricia Nelson Limerick catalogs some of these quirks and idiosyncrasies in "J.B. Jackson and the Play of the Mind: Inquiry and Assertion as Contact Sports," Geographical Review 88.4 (October 1998): 483-491. A more extensive discussion of Jackson's approach to landscape study appears in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, "J.B. Jackson and the Discovery of the American Landscape," in John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ix-xxxi. 21 Jeremy L. Korr, "Cultural Landscapes in Material Culture Studies," M.A. thesis, University of Maryland at College Park, 1996; Jeremy L. Korr, "A Proposed Model for Cultural Landscape Study," Material Culture 29.3 (Fall 1997): 1-18. Earlier versions of this fieldwork model were presented to the New England Antiquities Research Association (1996), the University of New Mexico's conference on J.B. Jackson and the American Landscape (1998), the Great Lakes American Studies Association (2000), and the American Studies Association (2000). Portions of the model which have appeared in Material Culture are reprinted here with permission of the editor. 22 I am indebted to Mary Corbin Sies for her comments and critique through multiple drafts of this fieldwork model. For their suggestions and feedback, I am also grateful to John Caughey, Virginia Beauchamp, Kelly Quinn, David Silver, Ann Denkler, 12 The second of Jackson's gaps is harder to fill. At least for cultural landscape study, a number of scholars had offered their own ideas for study methods, so that I had a starting point for developing my own fieldwork model. This is less the case for the cultural study of roads, or what Jackson calls odology. As usual, in this context Jackson excites the reader, establishes the sense that there is much more to be learned, then ends his thoughts abruptly and runs off to his next topic. Here is his definition and prognosis for this line of scholarly inquiry: Odology is the science or study of roads or journeys and, by extension, the study of streets and superhighways and trails and paths, how they are used, where they lead, and how they come into existence. Odology is part geography, part planning, and part engineering-engineering as in construction, and unhappily as in social construction as well. That is why the discipline has a brilliant future. 23 Roads, Jackson explains elsewhere in the same essay, have a double identity: they are instruments of movement, enabling transportation between places, but they are also distinct places in and of themselves. Thinking about a road in odological terms, he adds, means considering the road's functions, its impacts on the landscape around it, and- intriguingly- its subversive impact: "[T]he road is a very powerful space; and unless it is handled very carefully and constantly watched, it can undermine and destroy Margaret Enloe Vivian, Susan Trail, Bruce Johansen, Mike Lucas, Erin Benedict, Sandor Vegh, Jennifer Bixler, Edwin Martini, Sarah Dangelas, Donald Snyder, Claudia Rector, Jane Dusselier, Jennifer Stabler, Nicole King, Linda Borish, Noel Sturgeon, Sherry Linkon, and the many others who have generously shared their insights with me while applying various iterations of this fieldwork model to their own case studies. For an example of an extensive application of my study model, see Margaret M.G. Enloe, "From Watermen to Waterviews ... From Tilghman Packing Company to Tilghman on Chesapeake: A Cultural Landscape Study of Avalon Island, Chesapeake Bay," M.A. thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2000, esp. 17-20. 23 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, "Roads Belong in the Landscape," in A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 191. 13 the existing order. "24 That is all. Other than some pontifications on the effects of recent innovations in road-building and traffic management and a rambling discursion on the ancient history ofroads, this constitutes Jackson's explicit analytical framework for the cultural study ofroads. But his suggestions, however sparse, are still substantive and unique enough to drive a distinct approach to roads and highways. The challenge of how to study roads from this perspective, and the successes and limitations of the ways in which a handful of road studies have attempted to do it, inform this study of the Beltway. Along the way, I will also offer suggestions about what future work in odology might comprise. Odologies can be defined as studies of roads from some combination of cultural and/or historic perspective. Several American Studies scholars and cultural geographers have published such studies of American highways. From a quick overview of their work, I will point out which elements of their analytical techniques seem most useful for my own study, and what additional avenues of inquiry I can add.25 Among these 24 Ibid., 190; Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, 6. 25 Among these scholars, Tim Davis is the only one to explicitly use Jackson's term "odology" and to suggest ways for extending Jackson's suggestions. In his abstract for a 1998 conference paper, which to date is the only scholarly assessment of Jackson's contribution to odology, Davis summarizes the geographer's work in that area: J.B. Jackson's reputation as the father of landscape studies rests in no small measure on his original and insightful interpretations of the American highway. While most contemporary writers condemned the roadside landscape and decried the highway's influence on American culture, Jackson sought to understand the highway on its own terms, to contextualize the modem motorway and its attendant culture of mobility within broader social and historical patterns, and to explain why Americans used and shaped highway landscapes in ways that did not accord with elite conceptions of social and aesthetic propriety. Jackson's writings on the American highway inspired many scholars, designers, and popular writers to follow in his tracks. His essays, editorial influence, and personal encouragement played a crucial role in the 14 studies, Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland go furthest in suggesting what an odology might look like when generated from an American Studies approach. Their goal is a general cultural analysis of the New Jersey Turnpike's functions as a cultural icon on regional and national levels: "Despite our attempts to discover larger meanings for the Turnpike-the ideas and values of which it is emblematic-the New Jersey Turnpike is also, of course, just there, part of the landscape, and we try to describe it accurately, capture its flavor, and discuss what makes it unique among roads."26 To that end, they combine approaches from American Studies, history, · highway engineering, transportation planning, ethnography, and occupational folklore; together, these result in a purposefully segmented work in which certain chapters are heavily descriptive and experiential, while others are more analytical and evaluative. The authors' ethnographic/folkloric approach-based on interviews with local and out- of-state drivers, toll collectors, police, tow truck drivers, administrators, and others- distinguishes their work from others which emphasize engineering, roadside architecture, or politics. The thoughtful application of a variety of complementary methods is the key which positions their monograph as a work of American Studies, more so than Timothy Davis's dissertation on the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, an development of "odology" (his own term for the study ofroads) into a respectable scholarly field and an increasingly popular literary and journalistic endeavor. (Tim Davis, "Looking Down the Road: Odology After J.B. Jackson," abstract of paper presented at the "J.B. Jackson and American Landscape" conference, University of New Mexico, School of Architecture and Planning, Albuquerque, N.M., October 1-4, 1998.) 26 Gillespie and Rockland, xiii. The book remains the standard authority on the Turnpike even though the ethnographic research is over a decade old; see Scott Simon, interview with Michael Aaron Rockland, Weekend Edition Saturday, National Public Radio, 15 January 2000 . 15 exceedingly thoroughly researched piece of scholarship but one grounded almost entirely in history, engineering, and landscape architecture.27 The National Road (formerly in part U.S. 40, now in part 1-70), the first road sponsored by the federal government, runs east-west between Maryland and Illinois. This highway has provided the basis for several other major works in odology, among which Thomas Schlereth's study is especially useful, as the author specifically designs his book as a model for the analysis of highways from a cultural approach. Clarifying this in his introduction, Schlereth, a professor of American Studies and history, promises to explain "how anyone can identify and interpret the extant physical evidence of the American road and roadside in a way that reveals much of its historical development and contemporary meaning. "28 Interspersed with his case study are general questions for road scholars, such as this sequence: How has the road affected the environment? In what ways has the road had an impact on where we live? Is the road responsible for any new occupations among us? How has the road influenced our modes of recreation? What has the road meant to us as a place for civic celebration and as a symbol of our collective identity?29 While Schlereth's actual analysis of the road is limited and does not fully answer his questions, the book itself still serves as a helpful framework for similar research. Geographer Richard Schein's approach to Interstate 70 offers another useful model, with many detailed conceptual suggestions, on which to base a cultural highway analysis; his work is directly relevant to this study of the Capital Beltway because he 27 Davis, Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. 28 Thomas J. Schlereth, U.S. 40: A Roadscape of the American Experience (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1985), vii. 29 Ibid., 213. 16 takes an interstate highway as his object of analysis. Schein summarizes his proposed framework: Explaining the interstate highway ... requires extending one's viewpoint beyond the road itself, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively, a view beyond the road takes in the interstate's political and economic context and its place as a symbol of modem American life. Literally, an extended view places the interstate highway at the center of new American landscapes, reconfigurations of the built environment altering the spatial and visual arrangements of an earlier America. 30 Schein suggests several broader contexts within which to analyze an interstate highway's significance. For example, he addresses the ways by which the national spatial framework superimposed by the Interstate Highway System both affects and is reshaped by local inhabitants, arguing that "individual and collective response to the interstate's presence contributes to new spatial arrangements in daily life and new forms in the American cultural landscape. "31 Schein's check.list of tensions inherent in interstates is particularly useful: local vs. national, place vs. placelessness, somewhere vs. nowhere, cultural diversity vs. cultural convergence, friend vs. stranger, tightly managed central control vs. individual freedom of movement, can all be identified to some extent in each of the interstate highways. Other cultural studies of highways contribute additional suggestions for odological analysis. George R. Stewart's 1953 treatment of U.S. 40, which "inaugurated the serious study of automobile highways as historic landscapes," addresses the 30 Richard S. Schein, "The Interstate 70 Landscape," in The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 321. 31 Ibid., 331. 17 importance of viewing roads as more than artifacts of engineering.32 Stewart points to the importance of what the highway means to the driver, how it is perceived with all senses, how it relates to both natural (fields, streams) and artifactual (utility wires, billboards, beer cans) landscape elements, and who used it under what circurnstances.33 Despite frequent subjective critique of the landscape and uneven attention to human history (in the East) and landscape features (in the West), Stewart's book remains a fascinating and pioneering cultural highway study, as does Thomas R. Vale and Geraldine R. Vale's sequel evaluating changes in the highway over the subsequent 30 years.34 Drake Hokanson's study of the Lincoln Highway, the first pre-interstate transcontinental highway, emphasizes both the highway's role in educating Americans on the possibilities of long-distance automotive travel, and the individuals who developed and used the highway during its heyday.35 His work is a helpful model for integrating national contexts with analysis of a single highway, and for incorporating diverse reference sources for a highway into a cohesive narrative. Taking a different approach, Bruce Radde's examination of Connecticut's Merritt Parkway emphasizes, and in fact overemphasizes, the planning and architectural sides of the parkway: fully 32 Jeffrey L. Durbin, review of The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz, Material Culture 29.3 (Fall 1997): 45. 33 George R. Stewart, U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1953). 34 Thomas R. Vale and Geraldine R. Vale, U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). 35 Drake Hokanson, The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988). 18 one-fifth of the book is devoted to George Dunkelberger's 68 unique bridges crossing the Merritt.36 While Radde's discussion of the road's design offers a model for mcorporating that approach into a more multifaceted highway analysis, his mini~al concern for the parkway's impacts (land use, economic, social) and for scholarly analysis more generally makes this work less useful than it might be as a model for other highway study. On the opposite side of the pendulum, a collection of books on U.S. 66 approach the Mother Road from a social history perspective. Relying heavily on over 200 personal interviews, Quinta Scott and Susan Croce Kelly aim "to describe the history of U.S. 66 and to show its role in their lives and some of the major events of America's twentieth century. 1137 Scott and Kelly draw also from a wide variety ofbooks, joumal and magazine articles, newspapers, archival collections, and maps. Michael Wallis does the same in his work, but while Scott and Kelly also bring in an architectural history approach, w allis evaluates the highway almost entirely as a social institution. 38 Together, these highway studies have many analytical suggestions to offer. They have several shortcomings as well, which make some of them less useful as models for a study of a contemporary, everyday highway like the Capital Beltway. For one, most of these studies examine roads created eighty years ago or more; only the New Jersey Turnpike, in Gillespie's and Rockland's book, was designed during the same period (and, as Chapter 4 describes, by some of the same people) as the Capital Beltway. Most 36 Bruce Radde, The Merritt Parkway (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 37 Scott and Kelly, Route 66: The Highway and Its People, xiv. See also Quinta Scott, Al R 66 (N Ok . University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). __ ong oute orman, .. 38 Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road. 19 of the odologies do not treat their highways as living phenomena: Scott and Kelly study how Route 66 once was, not how it currently is. Similarly, all but the two U.S. 66 books and the New Jersey Turnpike study are missing, entirely or to a large extent, the voices of the individuals whose lives intertwined with the highways; instead, the other works focus on planning, engineering, architecture, or landscape design. Issues of power and access, too, are rarely addressed; Gillespie and Rockland go into great detail about who can and cannot take advantage of the New Jersey Turnpike, who has had a voice in the planning process, and what the implications are, but most of the studies are silent on these issues. There are several elements of these previous studies which I believe are critical to the odological approach as introduced by J.B. Jackson. The ethnographic component-Gillespie and Rockland's and Scott and Kelly's incorporation of individuals' voices in an attempt to understand what the road means to them-is one, especially in the study of a contemporary road for which live informants exist. Stewart's emphasis on studying the nature and artifacts of a roadscape, not just the road itself, is consistent with my cultural landscape study model, detailed in Chapter 2. Similarly, Gillespie and Rockland's dual approach to the New Jersey Turnpike as both a physical artifact and a social institution is a reminder that every highway can be viewed both by itself (as a product of a complex engineering and design process) and in a constant dialectic relationship with the people who use and maintain it. That dialectic, too, plays an integral role in my landscape fieldwork model. Guiding Questions 20 A variety of specific points from the published highway studies lead directly to the five questions which guide this analysis of the Capital Beltway and which structure my own odology framework. First, drawing on Thomas Schlereth's attempt to understand the contemporary meanings ofl-70 and Andrew Gillespie and Michael Rockland's efforts to "discover larger meanings for the [New Jersey] Turnpike-the ideas and values of which it is emblematic," I approach roads as value-laden landscapes whose underlying beliefs and assumptions can be analyzed.39 Geographer Karl Raitz writes: "Both in the selection of its character-direction, destination, capacity, and visual qualities, among many others-and in the manner in which people choose to represent it, the landscape of the road captures and mediates social and political relationships of the human world." Quoting Baudrillard, Raitz adds that "the road is a trope for social and economic life in the United States; it reflects what Americans hold to be important and central to our being. 1140 But the road is not merely representative; it is not simply a mirror of American beliefs. Material culture studies theory posits a dialectic relationship between humans and artifacts, and in this way roads and society affect each other reciprocally. While Americans' values and priorities shape the roads, those roads dictate residential patterns, commercial development, and history.41 In her study of nineteenth-century Nevada roads, Margaret Purser summarizes this point succinctly: 39 Gillespie and Rockland, 3. 4° Karl Raitz, "American Roads, Roadside America," Geographical Review 88.3 (July 1998): 363-4. 41 Schlereth, 1. 21 In the end, roads do not act; people do. But where roads go, and how they do or do not link place to place, does shape the lives of the individuals and communities that use them. People, in turn, continue to build and use roads. The relationship is not determinative in any finite sense, but continuous and interactive.42 With this dynamic in mind, and using the Capital Beltway as a case study, my first question is: What beliefs and values does the Beltway reveal and create? How does the Beltway shape the lives of the individuals and communities that use it, and how do people in turn influence the Beltway? Second, Gillespie and Rockland discuss in their text how issues of power and access have influenced the development of the New Jersey Turnpike. In the case of the Turnpike, questions of access have arisen not only in terms of planning ( e.g., to what extent do abutters have a voice in the planning process) but for circumstances as mundane as flat tires and scenic views. Running a private road, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority can invite whom it pleases, and its invitation list excludes AAA, whose tow trucks are banned from the turnpike, and all cameras (thus the absence of photos from Gillespie and Rockland's book, and their description of the arrest and confinement by state police of a bewildered driver for taking a photograph on the turnpike). Most roads do not go that far in terms of exclusion. But all are, to some extent, instruments of power; and access to their creation, maintenance, and use has significant societal implications. As noted earlier, J.B. Jackson argues that subversive use of 42 Margaret Purser, "All Roads Lead to Winnemucca: Local Road Systems and Community Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century Nevada," in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, III, ed. Thomas Carter and Bernard L. Herman (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 134. 22 roads-or even non-subversive--can "undennine and destroy the existing order," one reason why Congress is specifically proscribed from building roads.43 In this sense, the road, or at least the public road, may be considered a state project; Raitz suggests giving explicit attention to "the role the road and the roadside may play in reinforcing or transfonning ... narratives of nationhood. 1144 Access to the nation's roads empowers those with vehicles and/or money who can use them; for others, without such access, the roads enforce a stigmatized isolation from the national culture, economy, and even identity.45 Contrary to its representation in the media, for example, the Beltway does not help everyone. Multiple segments of the Washington area's population cannot or will not use the Beltway, because of factors including their income, age, and feelings toward the road (e.g., deep fright). When area governments put resources into the Beltway and other roads, those resources are not available for other modes of transportation which both the Beltway's users and non- users could access. So although roads serve as a common experience for all Americans by affecting their lives in some way, different people are influenced by the road system in very different ways. Thus my second question: What dynamics of power and access relate to the Beltway? Who controls or has access to the road and its planning and alterations, and with what implications and consequences? 43 Jackson, A Sense of Place. A Sense of Time, 6. 44 Raitz, "American Roads," 365. I will discuss this issue further in Chapter 4. 45 Karl Raitz, "Introduction: The National Road and Its Landscapes," in A Guide to the National Road, ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7, 14; Grady Clay and Karl Raitz, "Never a Stationary Highway," in The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 351-354; John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker, 1998), 89-95. 23 Third, as noted above, Drake Hokanson explains in his study how the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road, re-educated Americans to think in a different way about the possibilities of long-distance travel. Hokanson opens the door to a broader question: in what other ways can roads either encourage people to challenge their assumptions (as in his study) or to develop and/or reinforce those assumptions in the first place? This line of inquiry dovetails with current projects in several fields of study, each of which attempts to identify and interrogate accepted conventions for the ways in which some societal phenomenon functions. In American Studies and cultural studies, this effort is usually articulated in terms of challenges to naturalized (what is generally accepted as "normal") conventions of race (white), gender (male), sexuality (hetero ), and other categories of identity. In the environmental justice and New Urbanism movements, both more obviously related to transportation issues, the challenge is to commonly accepted understandings of transportation planning (e.g., strong emphasis on automobile travel) and land use.46 This type of questioning seeks to identify how assumptions developed and what other possibilities exist. While current transportation networks, for example, generally are set up with the key goal of establishing efficient traffic flow for motor vehicles, Jackson notes that other structures are possible, once observers stop taking their assumptions for granted.47 Clay McShane points out that for centuries roads functioned 46 On the relationship between environmental justice and transportation, see, for example, Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility, ed. Robert D. Bullard and Glenn S. Johnson (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 1997). Bullard and Johnson offer a variety of examples, including freeways which, as in Los Angeles, "isolate, segregate, separate, and trap the poorest of residents in polluted 'poverty pockets"' (18). 47 Jackson, "Roads," 192. 24 primarily as public, communal sites for recreation and social gatherings; only after twentieth-century engineers and suburbanites refocused the street's purpose did its primary responsibility become to move traffic efficiently.48 Odology can be a vehicle for exploring this and other assumptions of the American road and transportation network. The Beltway, in fact, is tailor-made for it: Perhaps because it rings Congress and its shortcomings are so visible to those in power, the Beltway has become the most examined and questioned piece of the interstate system, and problems which have national significance were first brought into focus by critics of the Beltway. It became a symbol for highway oversight and challengeable assumptions [emphasis added].49 The third question: What assumptions (or "normativities") does the Beltway reflect and create; how does it contribute to a social world which seems "normal"? Through what process did those assumptions take hold? In what ways have they been challenged? What ramifications result from this? Fourth, in his analysis ofI-70, Richard Schein argues that interstates are fraught with tensions, ranging from the local vs. national dynamic to tightly managed central control vs. individual freedom of movement. Any interstate, then, can be expected to harbor some variations of consensus and of conflict. Certainly, as we shall see, the local vs. national tension plays out in the case of the Capital Beltway, but even stronger is the tension between unity and division: the highway literally bridges two states (and a federal district), and must by definition bring them together even as its strings are being pulled by separate administrations with drastically different planning philosophies. 48 Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57-64. 49 Dickson, 15. 25 The challenge here is to the promise contained in the Beltway's inaugural address, delivered by Federal Highway Administrator Rex M. Whitton, proclaiming that "Interstate 495 is ... a huge wedding ring for the metropolitan area, uniting all of its suburbs .... Here on this Beltway we have seen cooperation between levels of government at its best. 1150 Has the Beltway indeed functioned as a unifying device and a symbol of governmental cooperation? As to Whitton's wedding ring, the Beltway had been opened less than two years before the AAA convened a "Beltway Forum" at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History to address the question "Golden Ring or Vicious Circle?"51 After years of increasing traffic, Whitton's promise was not forgotten; in 1989 an AAA spokesperson said that "[t]he road that was heralded as a wedding ring around Washington is now 25 years old, and a lot ofus want a divorce." 52 Nor did the Beltway so easily bring together the governments of multiple jurisdictions, as Whitton intimated in 1964. In 1973, for example, President Richard Nixon proposed a national 50 mile per hour speed limit as an energy-saving measure. At the time, the Beltway's Woodrow Wilson Bridge was posted at 60 miles per hour. But the bridge ran through three area jurisdictions, each of which had a separate plan: Virginia, whose governor had rejected Nixon's proposal and imposed a statewide limit of 55 miles per hour, planned to post its section of bridge at 55; Maryland planned to 50 Rex M. Whitton, "The Minus-Ten-Minute Road: Remarks by Rex M. Whitton, Federal Highway Administrator, Bureau of Public Roads, U.S. Department of Commerce, at the dedication of the Maryland section of the Capital Beltway, Interstate Route 495, August 17, 1964," typescript, photocopy in possession of the author. 51 "Capital Beltway: Golden Ring or Vicious Circle?" Fairfax City Times, 19 November 1965: 3. 52 Greg Henderson, "What Has Lines That Show, Is Only 25 Yrs. Old and People Run Over It?" Northern Virginia Sun, 17 August 1989: 1. 26 impose a 50 miles per hour limit; Washington planned for 45; and none of the three wanted to compromise. 53 Similar tensions and necessitated compromises have accompanied the Beltway since long before it opened to traffic. The fourth question addresses these and other tensions: In relation to the social systems it affects, in what ways does the Capital Beltway function as an arena of consensus and of conflict, of unity and of division? Finally, in his pioneering study of U.S. 40, George Stewart highlights the importance of what the National Road meant to the people using it. To study the New Jersey Turnpike, Gillespie and Rockland adopt Stewart's approach and expand it to include the roles the turnpike played in the lives of its designers, administrators, toll collectors, police, and neighbors. This perspective recognizes-as most of the highway studies cited above do not-that roads play integral parts in individuals' lives, and in fact contribute to structuring people's thoughts and decisions. The focus here is not on the physical construction of the road, which can be understood by studying its planning and engineering, but on its social construction, or how the road exists in the minds of the people whose lives intertwine with it. Among the 607 individuals who responded to a survey I conducted as part of this study, discussed in greater detail in Chapters 2 and 8, many commented that the Beltway was extremely dangerous, that "everything costs more inside," or that the crime rate is higher inside the Beltway.54 Whether or not thes·e assertions are statistically accurate, they are true within the individual worlds of the people who believe them. It is 53 Paul Hodge and Helen Dewar, "Energy Moves Draw Mixed Reaction: Virginia Speed Limit Set at 55 m.p.h. ," Washington Post, 27 November 1973: Al. 54 Beltway Survey #543. 27 still important, certainly, to assess the accuracy and significance of this type of claim, just as it is to understand the physical construction of a highway and its ramifications. At the same time, the social construction of the road-what it means in the minds of the people associated with it-should not be discounted, because it is that version of the road, as well as its physical iteration, which drives individuals' emotions and decisions. The fifth question addresses this social construction: How is the Beltway perceived and experienced by the individuals whose lives intertwine with it? How has it influenced their lives and identities. and how have they. in turn, influenced the Beltway? These are the five central questions which I developed and kept in mind when beginning my study, to help me analyze the Beltway from an odological approach. However, as my research progressed, I realized that a sixth question was equally important. In ethnographic case studies, researchers interact with specific sets of people and learn about their beliefs, values, and concerns, which by definition cannot be fully anticipated. The researchers then are able to address and analyze these previously unidentified questions and issues which are important to their informants. (I discuss ethnographic method in further detail in the next chapter.) During the course of my study, it became apparent that the people I was interviewing and the respondents filling out my Web survey were not especially concerned about the same issues I was, the ones addressed in the five questions above. Instead, what they wanted to know, over and over, was why the traffic on the Beltway is so abysmal, and what I could suggest for improving the situation. At first I explained politely that this was not the question I was looking to answer. But after seeing that this concern was shared by the different groups I studied-commuters, truckers, police, fire 28 and rescue crews, planners-I realized this question was not incidental, and is important to address in order to more fully understand how people perceive the Beltway and incorporate it into their daily decisions. Drawing on my informants' concerns, then, I ask this unanticipated sixth question: Why is traffic on the Capital Beltway so bad, and what can be done for improvement? Each of the six approaches represented by these questions guides at least one of the odologies discussed earlier-Gillespie's and Rockland's study of the New Jersey Turnpike incorporates informants' concerns in a way similar to what I have done with my sixth question- but no single study includes all six. In this study, I bring them together for a single highway, a road which has almost subversively reshaped the lives and thoughts of so many individuals, and "which not only has become firmly entrenched in the Washington area [and national] lexicon ... it has become an infamous-and unavoidable-part of Washington area life."55 Organization My study is divided into ten chapters, some of which are heavily historical and descriptive while others are much more experiential and analytical. Here in Chapter l, I have introduced the guiding questions and theoretical frameworks underlying this dissertation, and explained my approach to odology. Chapter 2, "'Most of Those Involved ... Are Dead': Selection and Implementation of Study Methods," goes into 55 Sue Anne Pressley, "The Beltway: Region's Main Street, Main Pain," Washington Post, 14 March 1986: Al. 29 further detail about my research tools, including cultural landscape analysis, documentary analysis, ethnography, and Web surveys. Chapter 3, "'There Was Just No Easy Way to Get Anywhere': Washington's Transportation in the 1950s," sets the scene for the creation of the Capital Beltway. Looking first nationally and then regionally, I discuss the origin of circumferential highways and examine how the Beltway fit into both the developing Interstate Highway System and the Washington metropolitan transportation network. Drawing on responses from the Web survey, I look at how some Washington area residents traveled around the region before the Beltway, and how their options then structured their lives in ways different from how the Beltway would later change them. In Chapter 4, "'A Huge Wedding Ring for the Metropolitan Area': The Coming of the Capital Beltway," I provide the first in-depth discussion of the Beltway's development and construction in Maryland and Virginia. Using my interviews with ten of its original engineers, survey responses from residents who watched the highway's development, and primary documentary sources, I examine the planning and building of the Beltway from 1952 to 1964. Chapter 5, "'This Was a Nice Place': Conflict and Anger," concentrates on the conflicts and the perceived inequities created by the Beltway's construction, which until now have received virtually no attention. Through case examinations of Cabin John, Silver Spring, and especially Rock Creek Park, I show how the Beltway divided some neighbors and communities even as it brought others together. I use selections from personal interviews and survey responses to highlight the magnitude of the Beltway's 30 negative impact on certain individuals' lives, and contrast these with the positive assessments discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 4, "A Huge Wedding Ring," explains how Maryland and Virginia each built a distinct road which connected in a ring, and Chapter 5, "This Was a Nice Place," focuses on the conflicts and frustrations which individual area residents felt about different aspects of the Beltway. In Chapter 6, "'I Am Being Raped by VDOT': Virginia's and Maryland's Struggle for Consensus," I turn to the transportation planning process to examine how both states have tried to address both of these dynamics, how they attempt to reach consensus with each other and with their own residents. I bring the reader into the world of contemporary Beltway planning and show how Maryland's State Highway Administration and Virginia's Department of Transportation currently bring the public into their development processes, as well as how they attempt, and with what degree of success, to coordinate with each other. By applying detailed rhetorical analysis to a public presentation given by a VDOT official, I explain how Virginia residents in particular continue to feel excluded from the transportation planning process even though officials correctly-in a way-believe they are allowing residents to participate in unprecedented ways. Moving to the highway itself, Chapter 7, "'A Deer Doesn't Stand a Chance': Good Calls, Bad Calls, 10-45s, and the Physical World ofl-495," examines the road in its identity as a physical artifact. Drawing on my cultural landscape study model, personal interviews, and survey responses, I explore how the intersection of the three components of a landscape (nature, artifacts, and humans) characterize the Beltway. I 31 conclude by looking carefully for absences-for who does not have access to the Beltway-and the ramifications of those absences. Chapter 8, "'The Beltway Alone Will Prevent Me From Returning': The Capital Beltway and/in Individual Lives," turns from the Beltway's physical to its social construction, and focuses on how individuals perceive the highway and how it influences and structures their thoughts and lives. This chapter draws the most heavily on the Web survey, for which I discuss the demographic breakdown. In Chapter 9, "'Surrender Dorothy': Roles and Effects of the Beltway," I shift the emphasis on the Beltway's social construction to examine what roles it has played on a collective (rather than individual) level. I show how the Beltway has served in multiple ways as a venue of both community and conflict, as a template on which people can promote their values and beliefs, as a site of negotiation between public and private space, as a vehicle for creation and maintenance ofregional identity, and as a site for mediation and compromise in inter-jurisdictional cooperation. I conclude with a brief overview of the Beltway's economic and political effects on the Washington area. Chapter 10, "'What the Pave Meant': Coming Full Circle," brings the study to a close by reviewing my guiding questions, considering my answers and conclusions, and looking to the future. I also offer reflections on the effectiveness and limitations of my study methods, and suggest what remains to be done in the way of Beltway and odological research. Finally, I explain why neither I nor highway officials can solve the challenge more of my survey respondents raised than any other concern-how to ameliorate Beltway traffic-and reflect on what my response means for the people whose lives intersect with the Beltway. 32 CHAPTER2 "MOST OF THOSE INVOLVED .. . ARE DEAD": SELECTION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF STUDY METHODS In beginning my research for this study, I expected to draw on previous work examining the Beltway's central role in the daily lives of Washington-area residents and its regional and national significance. I was surprised to discover that the road's effects have been largely unexplored. Through five years of research, no one I spoke with indicated having been approached for or having participated in a similar research project; in fact, some retired engineers were surprised and pleased that someone came to ask about their work for the first time in decades. Yet there have been a few attempts to go down this path before: Larry Van Dyne' s articles for the Washingtonian magazine and George Grier's demographic analyses of the 1970s at least made a start, as has Yale undergraduate Rebecca Benefiel's work.56 A more extensive and multifaceted study, though, has clearly been lacking. There is, of course, a full shelf of traffic-oriented studies for the Beltway, but not much more than that. This paucity in part derives from the difficulties inherent in studying the Beltway, which I address below, but I believe it also speaks to the compartmentalization of knowledge in academia, which often discourages the study of complicated phenomena from more than a single discipline' s established approach. To study the Capital Beltway from strictly a planning, engineering, architectural, 56 Van Dyne, "Getting There;" Grier, "Washington"; Rebecca Benefiel, "Intention and Reality: The Planning of the Capital Beltway and its Impact on the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area, 1950-2000," unpublished paper, Yale University, December 2000. Cited with permission of the author. 33 geographic, historical, or sociological perspective, as other studies of beltways have done and which I summarize in Chapter 9, would be to miss much of its complexity. This project, in contrast, is explicitly an interdisciplinary work of American Studies. In her 1988 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Linda Kerber argued that American Studies "is positioned well to move toward issues that by their nature do not settle well into traditional disciplines. 1157 I believe that the Capital Beltway, understood as a cultural phenomenon, is such an "issue." Each of the approaches I incorporate in this study could function alone to guide research, and as such it might seem more appropriate to situate this work within a planning or a cultural geography context, for instance. But by grounding my research in American Studies, a field which encourages a careful selection of cross-disciplinary methodological and theoretical frameworks, I incorporate and apply useful approaches originating from several disciplines to understand more thoroughly the complexity of my object of study. However, this is easier said than done. What does it mean to study a highway from an American Studies perspective? The only examples of such full-length studies are Gillespie and Rockland's analysis of the New Jersey Turnpike, which explicitly references American Studies figures such as John Kouwenhoven and Leo Marx, and Davis's work on the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway. Neither of these works addresses all the questions I have posed towards the Capital Beltway, leaving me to chart my own path. In this study, I combine approaches from cultural landscape analysis, documentary analysis, planning history, and ethnography to create a framework for studying a highway from an American Studies foundation. 57 Linda K. Kerber, "Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies," American Quarterly 41 (1989): 425. 34 Cultural landscape analysis Drawing on cultural geography, material culture studies, historical ecology, and other disciplines, cultural landscape analysis focuses on the dynamic relationships among the people, the objects, and the non-human natural components of a given site. In an odology context, this approach helped me think about roads in interdisciplinary tenns, rather than in the tenns of single fields ( e.g., engineering or geography). This analytical approach also encouraged me to ask questions which explored the issues raised in the odology questions introduced in the last chapter, thus serving as a substantive and detailed study model for answering those broader and more abstract questions. Since 1995, I have been developing and refining a fieldwork model for cultural landscape analysis. This examination of the Capital Beltway is an extensive case study testing and applying that model, and an example for other researchers interested in roads and other types of landscapes who may find this approach useful in their own analyses. The full fieldwork model includes five operations, each with several subheadings and with sets of study questions for guidance. The complete version of the model appears in Appendix A, and may be used to study a wide variety of cultural landscapes. Here in Chapter 2, I provide a basic outline of the operations and subheadings (Table 1), and note how I apply them to a highway landscape in the course of this study. 35 Table 1.---Cultural Landscape Fieldwork Model (2002 revision) Operation 1. Description of dimensions 2. Boundaries 3. Perceptions 4. Dynamic relationship 5. Cultural analysis Sub-operation a. Physical 1) Hwnans 2) Artifacts, and/or 3) Non-hwnan natural components b. Multisensozy c. Spiritual/sacred a. Set in time and space b. Creators and alterers identified c. Exp~riential ~s: abstract (if applicable) d. Social vs. political (if applicable) a. Identify b. Aesthetics c. Cognitive landscapes d. Language and terminology e. Spatial relationships a. Hwnans as agents b. Nature as agent c. Artifacts as agents a. Cultural context & significance evaluated b. Power and access dynamics 1) Competing meanings 2) Images and representation c. Identity analysis d. Absent components e. Variable survivability (if applicable) f. Technology g. Role of the researcher The model's first operation, description of dimensions, introduces several complementary ways to think about and define a specific cultural landscape. First, the physical dimensions of a landscape include its humans, its artifacts (i.e., objects purposefully shaped by people), and its non-human natural components; the people can 36 further be divided into individuals physically present within a site and those who significantly influence it but occupy separate space. In this study, I carry out this step intermittently rather than in one self-contained section, by introducing components of the landscape as appropriate in different contexts. Over the course of Chapters 2 through 9, I discuss people associated with the Beltway including its designers, engineers, planners, neighbors, maintenance workers, police, and fire and rescue crews. I focus in Chapter 7 on the distinction between people inside and outside the landscape in separate analyses of police and emergency crews (inside) and traffic controllers (outside). Similarly, I discuss artifactual and non-human natural components throughout the study, but especially in Chapter 7 where I explore how they contribute to danger and safety. Additional dimensions of a cultural landscape include its multisensory and its sacred qualities. While I look at the Beltway primarily in visual tenns, I also address how it functions as a soundscape by discussing sound walls and neighbors' reactions to the Beltway's noise. I do not approach the highway in depth in tenns of its sacred dimensions, though I do introduce in Chapter 9 the way in which a local church has appropriated the Beltway as a spiritual template. Analysis of this dimension may be more useful in studying other types of cultural landscapes. The second operation focuses on defining boundaries. In this operation, the researcher sets boundaries for the site in terms of space and time; identifies creators and alterers to those boundaries; addresses whether the boundaries are experiential (determined and perceived though concrete experience) or abstract; and looks at whether they are social (defined by those within it) or political (defined from without). 37 This study covers the Beltway's first 50 years, beginning in 1952 with the first planning meetings in which the highway was seriously discussed, and concluding in 2001, the most recent full year of operation. I focus on the evolution of the highway's boundaries by studying how the road's original engineers and draftsmen created it, how its neighbors contributed to the process, and how later generations of planners and neighbors have tried to change the appearance and boundaries. In my detailed discussion of the Beltway's design and construction process, I focus on engineers and draftsmen who saw the highway either in abstract terms or in experiential ones, and on the circumstances underlying their respective approaches. I later address the distinction between the Beltway as a political versus a social boundary by examining the tension between local residents and outsiders over the term "inside the Beltway." The third operation looks at people's perceptions of the cultural landscape. Steps within this operation encourage the researcher to identify varying perceptions of the landscape, issues of aesthetics and taste, cognitive landscapes (i.e., mental conceptions of landscapes perhaps differing from those sites' physical forms), language and terminology, and spatial relationships. By drawing on my Web survey and on face-to- face interviews, both of which I address later in this chapter, I introduce individuals' perceptions and cognitive versions of the Beltway throughout the study, but emphasize them most strongly in Chapter 8 in discussing how perceptions rather than specific events or statistics guide major decisions some people make with respect to the Beltway. In Chapter 7, I explore the Beltway's aesthetics in discussions of the highway's artifactual and non-human natural components, and look at the spatial relationships between the Beltway and its workers and users. I focus in detail on the exact language 38 used in discourse about the Beltway in my discussion of ongoing planning processes in Chapter 6, identifying the words and phrases used by engineers and by residents at public planning workshops, and analyzing the implications of those choices. The fourth operation of the study model looks at the dynamic relationship among the physical components of the cultural landscape. How, this step asks, do the humans, the artifacts, and the non-human natural components of a site influence each other? Throughout this study, I address a variety of ways in which the Beltway's natural elements (e.g., topography, wildlife, precipitation), artifacts (e.g., bridges, signs, guardrails), and people (e.g., engineers, neighbors, police) have interacted with one another. I most thoroughly investigate these interactions in Chapter 7, which includes separate discussions of the agency, or influence, put forth by each group of components. The fifth operation, cultural analysis; relates the cultural landscape to the social, political, economic, or cultural contexts surrounding it, and asks what ideologies, meaning systems, social systems, shared beliefs, and attitudes toward nature and people the landscape can help the researcher to understand. Subheadings in this operation suggest analyzing dynamics of power and access, competing meanings of a landscape, its images and representations, issues of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality), components absent from the landscape, variable survivability (i.e., components which may not be representative oflarger patterns because they survive from earlier eras), technology, and the role of the researcher. · In this study, I preface my examination of the Beltway with discussion of the historical and cultural context surrounding its development; Chapter 3 looks at the history of beltways and the Interstate Highway System and at the state of transportation 39 in the Washington area in the 1950s. As the study progresses, I analyze the significance of my observations on an ongoing basis, with summation in the concluding chapter. I focus on issues of power, access, and contested meanings in discussions of the Beltway's neighbors and engineers and their respective roles and interactions in planning processes from 1959 to 2001, in Chapters 5 and 6. I look at representations of the Beltway in Chapter 9, emphasizing its differences in national and local discourse. In examining who does not have access to the Beltway and does not stand to benefit from it as strongly as others, I focus on both class issues and absent components in Chapter 7. My discussions of the original design process, in Chapter 4, and the constant replacement over time of objects ( e.g., signs· and guardrails) with modernized versions, in Chapter 7, speak to the role technology has played in the Beltway's development. Finally, later in this chapter I address in detail the dynamics associated with my position as researcher in this project. Together, these five operations, which are described in greater detail in Appendix A, structure much of the substance of the study, although I do not perform them sequentially. As the study progresses, I relate certain observations and analyses back to this fieldwork model, and in Chapter 10, I offer some thoughts on which steps were particularly useful and whichwere not for this case study. This framework, however, suggests analyzing the contexts and components of cultural landscapes without offering specific methods for approaching those contexts or components. For complementary study methods, I turned to documentary analysis, planning history, ethnography, and Web surveys. 40 Documentary analysis and planning history Roads, like other cultural artifacts and social institutions, generate written texts. Documentation relating to the Beltway includes such primary sources as planning materials and contemporary newspaper accounts as well as secondary sources including historical and geographic analyses. The documentary record, in conjunction with the landscape and with other sources I will discuss shortly, helps answer the questions I introduced in the odology and cultural landscape analysis frameworks. However, although it is a prominent road, documentation for the Capital Beltway is remarkably difficult to track down, especially for its early years. The problem begins with its provenance: the Beltway has never had any central administrative authority. Various elements of its oversight have fallen to the federal government (the Bureau of Public Roads, later the Federal Highway Administration); the states of Maryland and Virginia; the District of Columbia; the City of Alexandria (Virginia); Fairfax (Va.), Prince George's (Md.), and Montgomery (Md.) Counties; and the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC).58 But the Beltway's many tentacles do not translate into a wealth of reference material. Paul Dickson wrote in 1973 that 58 Throughout this study, I refer regularly to the NCPC and the M-NCPPC, both of which are somewhat unique agencies. Here is a brief overview of each: The Maryland General Assembly established the M-NCPPC in 1927 to perform planning and to administer parks in parts of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. The agency's membership consists of five members apiece from the Montgomery County and Prince George's County Planning Boards. The M-NCPPC today has planning authority over most of the land area and population in both counties, and is 41 ironically, in a city dripping with statistics, there are none on the area's most important traffic artery. The Beltway has no central repository for information about itself. [AAA staffer Glenn] Lashley says, "You'd probably have to make 20 phone calls to all the various police departments and agencies which have a piece of the answer you want, and even then your information would probably be incomplete. 59 Nearly 30 years later, written records for the Beltway remain dispersed in many locations. In this study, I draw from the archives of the National Capital Planning Commission and the Maryland-National Capital Park & Planning Commission, the special collections in the Fenwick Library at George Mason University, the Marylandia and archives collection of the University of Maryland Libraries, the Virginia Room of the Fairfax County Public Library, the Maryland Room in the Hyattsville Branch of the Prince George's County Memorial Library system, and materials from the Virginia Department of Transportation's (VDOT's) reference collections. Unfortunately, my archival research revealed that both Maryland's State Highway Administration (SHA) and the M-NCPPC have in all likelihood discarded their written records pertinent to the Beltway's construction and early years (some M-NCPPC records may survive, but its funded primarily by property taxes. See the Commission's home page, online, at . The NCPC is a federal agency which provides overall planning guidance for federal and District of Columbia government land and buildings in the National Capital Region, which includes all jurisdictions through which the Capital Beltway passes. The NCPC has separate responsibilities from the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB) of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), which is the designated metropolitan planning organization for the Washington region and which I address in Chapter 9. NCPC members include key federal executive and congressional leaders, the D.C. mayor and the D.C. Council chair, and three appointees by the U.S. president and two by the D.C. mayor. The agency comments on non-federal projects that affect the federal presence in the Washington region, and facilitates consultation between state, local, and federal officials on plans for federal properties. See the NCPC's home page, online, at . 59 Dickson, 16. 42 archive collection, uncatalogued ar_id with closed stacks and extremely limited staffing, makes such determination almost impossible). From the repositories above and others, the sources I use include books , Journals, magazines, planning documents, highway maps and publicity materials, oral histories, brochures, songs, and poems. I draw extensively from the Washington livening Star and Washington Post in large part because they are among the only area newspapers with long-running indexes available to the public. 60 In addition, Richard F. Weingroff of the Federal Highway Administration granted me access to his extensive vertical files which hold a variety of materials including brochures, maps, and newspaper clippings. Documents from various stages of the Beltway's planning processes, from 1952 through 2001, comprise some of my key primary sources. Planning history helps me interpret the significance of these documents as weU as the planning meetings I attended and which I describe in detail in Chapter 6. Here my thinking is informed by four avenues of research suggested by Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, who suggest the following approach to studying planning history: first, use interdisciplinary approaches to study specific episodes of planning development and implementation; second, uncover and analyze the beliefs and assumptions which have driven planners 60 Ihe Washington Post is indexed from 1971 onward in The Washington Po~ Newspaper Index (Wooster, Oh.: Bell and Howell, 1971-19~8), .The Official .:Washington Post Index (Woodbridge, Conn. : Research Pubhc~t10ns, 1979-1988), and .Washington Post Index (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1989-). S~bJect~based indexing is available for the Evening Star from 1852 through 1972; the mdex is a microfilmed set of index cards which constituted the Star's in-house refe.rence system and which was donated to the D.C. Public Library after the Star folded m 1 ~81. In addition, The Washington Times is indexed for several years in The Washington Times Index (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1986-1993). 43 and policymakers; third, address the impact of planning and development initiatives on urban dwellers themselves, especially those marginalized from decision making processes; and fourth, study the built environment itse1£ 61 In recent decades planners and planning historians have begun to study the social and cultural effects of highways from these directions, but to date these efforts have focused predominantly on inner-city freeways. 62 My study extends this approach to include a suburban highway, the Beltway, and addresses Sies's and Silver's four points in the course of exploring the questions raised in the odology and cultural landscape study models. Ethnography Most of the works on roads which I discussed in Chapter 1 analyze highways of the past, and therefore rely heavily on written records. The contributors to Karl Raitz's anthology on the National Road, for example, could not ask nineteenth-century travelers about their thoughts and feelings; they were limited to drawing conclusions from surviving documentation. Because the Beltway is sti11 a functioning highway, and because my study covers its operation in the very recent past, I had the opportunity to 61 Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, "Pl~ng History and the New American Metropolis, 11 in Planning the Twentieth-Ce~tury ~1ty, ~d. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 450. 62 • See, for example, Cliff Ellis! "Vi~ions of Urban Fr~ewars,,,193~-1~70," Ph.D. dissertation University ofCal1fonua, Berkeley, 1990, Ellis, Profess10nal Conflict Ov Urban Fo~: The Case of Urban Freeways, !930 to 1~70," in Pl~ng the Twentieth- er Century City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher SI1~er (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 262-279; and Ra)?Ilo~d ~ohl? 11 ~ace and Spa.ce i? the Modem City: Interstate-95 and the Black Community m Miami, m Urban Policy m Twentieth- Century America, ed. Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 100-158. 44 use individuals as firsthand sources and to ask them directly how the Beltway affected their lives and what experiences they had with it. My informants' words complemented my written data and my observations of the landscape. To collect and interpret contributions from live individuals, I incorporated elements of ethnography into my study. This mode of inquiry, developed within anthropology, seeks to understand the meaning systems and worldviews of distinct sets of people (defined by ethnicity, religion, avocation, or other common denominator) through participant observation and interviewing, in which the researcher spends extensive time interacting with group members, thus simultaneously observing and participating in their everyday lives. Here, my cultural set comprises numerous different individuals whose lives have in some way intertwined with the Capital Beltway, a broad and loosely-defined cluster. In this study, I use visits to the field, 44 face-to-face and phone interviews with 54 people, and 607 Web survey responses, as cyberculture ethnographer David Silver puts it, to "get a detailed sense of how particular individuals understand, conceptualize, and talk about [the Beltway] from their points of view, in their language-concept systems."63.My interviews and survey responses also brought to light additional written materials, particularly maps and planning documents, of which I was previously unaware. Anthropologist Michael Agar further explains that "language carries with it patterns of seeing, knowing, talking, and acting .... Different words signal a different 63 David Michael Silver, "Cyberspace Under Construction: Design, Discourse, and Diversity in the Blacksburg Electronic Village and in the Seattle Community Network," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2000, 236. The discrepancy between number of interviews conducted ( 44) and number of informants ( 54) results from several of the interviews taking place with groups of informants. 45 mentality, a different way of looking at things,"64 Accordingly, I pay close attention to the language used by my informants to help me understand how they conceptualize and experience the Beltway differently, how they apply different patterns of seeing and knowing.65 Along the same lines, and following ethnographic convention, I cite my informants extensively, and include my own thoughts and experiences in the first person as well. In this study, I draw on both my 607 Web survey responses and my 44 interviews, but I go into more depth on certain individuals' experiences and beliefs with respect to the latter group, in order to avoid some of the potential problems that can result from generating conclusions from a large pool. Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod writes that when one generalizes from experiences and conversations with a number of specific people in a community, one tends to flatten out differences among them and to homogenize them .... The effort to produce general ethnographic descriptions of people's beliefs or actions tends to smooth over contradictions, conflicts of interest, and doubts and arguments, not to mention changing , , d . 66 mot1vat1ons an circumstances. Instead, Abu-Lughod recommends giving attention to understanding how a particular, small set of people experience a certain community and its institutions, by "showing the 64 Michael Agar, Culture Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 71, 89. 65 My approach to ethnography and to its emphasis on the meaning systems of group members derives primarily from Agar, Culture Shock; John L. Caughey, Negotiating Cultures and Identities: A Life History Approach (Wilmington, Del. : SR Books, forthcoming); Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979). 66 Lila Abu-Lughod, "Writing Against Culture," in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), 152-153. 46 actual circumstances and detailed histories of individuals and their relationships. 1167 I move in that direction, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, but there and elsewhere I address my informants' life histories~aptivating in and ofthemselves--only briefly in the context of their connection to the Beltway. To identify potential informants for more recent time periods, I spoke with individuals at SHA in Maryland and VDOT in Virginia to learn which engineers, planners, and maintenance supervisors were currently or recently responsible for the Beltway. My Web survey turned up additional informants, including individuals who lived next to the Beltway and who served as emergency medical technicians on the highway. However, the people who designed and built the Beltway in the first place were harder to find. John E. Harwood, then chief engineer of Virginia, warned in 1972-almost 25 years before I began this study-that "[u]nraveling the story of how the [Beltway's] plans were made two decades ago is difficult ... because most of those involved have retired. In fact ... most of them are dead. 1168 Even those designers who are still living sometimes hesitate to step forward. *Sidney Miller, one of the principal designers of the original Virginia portion of the Beltway, began our first conversation by downplaying his contributions and insisting that I use a pseudonym: First of all, let me say this. In terms of, if you want to give credit to anything, it's obviously the firm I worked for that deserves the credit for this, and not necessarily me as an individual because there were other individuals who were at that time, at the beginning of this, that were in a much more, obviously, senior position. From senior partners down to project managers down to lowly 67 Ibid., 153. 68 David R. Boldt, "Beltway: Planning Problem," Washington Post, 26 December 1972: Bl. 47 young engineers like myself .... I could give you lots of names, but they really wouldn't mean anything. Just like my name shouldn't mean anything. It's the firm, more or less, that did the work .... I mean, there are many, many people that I could give names to, but I don't think my name or their names mean much in terms of the historical development ofthings.69 As in any study involving live people, I had the additional challenge of persuading my potential informants, once I located them, to participate in this project. Here my personal background came into play, as this study took on somewhat of a community history bent. On a smaller scale, grade-school students are often assigned to travel through their community, interview old-timers, and document the town's history and flavor. This study is, for me, a ·larger version of the same task. As a lifelong resident of suburban Maryland, the Beltway has always been a part of my social community, and that experience played a key role in my informants' willingness to speak to me. William Arney, citing the educational philosopher Ivan Illich, introduces the geographic concept of "a circle with a radius of 22 kilometers (about 14 miles) that Ivan Illich calls a 'Kohr' to honor Leopold Kohr and that is, many seem to agree, the geographical area that one person can actually come to know and care about over time."70 The Beltway, with a radius of about 8 to 10 miles, roughly defines my "Kohr." Time and again the highway officials, police officers, or residents I spoke with during my research grew visibly more comfortable when I said something which demonstrated my familiarity with the area. My affiliation with the University of Maryland was usually a golden key (which is one reason why I chose to position this project from that 69 Interview with *Sidney Miller, 6 February 2001. In this study, I refer to informants who requested anonymity by using an asterisk (*) next to the first appearance of their names in each chapter. 70 William Ray Arney, Thoughts Out of School (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 155. 48 - institution); almost everyone I spoke to in Maryland, and some in Virginia, had some story to tell about their own or their child's or friend's experiences at the university. My academic training in transportation planning opened additional doors, as highway planners and engineers spoke more freely once they heard me speaking their language. Name-dropping also helped; references to my conversations with respected engineers and officials quickly opened heavy doors and reluctant mouths. The beginning of my meeting with Larry Kidwell, a facility maintenance supervisor for Maryland's State Highway Administration, is indicative: Korr: I've managed to talk with Bill Shook and Slade Caltrider- Kidwell: No kidding [smiles]! Korr: -and some of the original engineers- Kidwell: Slade. I remember Slade very well. I tell you what, I wish he was around now. Because he was a fair man. He was tough and persistent, but he was fair. 71 My willingness to share information about myself, on my website and in media reports, increased the comfort level of some of my informants. One individual, for example, responded to my Web survey only because he read on my website, which was linked to the survey, that I was a fellow banjo player. Finally, some people I spoke with, particularly the Beltway's immediate neighbors and a few of the original designers, were simply eager to have a chance to tell their stories. Web Surveys: Reversing the traditional dynamics 71 Interview with Larry Kidwell, 20 March 2001. 49 Using traditional ethnographic techniques, I spent time watching a set of people and listening to how they articulate and conceptualize the Beltway's role in their lives. However, these procedures required extensive time to learn about a few individuals. While this approach is valuable for the depth of understanding it can allow, other methods offer the opportunity to learn about more people over a smaller period of time. In her recent ethnographic study of World War I reenactors, Americanist Jenny Thompson supplements her face-to-face interviews with a written survey she has sent to 500 reenactors.72 In this study, I follow her lead by incorporating a survey in addition to personal interviews, but unlike Thompson, I elect to use a Web survey, distributed and returned over the Internet. This research tool was just emerging as I began this study and has developed concomitantly with my work: a recent review of the Web survey field cites 71 references, 58 of which were published after I began my research in 1996.73 For her study, Thompson collected the names and addresses of over 500 World War I reenactors from a fairly small overall pool of possible informants. Using several sources, she was able to identify individual reenactors with minimal difficulty. But my study has a far larger pool, because "individuals whose lives are somehow associated with the Capital Beltway" encompasses millions of people in Washington and far beyond. One option was to choose a finite number of individuals who live within a certain distance of the Beltway and to mail them a written survey. But I hoped to 72 Jenny Thompson, "Common Soldiers: An Ethnography of Twentieth-Century War Reenactors," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland at College Park, 1999. 73 Mick P. Couper, "Web Surveys: A Review oflssues and Approaches," Public Opinion Quarterly 64 (Winter 2000): 491-494. 50 receive responses from people I had no obvious way to identify: individuals who drove on the Beltway's opening day, who built its bridges, who had unique experiences on it. Sending a written survey to a random sample would almost certainly not bring in that range of responses. But a Web survey might, and did. Mick Couper notes the benefits of using this nontraditional approach: Not only can researchers get access to undreamed of numbers of respondents at dramatically lower costs than traditional methods, but members of the general population too can put survey questions on dedicated sites offering free services and collect data from potentially thousands of people. The ability to conduct large-scale data collection is no longer restricted to organizations at the center of power in society, such as governments and large corporations. The relatively low cost of conducting Web surveys essentially puts the tool in the hands of almost every person with access to the Internet, potentially fully democratizing the survey-taking process.74 Certainly using a Web survey saved me money over printing and distributing a traditional paper survey. But beyond that, it allowed open access to as many informants as wanted to reply-perhaps not appropriate for a quantitative analysis, but ideal for a cultural study where each individual's words contribute toward understanding the overall meanings and beliefs of the groups to which they belong. At least two other surveys collecting people's thoughts and attitudes to the Beltway preceded mine. Shortly after the Beltway's 1964 opening, the American Automobile Association (AAA) ran an advertisement in its magazine asking members to describe their experiences on the highway. Between 500 and 600 people responded, giving the AAA ammunition for urging specific steps to be taken to improve safety and 74 Ibid., 464-465. 51 traffic.75 I could not locate the responses to this survey, and in any case, that and some other AAA surveys are limited by their recipient pool, since only club members are invited to respond. 76 Without access to the responses, this survey was not a useful source for me. More useful is the report from a series of focus group sessions conducted by the Preusser Research Group for the U.S. Department of Transportation in August 1994. In these sessions, Preusser gathered 64 non-commercial drivers from Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, and 18 area commercial truck drivers. Preusser's quotas ensured a distribution of non-commercial drivers roughly proportional to the Beltway's overall driver populace in gender, age, residence, and frequency of Beltway use. The detailed responses echo many of the attitudes and experiences I found in the responses of my own informants, and I draw on Preusser's report-especially on the responses of the truck drivers, of whom I did not interview nearly as many-later in this study.77 In the five years of research for this study, not a single person I came into contact with made any mention of either of these previous Beltway surveys, suggesting that they are effectively unknown to both the public and the government. Using both Web surveys and paper surveys as models, I drew up a draft of my own survey in early 2000 and, after taking HTML classes to learn how to program for 75 "50-M.P.H. Limit Urged for Beltway Section," Evening Star, 4 January 1966: B-4. 76 For a further (and somewhat dated) critique on the ways AAA uses its member surveys, see Richard Hebert, "How the AAA Uses Its Members to Pave the Way for More Freeways," Washingtonian, June 1970: 34-37, 61-63. 77 Preusser Research Group, Inc., "Drivers' Perception of Problems and Solutions: Report of Beltway User Focus Groups, September 20, 1994," in Capital Beltway Safety Team, Capital Beltway Safety Update (n.p.: [Virginia Department of Transportation,] 1994), 209-255. 52 the Web, coded the draft into a working HTML docwnent. Three rounds of pilot testing by friends and colleagues offered nwnerous critiques and suggestions. After making many revisions and testing the final draft on several computer platforms and monitors (because Web pages viewed through browsers appear differently when seen on different monitors or platforms), I launched the survey on my personal university Web page. A traditional paper survey goes directly to its recipients, who complete it if they choose and then return it to the researcher. For a Web survey, the dynamics are reversed. After mounting the survey on the Web, I had not actually sent it to anybody. Instead, anyone who chose could then respond directly to me by accessing and fiIIing out the survey. At that point, my challenge became how to publicize the survey and then to entice potential informants to respond to it. A question on the survey asking for how respondents learned about it allows me to trace how this process played out. I began by sending personal emails to virtually everyone I knew, encouraging them to forward the survey and to complete it themselves. I also posted a notice on two Usenet newsgroups, misc.transport.road and de.driving. These steps brought in over lOO responses. But my informant base really opened up when the media began to publicize for me, a strategy I was able to use because of my history within the Washington community and my positioning of this project as an academic endeavor. Bob Levey, who writes a regular column on community life for the Washington Post, at my request published a description ofmy research in progress and a suggestion to complete my Web survey. Reporters for smaller local newspapers read Levey's column and published their own articles. Other journalists read those smaller papers and contacted me for 53 further pieces, including one run in the Baltimore Sun and picked up by the Associated Press; that piece was then picked up by a number of other AP newspapers including the Washington Times and the Frederick (Md.) News-Post. Nonprintjoumalists also read the articles and asked me to appear on their programs; WRC-TV (NBC) displayed my survey's URL (its Web page address) while airing my interview, and WMAL-AM (ABC) put up a link to my survey on its own Web page while interviewing me live. Each of these episodes drew a group of respondents, many of whom forwarded the information to their own friends and families. I had hoped for this; as a result, the media did not so much publicize my research-in-progress as play an integral enabling role in it. 78 The breakdown of how each r~spondent learned about my survey appears below (note that the total number of sources does not equal the total number of respondents, because some identified more than one source and others listed none): Table 2.-Source for Finding Out About Web Survey (594 sources given) Source . Washington Post Directly from researcher Friend or neighbor WRC-TV (NBC) Co-worker WMAL-AM (ABC) Baltimore Sun or Sunspot.com Email (unspecified) N 189 83 65 51 35 28 26 25 7s S "St d t S k Help for Beltway History," Greenbelt (Md.) News Review, 19 ee u en ee s h' " w h' p 0 t b 2000· 4· B b Levey "Bob Levey's Was mgton, as mgton ost, 24 October c O er · , 0 ' • hn ff. "Th R d S h l B 2000: Cl 1, 31 October 2000: Cl I; Jessica L~s . 0 ' .e oa 8 c O ar: eltway D' · K UM Student in the Loop, Silver Sprmg (Md.) Gazette, 18 1ssertat10n eeps · h "Th R d M T I d II B · December 2000: A-1; and JoAnna Daemmnc ' e 0.a ore rave e , alt1more Sun, 23 January 2001: IA. 54 Gazette* 24 Family member 20 Usenet newsgroup 1 O College Park (UMCP alumni magazine) 7 Newspaper (unspecified) 6 Washington Times 4 Web surfing 3 Hungarian listserv 3 Researcher's high school alumni newsletter 3 Greenbelt News Review 2 Bowie Blade-News 1 Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star 1 Montgomery Journal 1 Truckinginfo.com 1 Trucking magazine 1 The Trucker newspaper 1 News story (unspecified) 1 University of Maryland Web page 1 Plastic.com 1 zdnet 1 * Gazette includes the Montgomery Gazette, Silver Spring Gazette, Rockville Gazette, College Park Gazette, Burtonsville Gazette, and other unspecified zoned editions. With help from the media, I received a total of 607 individual responses (by August 2001; the Web site remained active thereafter). In Chapter 8, I discuss in detail the demographic breakdown of respondents. It is difficult to compare the demographic characteristics of my respondents to the full set of people who interact with the Beltway because that set is so large (it begins with the roughly one million people each day who use the highway) and unknown (no one has accurately assessed the characteristics of its users in detail). Still, the tables in Chapter 8 indicate that my survey is not generally skewed toward particular demographic subsets, and my discussion in that chapter suggests explanations for the distributions that do occur. These distributions include some interesting parallels to broader trends; for example, the respective shares of 55 responses from Maryland and Virginia almost exactly mirrored their respective proportional shares of the Beltway's mileage. In interpreting the data contained within the replies, as weU as in structuring the survey in the first place, I had to account not only for the dynamics associated with traditional surveys, but also the unique concerns inherent to Web surveys. In his review of the field, Mick Couper breaks down this type of survey into eight categories; mine comes closest to his second type, what he calls "self-selected Web surveys. 11 This approach, he explains, "uses open invitations on portals," frequently visited Web sites, or (in some cases) dedicated 'survey' sites. This is probably the most prevalent fonn of Web survey today and potentially one of the most threatening to legitimate survey enterprises because of the claims for scientific validity that are sometimes made. 1179 Couper is justified in his concern that such open surveys, with no access restrictions and minimal control over multiple completions, are not "scientifically" valid. He offers examples to illustrate how the problems arising from this type of Web survey stem from extrapolations, when "inference or generalizations to [a target] population are based on leaps of faith rather than established statistical principles. 1180 However, he also notes that "[a]ny.critique of a particular Web survey approach must be d th 1 . ·t ak 1181 • done in the context of its intended purpose an e c aims 1 m es. Accordmgly, rather than generalize or make a leap of faith, I approach the survey responses from a cultural perspective. What does each response teU me about its writer'? How does each 79 Couper, 478-479. 80 Ibid., 477. 81 Ibid., 465. 56 person's individual context (or as much of it as they reveal to me) infonn their responses? What meanings systems and beliefs are apparent in those responses? I do not argue that my respondents' surveys are precisely representative of all Beltway drivers and critics. However, the respondents, who range across demographic categories and whose ideas and experiences I have in most cases corroborated from other sources, are most likely at least somewhat representative of the far greater group of people whose lives intertwine with the Beltway. Beyond his primary concern, Couper also lists four limitations present in all Web surveys. I introduce them here with a brief description of how I have accounted for each. First, coverage error refers to people missing for specific reasons from the target group being studied. For Web surveys, this includes most obviously anyone without access to the Internet or knowledge of what to do with it. I created my Web survey knowing that the percentage of Washington area residents who have Internet access is higher than in most metropolitan areas, such that I would have less of a deficiency in coverage than ifl were targeting the survey elsewhere; as of February 2000, 56.1 percent of regional residents had Internet access, the third highest rate in the nation. 82 Even so, I omitted a sizable portion of my potential infonnant pool by providing only an Internet fonn of the survey; some individuals familiar with my research, particularly elderly Washington area residents, told me explicitly that they could not participate 82 Michael Pastore, "America's Most Wired Cities," online, 12 April 2000, 57 because they are not Internet-literate, and others did not have access. The omission of this segment of my target pool is admittedly a weakness in my research approach. 83 Secondly, sampling error recognizes that not all members of the target population are measured, so that if I were to repeat my survey process, a different subset of Beltway users would respond. 84 This is more of a problem for probability- based survey designs, where a representative sample is used to generalize to the entire target population. Since I apply a non-probability, cultural approach instead, sampling error is not as significant an issue. To gauge whether the responses from my particular 607 respondents were plausible and at all representative of others' experiences and beliefs, I compared them to the data in other types of sources, especially personal interviews and primary records. In almost every case, I found that portions of the survey responses which at first seemed questionable--for example, Montgomery residents' level of concern at losing a supposedly treasured natural landmark to the Beltway, or the circulation of a racially derogatory nickname for the highway-were supported by other types of sources and were not the product of an eccentric, unique response. Measurement error, the third type of limitation, indicates the extent to which respondents' answers are their true answers to the questions the researcher believes he or she is asking. 85 I attempted to minimize respondent confusion by running my survey through three rounds of pilot testing, soliciting critique on the clarity of wording and visual layout, and revising in response to the critiques. Even so, in some cases 83 Couper, 467-473. 84 Ibid. , 467, 473. 85 Ibid., 475-476. 58 informants wrote that they did not understand my questi~n(s) or did not want to take the time to think through and answer certain questions. My specific instruction to respond to as many questions as the respondent desired was intended to make such informants feel more comfortable and recognize that I wo~d find their responses valuable even if they chose to answer selectively. Informants might still opt to answer inaccurately, as they could also for a paper survey or interview; in each case the researcher can only hope that most respondents choose to be truthful and compare responses to other sources of information. I expected that if the answers to any survey response appeared consistently implausible, I could discount the veracity of most of the response; this happened for only one of the 607 replies I received. In fact, I expected to receive a sizable portion of responses which were terse or characterized by exaggeration. I was surprised to find that most responses, instead, were thoughtful, plausible, and often emotional. The most convincing responses included the respondent's name, phone number, email address, and the details and emotions of specific and viable experiences. In some cases, the memories created unique links between the respondent and the Beltway, as in this excerpt from Michigan resident Doug Osmond: The area between New Hampshire Ave and the Potomac river is a favorite. In the summer of 1965, J was a summer.hire for the ~d ~tate Roads Commission and was responsible for the construct10n of the cham hnk fence that was put up on both sides of the beltway, in that area. I was a construction inspector, for the SRC and we worked with a fence crew th~t drove down from W. Virginia, everyday, to spend 12 or more hours working. on ~e fence. So, I always look out for that fence, most ofit gone now, when I drivem that area .... Also I have always had a special feeling to be able to sad6 that I was a part of the beltway construction, even if it was. only the fences. 86 Beltway Survey #265. 59 In other responses, I read intensely emotional accounts of how the Beltway affected one individual life after another. Arlington resident Kenneth P. James offers such an example: I have grown up almost exclusively in this area. The beltway has played a rather large role in my life, my families lives, and our travels. 5 years ago, my uncle Timothy Hughes, was killed while traveling home from work on the capital ' beltway. It happen~d just before 1?: overpass for go?d. luck road. It was early on a saturday morrung. He was dnvmg home from his Job at the University Of Maryland. He would typically take his son to work with him when he had to work on saturdays, but for some reason, he decided not to this particular saturday. He was killed do to someone else's ignorance, and lack of attention to driving. The one person that witnessed it, did not get the tag of the vehicle that caused the accident. He was in the far ri?ht lane (slow Jane) on the inner loop heading home to oxon hill. The person m the next lane over from him decided they wanted to get into his lane, without looking or signaling. Timothy swerved onto the shoulder to avoid an accident, and struck a parked tow truck, dead on in the rear, at about 60 mph. He was killed instantly. Some day, I think it would be appropriate to perhaps have a memorial to those who have died on the beltway. I'm sure it has claimed as many lives, as a small battle in the civil war.87 Both James and Osmond may have made up their stories, but I cannot identify any motive for doing so. Both accounts include plausible details of personal experiences and the writers' retrospective thoughts; while James's episode is sadder than Osmond's, neither stood to gain anything by fabricating. The following excerpt, in contrast, appears to blend fact and fiction: I was born in 1951, and we lived on the top of the hill, Parkwood Drive. All of Rock Creek stretched out for all us kids to play in ... for miles and miles, nothing but the most wonderful wild woods! Deer, snakes, coons, foxes, the creek full of sunnies and bass, clean water etc ... and we ran and ran fron:1 the moment the sun came up until way past dark. The woods was my whole childhood, my whole life and joy. Then, the bulldozers came, and the work men came. The[y J gutted our entire LIFE, for God's sakes. I was c?ase~ and damn near caught by some and then the parents forbade the girl children from even straying an inch men ... 87 Beltway Survey #407. 60 off the home property. I remember the workers brought beer and whiskey and guns. They shot every creature that moved, killed snakes and nailed them on trees. Right behind our house they dynamited out our "Gold Mine" and completely changed the course of the creek. They burned off many acres, tore out as many trees as they could ... well, it was a total rape. A slashing. To retaliate, we kids saved our money, bought several bags of sugar, and in the dead of a Saturday night, after the drunks had gone home, we poured sugar into the gas tanks of three pieces of heavy equipment. I am, to this day, not at all sorry.BB In this case, the respondent adds seemingly implausible details to an otherwise viable account of her childhood. Several other informants and survey respondents shared with me similar stories of losing their cherished childhood woods to the Beltway. But the beer, whiskey, guns, inebriations, and nailing of snakes to trees do not appear anywhere else among my sources. I would have expected to hear some mention of them from either the Beltway's original engineers with whom I spoke, who were mostly forthcoming about mistakes they believe in retrospect they made, or from the other respondents who were also upset about the deforestation. Although this respondent appears to have needlessly exaggerated what is likely a true memory, the underlying issue of individual lives and childhoods disturbed by the Beltway is indeed germane to this study, as we will see later, even if this specific case is partly or wholly fictitious. This text is the rare example of a response that gave me serious reason to suspect exaggeration. Finally, Couper's fourth type of error, nonresponse, is hardest to define for my survey. Nonresponse error measures the extent to which members of the target population who are invited to participate do not. In my case, personal feedback indicates that some people who learned about my survey did not respond because of 88 Beltway Survey #574. 61 lack of time, lack of Internet access, or problems accessing my Web site. But as Couper notes, the nonresponse rate is virtually impossible to determine for a survey like mine in which an open invitation to participate is offered, because "the denominator of those eligible to participate is typically not known, and therefore the nonresponse rate is unknowable. "89 Because research has not yet suggested how the nonresponse rate for Web surveys compares to traditional paper surveys, Couper extrapolates from several studies on email surveys, which conclude that the response rate is lower for the email surveys. Couper offers several possible reasons for the lower rate, all of which I tried to compensate for in my Web survey. For one, motivating devices used in paper surveys such as personalized signatures and letterhead cannot be used in email surveys.90 In my Web survey, however, I tried to use functional equivalents to the paper survey devices by mounting the survey on my personal Web page and by divulging personal information (thus personalizing the process and demonstrating that I too was sacrificing my privacy), by situating the survey under a ".EDU" address and emphasizing its part in a student academic project (thus making clear that I am not out for profit), and by highlighting the connection to the University of Maryland (to which many people in my target population had personal ties). Email surveys also have a low response rate, Couper suggests, because "technical difficulties interacting with an Internet survey (whether e-mail or Web) may discourage some from completing (or even starting) the survey, relative to the ease of 89 Ibid. , 473. 90 Ibid. 62 completing a paper-and-pencil mail survey."91 This was certainly the case when at least four different newspapers misprinted the URL, or Internet address, for my survey, thereby cutting off access to my survey for all but the most intrepid respondents. It was also the case when the computer programming of the survey made responding difficult, and two frustrated informants emailed me that they had spent twenty minutes filling out the survey when their computer erased everything they h.ad written. I dealt with this first by subjecting the survey to three waves of pilot testers, and then, in an unorthodox move, by changing the form of the survey while already in progress. Those changes responded only to faults in the survey's HTML coding and did not significantly affect how or what respondents could do: On the first day of the survey, I extended the number of characters respondents could enter for their email address from 25 to 55 (one respondent's long address would not fit); on the third day, I scaled back the number of responses which the operating program required to be filled out before accepting the completed survey; in the fourth week, I added "wrap=physical" to all text areas so that free responses would appear on the screen line by line rather than in one long run-on line.92 Couper further believes that email surveys have lower response rates because of confidentiality concems.93 In my survey, consistent with ethical standards of 91 Ibid., 4 7 4. 92 Originally, the survey required extensive demographic information as well as permission to use the respondent's survey in my research. I took the second step above after an angry respondent emailed me that he did not want to give me all his demographic information, and that his computer erased all his other answers when he tried to submit the survey without the demographics. I agreed, and scaled back the required fields to include only the permission waiver. 93 Couper, 474. 63 ethnographic research, I offered respondents the options of being identified by name, by direct identifier (gender, age, etc.), or anonymously.94 All three options were chosen by a significant percentage of informants, as I explain in Chapter 8. Additionally, I divulged personal information about myself through my Web page (linked to the survey) so that respondents would know exactly to whom their confidential responses were going. As noted, the survey received 607 responses through August 2001, which I draw on extensively through the remainder of the dissertation, especially in Chapters 8 and 9. The survey itself is reproduced in Appendix B. I used a Web survey in part to reach out to a broader informant base than I could reach with a paper survey, and this attempt was successful. I received responses from people who grew up near the Beltway, who drove fire trucks and ambulances on it, whose family members had died on it, who helped build it, who lived across the country, who lived overseas. Because that range of respondents would not have been possible by sending a paper survey to a previously identified set of individuals, because the Web survey helped me locate informants for face-to-face interviews, and because it functioned so effectively as a complement to traditional ethnographic techniques, documentary research, and cultural landscape analysis, I encourage further, carefully designed use of this method to take advantage of its benefits. By merging the four approaches discussed in this chapter, I am indirectly asking methodological questions as well as the six content-oriented ones listed in Chapter l. These queries include: What is a cultural landscape approach, and how can it be applied 94 For a discussion of ethical principles in ethnography, see Spradley, 34-39. 64 to roads? How can a road be studied ethnographically? How can a Web survey be incorporated into an odological, cultural landscape, or ethnographic analysis? How can avenues of inquiry suggested by planning history enrich a broader cultural landscape study, particularly of a road? In short, from a methodological perspective, I am asking what constitutes an effective odology, especially from an American Studies foundation. My answer is a combination of cultural landscape analysis, documentary analysis, ethnography, and planning history, all informed by a specific set of guiding questions. I now begin this study of the Capital Beltway by looking at the origins of circumferential highways and the state of transportation in the metropolitan Washington region immediately prior to the Beltway's construction. 65 CHAPTER3 "THERE WAS JUST NO EASY WAY TO GET ANYWHERE": WASHINGTON'S TRANSPORTATION IN THE 1950s The Old Bladensburg Road was an important commercial route for colonial Maryland's tobacco farmers. A few miles north of what would become the District of Columbia, the old road connected the farms of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties to the port town of Bladensburg on the Anacostia River, a northeastern branch of the Potomac about 25 miles west of the Chesapeake Bay. But Old Bladensburg was Particularly important because it crossed and linked the rural farmlands, while most other roads in the colonial and post-colonial eras radiated outward from the cities of Georgetown, Md., and Alexandria, Va., both later part of the District of Columbia. By the 1950s, the Old Bladensburg Road was paved, but otherwise little about the road had changed beyond its name. With a far larger population and thousands of motor vehicles, the two Maryland counties were still connected by the same narrow road, which was alternately called the Kensington-Wheaton Road (in Kensington), the Old Bladensburg Road (from Wheaton to Takoma Park), and University Lane (from the Prince George's County line to U.S. 1 in College Park). But Maryland Route 193 no longer served the occasional tobacco fanner, and the road lagged far behind modem safety and capacity standards. Its drivers called it the "Old Bladensburg Rut" because, as the Washington Evening Star reported in 1955, 1. It is clogged with the heaviest traffic of any Maryland State highway in its class. uld "d dr . 2 It h b and few adequate sho ers to prov1 e amage and safety. . as no cur s . . d th t t . d 3. Its blind curves and its narrowness mv1te ea o mo onst an pedestrian 66 alike. 4. Every main intersection becomes a traffic bottleneck. 5. Hidden entrances are commonplace. 6. Power poles, fire hydrants, bridge and culvert walls, trees and undergrowth crowd its edges. 7. It is treacherous when wet. 8. Its surface is pitted and uneven. 9. Sudden short inclines impair visibility. 10. Buses and trucks slow traffic down to a walk.95 Accidents were common; over 350 between 1950 and 1955 caused more than $75,000 worth of property damage in Montgomery County alone. Despite all this, the narrow, two-lane road, serving 10,000 vehicles per day, remained the "only 'direct' cross-county road linking those areas of Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. "96 The story was much the same elsewhere in metropolitan Washington. Winding, overused roads from a different era struggled to accommodate the traffic produced by a growing suburbia around the nation's capital. In this chapter, I set the historical and cultural context for the analysis of the Beltway which follows. I examine what preceded the Capital Beltway and how drivers made their way around the area before the circumferential was built. In the process, I look at the origin of ring roads, their introduction to the Washington area, and the disappearance of Washington's other four proposed beltways. Was the Capital Beltway, now so passionately hated by regional drivers, a welcome or useful sight when it opened up for the motorists of 1964? America's Beltways 95 John W. Stepp, "Story of a Road-Route 193 is Worst of Its Kind in Maryland," Sunday Star, 30 January 1955: A-18. 96 Ibid. 67 President Dwight Eisenhower is generally credited with the original vision for the Interstate Highway System, inspired by a 62-day transcontinental drive he took as a soldier in 1919 across the narrow and bumpy Lincoln Highway, one of the nation's better roads at the time. 97 Eisenhower signed into law the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which created the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, providing for the construction of some 40,000 miles of highways across and between cities over the subsequent 16 years. The plan was viable for individual states because of its financing formula, in which the federal government paid 90 percent of construction costs, funded through fuel taxes, and the states paid the remaining 10 percent while supervising the construction according to federally approved standards. Of the 40,000 planned miles of freeways, 2300 miles were reserved for beltways.98 However, both the beltways and the thinking underlying the principles of the Interstate system dated back to two decades earlier, when Franklin Roosevelt and the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) frrst investigated the possibility of a national freeway system. (I use the term "freeway" in this context in its original sense, as coined by 97 Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Inter~t~te Highways. Transfonni.qg American Life (New York: Viking, 1997), 8~-90; Wll~iam Kaszynski, The American Highway: The History and Culture of Roads m the Umted States (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2000), 163. 98 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 202; Payne-~axie Associates, T~e Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of Beltways: Executive Summazy (Washington, D. C., 1980), 5. For more detailed discussion of the development of the Interstate system, see Lewis Divided Highways; Mark H. Rose, Interstate Express Highway Politics. 1939-1989,' revised ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Pr~ss, ~ 990); Gary. T. Schwartz, "Urban Freeways and the Interstate System," so.uthem. Cal1fomia Law Rev~ew 49 (1976): 406_ 513; Bruce E. Seely, Building the Amencan Highway System: Engmeers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Richard F. Weingroff, "Broader Ribbons Across the Land," Public Roads, June 1996 (Special Edition): 1-16, 32-39. 68 planning expert Edward M. Bassett, to indicate freedom of movement, not the absence of tolls.)99 In 1937, Roosevelt asked the BPR to research the feasibility of a transcontinental network of three north-south and three east-west toll highways. In its 1939 report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, the Bureau rejected the idea of toll roads because only a portion of the system would pay for itself. Instead, it recommended a system of 26,700 miles of free highways between and through cities, and suggested ways for designing these highways in urban areas. Because Toll Roads and Free Roads "strongly influenced subsequent national policy," the Bureau of Public Roads's research is a key component of the effort to understand how and why our current national highway system, and especially our beltways, were designed the way they were. 100 In the 1950s and in the decades immediately preceding, Washington was plagued by heavy traffic within the city and by inadequate inter-suburban roads outside of it. Under the BP R's original line of thinking, though, a beltway was not the solution to the first of those problems, the city's traffic; in fact, travel between the suburbs was hardly addressed at a time when prevailing work patterns sent men into the central city to work and back to outlying points at the end of the day. The Bureau of Public Roads, Clifford Ellis writes, rejected the idea that bypass routes could solve the urban congestion problem. 99 Edward M. Bassett, "The Freeway-A New Kind of Thoroughfare," American City 42 (February 1930): 95. This was not Bassett's only contribution to influencing the structure of American cities: as chair of the New York City Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions, he promoted and oversaw the 1916 enactment of the nation's first comprehensive zoning laws, drawing on what he had seen during a 1908 visit to Germany. See Garrett Power, "The Advent of Zoning," Planning Perspectives 4 (1989): 2-3. 10 ° Clifford Donald Ellis, "Visions of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1990, 137-138. 69 The swelling of traffic volumes on urban highways was caused by "a multiplicity of short movements into and out of the city," not through traffic headed for destinations beyond. Bypass routes would siphon off a relatively small portion of traffic, because "As all traffic maps show, the greater part of the heavy traffic at a city entrance is an in-and-out movement of local generation." 101 The only effective solution for heavy city traffic, BPR engineers argued, was "the provision of adequate facilities for conduct of the heavier entering traffic streams through the city at or near its center, and on to appropriate exit points. 11102 New radial freeways connecting the city center with its outskirts, stretching out along all four compass points unless blocked by water, would achieve this goal. 103 So an expanded series of arterial highways, not beltway-style bypass routes, comprised the Bureau's primary strategy for dealing with urban traffic. Beltways appeared in its secondary strategy, wheels to connect the spokes created by the radial freeways proposed in the first step. This was not a new idea. Ring roads were well-known among city planners of the City Beautiful movement (1890- 1920), and had appeared even earlier to provide access between roads stretching out to farmlands from market and city centers. Daniel Burnham's 1905 Report on a Plan for San Francisco included a diagram and plan for an urban circulation system with a "classic radial-concentric arterial plan," essentially a set of radial roads connected by three concentric rings. 104 But no major American city had this type of purposefully 101 Ellis, 139-140. Eilis's quotations are from U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Roads, Toll Roads and Free Roads, report prepared by U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, H. Doc. 272. 102 U.S. Congress, Toll Roads, 95. 103 Ellis, 139, 146. 104 Ibid., 56-57. 70 designed, limited-access highway layout by 1939, so the BPR's suggestions constituted a groundbreaking attempt to put this element of planning vision into common practice. After safer and efficient "conduct of large traffic streams into and across cities," the second priority of the Bureau's 1939 report was "belt-line distribution roads" around large cities and bypasses around smaller ones. 105 But while beltways now play a dual role in connecting suburbs and in providing a bypass for through traffic, the BPR did not envision the second function as significant. The report noted that while belt-line distribution roads around larger cities will sometimes "have some of the characteristics of bypass routes, and may actually serve to bypass a considerable amount of through highway traffic around the city, [t]heir primary purpose ... is somewhat different. 11106 What did the Bureau see as the beltways' primary purpose? In other words, what was the first published federal policy regarding circumferential highways? The language is opaque; here is the BPR's 1939 line of thinking on beltways, and my translation of the technical language. First, That portion of the traffic from each of the [arterial] roads that is bound to or from the center of the city is best served, if it is a considerable movement, by the transcity connecting routes and expressways previously described. These same kinds of facilities also most directly serve the needs of traffic between each city-entering highway and points in or beyond the city that lie approximately diametrically opposite its point of entrance. 107 Traffic originating in the city or headed for it, in other words, will best be served by long-distance freeways which extend into and through cities. 105 U.S. Congress, Toll Roads, 95. 106 Ibid., 96. 107 Ibid. 71 But, for those parts of the traffic on each entering highway that are (a) interchanged with other entering highways not nearly opposite across t~e city and (b) ?:iginated ~n or destined to :ections of the city similarly situated, the fac1hty that wi11 generally provide the best service is a circwnferential or belt-line route forming an approximate circle around the city at its outer fringe. 108 So a beltway is the best way to deal with vehicles traveling between parts of the city, but not going directly across the city. This discussion stiU makes no reference to traffic between the suburbs, but the argwnent can be easily extrapolated to vehicles traveling between suburbs but not going 180 degrees across the city. The principal function of such a route is the ?istribution of traffic approaching the city on any highway, either to the other highways to which it may need to transfer or to points on the circumference of the city nearest the urban section of its ultimate destination, and the distribution of outbound traffic in a . al 109 rec1proc manner. Again, the main purpose of a beltway is to facilitate intra-regional travel, not long distance through-traffic. The BPR engineers, though, did recognize that beltways may fulfi11 both functions, and in fact the Capital Beltway's current traffic problems derive in part from serving both local and through traffic. 110 But the engineers of 1939 wrote this off: 108 Ibid. The remedy commonly proposed for these conditions [ congestion on arterial highways caused by throu~h traffic a~~ed to commuter traffic J is the construction of a bypass highway. It 1~ maccurately assumed that the congestion results from the joining of the local with the through traffic, and that a substantial relief would be obtained if the through traffic were diverted outside the city beyond the beginning of congest~on, and cai:ned on a bypass to a similar point on the rural route at the other side of the city. In rare cases 109 Ibid., 96-97. uo The Capital Beltway was not originally designed to ~commodat~ heavy through traffic but the 1973 cancellation ofl-95 through Washington led to its permanent desigdation as Interstate 95. I address this development in greater depth in Chapter 9. 72 / this remedy alone may prove sufficiently effective, but ... bypass routes are of advantage mainly to a relatively small part of the highway traffic normally approaching a city, i.e., to that small part of the traffic that is actually desirous of avoiding the city. 111 Clearly the Bureau underestimated the percentage of future highway traffic which would be "actually desirous of avoiding the city," instead believing that the majority of long-distance travelers would be departing from or destined to any large city in their paths. Even so, the BPR allowed for the possibility of some beltways to be developed specifically as long-distance bypasses. For those specific belts, engineers warned, special care must be taken to maintain very limited access because of the tendency for new highways to attract residential and commercial development which inundates those highways with new traffic: If, therefore, a bypass or belt-line route is to remain the through-traffic facility it is intended to be, it must be protected from the encroachment of bordering developments that quickly engulf it and destroy its special character. This means that bypass routes must be built as limited-access highways, cut off from the bordering land except at a very limited number of points, and separated from all but a very limited number of the cross streets and highways intersected by them. 112 Circumferentials like the Capital Beltway, which have interchanges every one or two miles, thus do not conform to the BPR's conception of effective beltways for long- distance traffic. But this type of beltway was almost an afterthought. In all, the 1939 report projects primarily a vision of beltways intended to ameliorate traffic conditions within a metropolitan area, to assist especially motorists traveling around the city but 111 U.S. Congress, Toll Roads, 91. 112 Ibid., 97-98. 73 not diametrically across it, and only secondarily to provide a bypass for long-distance travelers. A second federal highway report, written between 1941 and 1944 and "codif1ying] the basic planning doctrines for America's postwar urban freeways," for the most part echoes the vision of beltways as outlined in Toll Roads and Free Roads. 113 But national traffic patterns apparently caused the authors of Interregional Highways, also conunissioned by Franklin Roosevelt, to shift their perspective on the overall functions of beltways. In the 1939 report, BPR engineers had considered through-traffic to be "by far" a limited fraction of regional traffic. 114 By 1944, the National Interregional Highway Committee (including BPR representatives) increased that share of through-traffic to "a portion-its volume depending usually upon the size of the city in relation to the sizes of other nearby cities." 115 The Committee believed that significant long-distance traffic could be accommodated by beltways: To serve this traffic bound to or from points other than the center of the city, there is need ofroutes which avoid the business center. Such routes should generally follow circumferential courses around the city, passing either through adjacent suburban areas or through the outer and less congested sections of the city proper. Generally, such routes can be so located as to serve both as arteries for the conveyance of through traffic around the city between various approach highways and as distribution routes for the movement of traffic with local origins and destinations to and from the various quarters of the city [ emphasis added.] 116 113 Ellis, "Visions," 155. 114 U.S. Congress, Toll Roads, 95. 115 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Roads, Interregional Highways, report prepared by U.S. Interregional Highway Committee, 78th Cong. , 2d sess., 1944, H. Doc. 379, 64. 116 Ibid., 64-65. 74 The federal government, in laying the foundation for urban freeways and for the eventual Interstate system, thus expected beltways to be able to fulfill both functions (local and long-distance traffic) simultaneously. While the 1939 report envisioned most beltways as serving intra-urban and some serving inter-urban traffic, the 1944 report told the nation's highway planners and engineers that individual beltways could do both, effectively, at the same time. The prospect of addressing both those concerns, and the added incentive of the 90-10 funding formula of the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, led state highway officials to design and plan beltways around their cities. Between 1955 and 1995, some 100 complete or partial circumferential routes were constructed in the United States. A few predate the Interstate system and were absorbed into it (including the Capital Beltway, Baltimore's 1-695, Massachusetts's Route 128/1-93/1-95, and San Antonio's 1- 410), but most postdate 1956 and qualified for the 90 percent share of federal funding of construction. 117 Yet there has been little study of those 100 beltways and any of their social, economic, political, or cultural effects. Those few studies which have been published have focused almost exclusively on the economic effects of beltways. Because I look at the Capital Beltway from that approach in Chapter 9, I will examine what other beltway studies have been undertaken, and with what overall conclusions, in that chapter. Postwar Metropolitan Washington 117 Christopher John Sutton, "The Socioeconomic, Land Use, and Land Value Impacts of Beltways in the Denver Metropolitan Area," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Denver, 1995, 42-43. 75 In the years after World War II, the Virginia and Maryland suburbs outside Washington realized a population and housing boom for many of the same reasons as other metropolitan areas. Federal policies, including easy credit via the GI Bill and lower down payments and more affordable mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans' Administration, encouraged and helped families to buy houses. Builders constructed more low-cost starter homes because of limits on how much could be financed through federal programs. New and improved roads-even Maryland Route 193 was tripled in width shortly after the publication of the article at the head of this chapter- made the suburbs inviting and accessible. The baby boom meant that more families were looking for houses, and new ones were not as likely to be built within cities as in the open land surrounding them. 118 Other factors unique to Washington drove the suburban expansion there. The federal government moved some of its agencies outside the city in an effort to protect them from a nuclear attack. The suburbs hosting these agencies, including Germantown, Md. (the Atomic Energy Commission), Gaithersburg, Md. (the National Bureau of Standards), Fort Meade, Md. (the National Security Agency), and Langley, Va. (the Central Intelligence Agency) grew to accommodate the federal workers and their families. Developers found relatively cheap land in Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George's Counties, and often bought it in large parcels. In addition, some middle-class whites chose to move from heavily black Washington to the then-largely white suburbs 118 Van Dyne, "As Far As The Eye Can See," 92; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 203-205; Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass. : Basil Blackwell, 1988), 291. 76 for racial reasons especiall ft th d · · · 54· ' Y a er e esegregation of pubhc schools m 19 , Washington became majority-black in 1957. Those African Americans who tried to move to the suburbs themselves in the 1950s and 1960s frequently found themselves blocked by discriminatory housing practices both overt (racial covenants) and covert (exclusionary zoning in which large lot sizes and amenity requirements ballooned housing prices in some areas).119 One transportation generation earlier, the trolley had enabled the development or significant growth of streetcar suburbs in both Maryland and Virginia, including Kensington, Garrett Park, Chevy Chase, Riverdale, Hyattsville, Berwyn (all in Maryland), Clarendon, and Ballston (in Virginia). 120 The postwar housing and road construction boom ushered in a new round of growth, as the populations of Prince George's and Montgomery Counties almost doubled between 1940 and 1950 and Arlington and Fairfax Counties' numbers skyrocketed as well. 121 Ballston housed the first car-oriented shopping mall, Parkington, in 1952, and Maryland followed soon after with the Langley Park Center in 1956.122 In 1950, Washington still held 60 percent of 119 Van Dyne, "As Far As The Eye Can See," 92-93; Melder, City of Magnificent Intentions, 504, 548-555. For more on national patterns of discriminatory housi~g practices, see Kenneth Jackson, 195-217, 242, and Christopher Silver, "The Racial Origins of Zoning: Southern Cities From 1910-40," Planning Perspectives 6 (1991 ): 189-205. 12° Charles Freund, "Washington's Neighborhoods," Washingtonian, March 1983: 186. 121 Melder, 502. See also Richard Fidler, "County Is Seeing Biggest Building Boom in History," Suburban Record, 16 July 1959: l. 122 Ibid.; Freund, 189. 77 the metropolitan population; by 1953, it held less than 50 percent.123 The 1960 census revealed the first absolute decline in the District's population, and by 1970 its share of the metropolitan population had plunged to barely above 25 percent.124 As many Washingtonians moved to the suburbs and newcomers moved there as well, local planning agencies worked to coordinate the development of the region. The National Capital Planning Commission (created by Congress in 1926 as the National Capital Park and Planning Commission), or NCPC, encouraged local jurisdictions to restrict their growth within a framework of wedges and corridors. This was not a new idea, and in fact had been codified in the 1944 Interregional Highways, as Clifford Ellis explains: Since the existing urban pattern often had a star shape, with the points composed of mass transit or highway corridors, there were "wedges of undeveloped land" between these built-up areas. These areas had remained undeveloped because of poor transportation service, difficult topography, or reservation for public use. The [National Interregional Highway] Committee recommended using these corridors for radial freeways penetrating to the city center. Provision of highways in these wedges would open this land for development, a deliberate d . d h' 125 strategy es1gne to ac 1eve a more compact urban pattern. For the Washington area, the NCPC in 1961 recommended the concentration of high- density growth along six corridors (I-270, U.S. 50, and MD 5 in Maryland, I-66 in Virginia, and I-95 in both states) served by rapid rail and linked by beltways. The open space in the wedges between would be preserved as farmland, woods, or wilderness. The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), which 123 Zachary M. Schrag, "Mapping Metro, 1955-1968: Urban, Suburban, and Metropolitan Alternatives," Washington History 13 .1 (Spring/Summer 2001 ): 6; Gillette, "A National Workshop," 11. 124 Gillette, "A National Workshop," 11. 125 Ellis, Visions of Urban Freeways, 160-161. 78 coordinated planning for Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, endorsed the wedges and corridors plan the following year and embellished its own plans in 1964. 126 Wedges and corridors worked well on paper. In fact, the design did enjoy some success, particularly in Maryland, where development clustered around some radials like I-270 and where some parks and green belts were preserved in the wedges. 127 But like many political boundaries, the lines drawn on paper had little to do with the region's physical geography. 128 Anne Wilkins, who served on two planning boards at the time of the plan's adoption, explained this deficiency in a 1974 oral history: Basically, if you took a metropolitan area out in the middle of nowhere, a flat piece of land and adopted the wedges and corridors plan it would be great. We had one problem in Virginia that the plan completely ignored and that was that the watersheds of Fairfax County go in a different direction, then [ . ] h . 1 129 sic t e transportation p an. Maryland's topography was better suited to the wedges framework; in Virginia, "the configuration of the land ... turn[ed] the straight lines into concentric circles." 130 126 Van Dyne, "As Far As The Eye Can See," 98; "Washington, DC: A Second Revolution," The Economist, 16 April 1988, special section: 5-6; National Capital Planning Commission, Plan for the Year 2000, The Nation's Capital (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1961 ); Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, On Wedges and Corridors: A General Plan for the Maryland-Washington Regional District In Montgomery and Prince George's Counties, revised ed. ( 1962; Silver Spring, Md.: M-NCPPC, 1964). 127 "Washington, DC: A Second Revolution," 6. 128 See the cultural landscape fieldwork model in Appendix A for a discussion of political boundaries. 129 "An Interview with Mrs. Anne Wilkins of Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia, interviewed by W. Joseph Coleman on May 20, 1974," Northern Virginia Oral History Project Collection, Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries, 24. 130 "Washington, DC: A Second Revolution," 6. 79 Somewhat lax state laws also allowed developers to build within the wedges, particularly in Virginia with its strong tradition of property rights. Wilkins recalled: You've got your highways, your transportation arteries with wedges in between that were supposed to some extent to remain vacant. They overlooked the real economic problem. That it is almost impossible to keep them vacant. You've got a sewer line going this way and a highway going that way. We did it one time- we got a sewer program that provided for something called a limited access sewer. Well, you know how long that remained, not very long. Cause if a sewer line goes through somebody's land you can't prevent him from connecting.131 Even the Beltway itself, completed three years after the wedges and corridors plan's publication, sparked development within the wedges and away from the corridors. 132 Whether ostensibly guided by plan (in the 1960s and beyond) or not, suburban residential and commercial development exploded in the postwar decades, and the region's antiquated road system was hard-pressed to accommodate the new demand. Getting Around I have lived in or very close to Washington since I was born, in 1934. I remember, in the 1940s, the paved roads ran in and out of the inner city (like spokes on a wheel). Roads between suburbs were dirt roads in poor condition. To get from one suburb to another (for example, from College Park to Rockville), the quickest route involved driving into Washington and out again (example: driving in Rhode Island Avenue and out Connecticut Avenue. -Joseph T. Marsden, former Hyattsville resident133 For drivers traveling around Washington's suburbs in the 1940s and 50s, road options ranged from bad to worse. Any trip between Maryland and Virginia required 131 "An Interview with Mrs. Anne Wilkins," 25. 132 Van Dyne, "As Far As The Eye Can See," 98. 133 Beltway Survey #609. 80 passage through downtown Washington, with its traffic signals and city traffic, to reach one of the Potomac River bridges. A few suburban roads did run in partially circular courses, including Glebe Road in Arlington and East-West Highway (constructed beginning in 1928 to connect Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Silver Spring) and Route 193 in Maryland. But none of these arcs came close to a full circle or connected the two states. 134 The radials which those partial circles connected could not themselves accommodate the increasing traffic of the time. Some, including U.S. 1 in Maryland and Virginia, dated back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 135 Many were descendants of nineteenth-century turnpikes, which in some cases followed narrow alignments which restricted the possibility of expansion. 136 These included Prince George's County's Marlboro Turnpike (now MD 4), Montgomery County's Rockville Turnpike (now MD 355, first improved in 1805 over the partial alignment of a Seneca trail), Fairfax County's Little River Turnpike (VA 236, opened 1806), Arlington's Columbia Turnpike (now VA 244), and Fairfax County's Leesburg Pike (now VA 7) and Georgetown Pike (now VA 193), both chartered in 1813.137 Other radials into the suburbs were extensions of District roads, including Montgomery County's Connecticut 134 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 201. 135 Ibid., 126; Community Renewal Program, Prince George's County, Maryland, The Neighborhoods of Prince George's County ([Upper Marlboro, Md.]: The Program, 1974), 56. 136 Ross and Nan Netherton, Fairfax County: A Contemporary Portrait (Norfolk, Va.: Donning, 1992), 32. 137 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 126; Eileen S. McGuckian, Historic and Architectural Guide to the Rockville Pike (Rockville, Md.: Peerless Rockville Historic Preservation, Ltd., 1997), 1-2. 81 A venue, extended north from Dupont Circle in the 1890s, and Georgia A venue (formerly Seventh Street Extended). 138 In addition to upgrades of these old roads, new radials were constructed, beginning in the 1930s, to connect Washington more efficiently with its suburbs and with nearby cities. One of these was born when the commandant of the Marine Corps base at Quantico,Va., complained "to the Secretary of the Navy that the congested traffic on Rte. 1 [was] a hindrance to the national defense and should be alleviated by the building of a four-lane highway between himself and the pentagon-shaped War Department building planned for North Arlington." 139 Virginia Highway Commissioner ( 1922-1941) Henry Garnett Shirley, on his part, had long believed that Northern Virginia could use an expressway to serve the growing suburban population and to spur further development. Both objectives came together when the Public Roads Administration built what became the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway (first VA 350, then I-95, and now 1-395 and 1-95) "as a war measure to relieve the extremely heavy traffic of thousands of government employees who work in Washington and live in Arlington and Fairfax Counties."140 In 1944, the first two-and-one-half mile segment of the limited access Shirley Highway opened in Arlington between the Pentagon road system and Route 7; the maze of roads at the Pentagon was called the "mixing bowl" and the "mixmaster" until the Shirley's interchange with the Capital Beltway took over 138 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 127-128. 139 Donald Smith, "Shirley Highway: A Chronicle of Nightmare Non-Planning," Washington Post, 26 September 1971, Potomac Magazine: 14. 140 Ibid.; Nan Netherton et al, Fairfax County, Virginia: A History (Fairfax, Va.: Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 1978), 595-596. 82 the informal titles. 141 By 1951 the highway was extended south to Woodbridge in outlying Prince William County, with extra lanes added repeatedly to accommodate ever-increasing traffic. Still, unlike the older, slow, radials, the Shirley offered at least the possibility of a faster drive, built at a design speed of 70 miles per hour.142 While Virginia gained the Shirley Highway to provide traffic relief for old U.S. 1, Maryland constructed the Washington National Pike to offer a high-speed alternative to the Rockville Pike-Wisconsin A venue corridor to the northwest of Washington. At that time, Wisconsin A venue was designated U.S. 240 and linked Washington to Frederick, Md. Construction of the new U.S. 240 began in Hyattstown, Md., in 1953, and progressed in five stages southward through dairy farms and small towns until reaching Pooks Hill in Bethesda in 1960, where it would intersect with the future Washington Circumferential Highway (later the Capital Beltway). Figure 2, a 1952 plan of the Maryland State Roads Commission's highway plans, indicates the presence of both the new U.S. 240 and the Beltway well before the creation of the Interstate system four years later. At that time, the Beltway was incorporated into the system as I-495 and the Washington National Pike as I-70S, later I-270. 143 141 Smith, 15. 142 Ibid. ; Netherton and Netherton, 31; Netherton et al, 596. See also Athelia Knight, "33-Year Road Project Nears Completion," Washington Post, 21 June 1975: Bl; and "What's The Name of That Highway, Shirley, 350, 95," Fairfax County Joumal- Standard, 20 August 1964: 1. 143 Kenneth Bredemier, "I-70S: How Cow Country Became a Corridor City," Washington Post, 31 December 1973: Al; Jack Eisen, "Route I-70S in Maryland Quietly Becomes Known as I-270," Washington Post, 2 March 1975: D3. One major radial which did not predate the Interstate system, and in fact did not open for 15 years after the system's authorization, was I-95 in Maryland, originally known as the Northeastern Expressway between College Park and Baltimore. See "3rd Route to Baltimore Is Put Under Construction," Evening Star, 3 July 1966: A-11 ; William 83 In both Maryland and Virginia, the federal government built a series of parkways to connect Washington with federal installations outside it. The Baltimore- Washington Parkway, a replacement for congested U.S. 1, linked Washington with Fort Meade, Beltsville's National Agricultural Research Center, the new town of Greenbelt developed by the Resettlement Administration, and eventually Greenbelt's NASA space flight center and Fort Meade's National Security Agency. Suitland Parkway led to Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County. The George Washington Memorial Parkways in both states (the one in Maryland is now the Clara Barton Parkway) went to federal installations in Langley, Va., and Carderock, Md. 144 Still, every one of these additions to the highway network was a radial route, not a cross-county inter-suburban one. Long-distance travelers thus had to drive into and out of Washington to get to the other side. Area residents did have other options, although the transit routes-first streetcar, then bus by 1962-were for the most part also radial. Four companies provided streetcar and bus service during the Beltway's development. D.C. Transit, which had absorbed dozens of smaller companies dating back to the start of horsecar service in the District in 1862, ran lines in the city and, by the early 1960s, well out into the suburbs in both states. WV&M (Washington Virginia & Maryland Coach Co.), founded in 1926 and subsumed by D.C. Transit in 1964, had routes between the Taaffe, "I-95 Plods Between Beltways," Evening Star, 7 July 1970: B-1; "Maryland I- 95 Stretch is Delayed Until 1971," Evening Star, 26 October 1970: B-3; "I-95 Section to Open Over July 4 Weekend," Washington Post, 22 June 1971: C2; Ivan G. Goldman, "I-95 Leg Opens to Connect D.C., Baltimore Beltways," Washington Post, 2 July 1971: Bl. 144 Van Dyne, "Getting There,"129; Leach, "Fifty Years of Parkway Construction." 84 District, Arlington, Falls Church, and Fairfax, also expanding farther into the suburbs during the 1960s. AB&W, in service since 1921, ran between Washington, Alexandria, and Arlington. And WMA (Washington Marlboro & Annapolis Motor Lines), created in 1922 as the Bradbury Heights Bus Line, linked Washington with Prince George's and Calvert Counties in Maryland. All of these were consolidated as "Metrobus" under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in 1973, after which time redundant routes were gradually eliminated. In all, area residents on all sides of the city had more options for transit than they would decades later, but few opportunities for inter- suburban transit. 145 Pre-Beltway transit was not limited to streetcars or buses. Arthur McClinton, a longtime Northern Virginia resident, recalls: I worked at Naval Research Laboratory (early 60's) while living in Arlington County. Thus I commuted on a boat from Alexandria to NRL every day. This was a pleasant experience that was unfortunately ended by the construction of the [Beltway's] W[oodrow] W[ilson] bridge and the short lived extension of bus service over the bridge to NRL. The lengthening of my commute by the creation of the WW bridge was over 45 minutes each way. When they canceled the bus for lack of ridership, I bought a car and joined the mad house of commuters. It never was as pleasant as the nice twice daily boat ride.146 McClinton's "mad house of commuters" did not characterize the area's roads for all residents. Some found pre-Beltway era driving as relaxing as his commute by boat. One man who grew up in Silver Spring remembers that there was "NO TRAFFIC (we used to joke that if a car came northbound on N[ew] H[ampshire] Ave everyone would look 145 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, [History of Bus Service in the Washington Region] (Washington: WMATA, 1998), n.p. See also LeRoy 0. King Jr., 100 Years of Capital Traction: The Story of Streetcars in the Nation's Capital ([ n.p.:] Taylor Publishing Company, 1972). 146 Beltway Survey #513. 85 out their window!) .... My neighborhood was very "country" (eg: milk cows) where the beltway now runs." 147 The Virginia suburbs too were rural: a woman who grew up in Fairfax City and Annandale recalls that I was 14 in 1964, living in Annandale. When they constructed the intersection at Route 236, the signs pointed in one direction said "Alexandria" and in the other direction, they said "Tyson's Comer." In those days, Tyson's Corner was exactly that -- a comer. There was a butcher shop there that my parents sometimes went to, but it was in the middle of nowhere and there was NOTHING there. We all laughed and laughed that the beltway went to Tyson's Comer! 148 Even where traffic was heavy, the "mad house" atmosphere of later years was not necessarily present. One respondent, who lived in Kensington as a child, enjoyed the slow going: My Dad worked at the Washington Cathedral, and all us kids went to the Cathedral Schools (with Al Gore and Lucy Bain[e]s Johnson). My brothers and I commuted every day to the Cathedral via Wisconsin Ave, and I remember the traffic being pretty slow because everyone was driving on it. My Dad used to roll down the windows of the old Oldsmobile and sing "On The Road To Mandalay" at top volume to amuse other drivers and embarrass us kids. I remember the drive as fun, as everyone in traffic was usually communicating with other drivers in amusing ways. Much more relaxed. 149 This woman's recollection ( dating to 1960) of "everyone ... usually communicating with other drivers in amusing ways" suggests that drivers' and passengers' attitudes toward traffic may be more a function of prevailing social patterns and expectations than of the intensity of traffic. Decades later, slow traffic in the Washington area does not tend to produce relaxed or friendly drivers communicating with each other; the 147 Beltway Survey #476. 148 Beltway Survey #435. 149 Beltway Survey #574. 86 respondent seems to recall a time when the drivers she observed were more comfortable interacting and did not place such a premium on punctuality above all else. But if the area's roads in the 1950s and early 1960s were relaxing for some in certain parts of the region, they were crowded and a major irritation for many others. For one thing, traveling from almost anywhere to almost anywhere else required a trip into the District. Whether between states-"from College Park to Mount Vernon was all down Route 1 [ and through the city] "~r within them, all roads led to Washington. 150 Even the engineers building the Beltway specifically to address this concern ran into it daily. To travel around the Maryland suburbs, one engineer recalled, a side trip through the District was necessary: [F]or example, before the Beltway was built, you wanted to go from Laurel to Oxon Hill, you had to use Minnesota Avenue in the District and it wasn't a very wholesome experience, to say the least. Even when we were building it [the Beltway], in the first stages when construction had just started, you couldn't run down the alignment, you had to go by the street system. And we had projects on [Maryland] Route 5 at the time [to the city's southeast]; the district engineer's office was in Laurel [ to the north]. And there was just no easy way to get anywhere. But the Beltway subtracted all that ... 151 Traveling from a suburb to outside the area also frequently required passing through the city. An alumnus of the University of Maryland's track team (1957-61) remembers nearly nine-hour-long trips to Chapel Hill, N.C., drives lengthened by the slow ride south on U.S. 1 through the District. 152 From southern suburbs to points north was much the same. Keith Willis writes of traveling to New England from a southeastern Maryland suburb: 150 Beltway Survey #487. 151 Interview with M. Slade Caltrider, 28 September 2000. 152 Beltway Survey #229. 87 I lived in Camp Springs, MD before Beltway opened near where Branch AV. exit is now. We often traveled to New England for visits. This entailed going through the District to get to Balto-Wash Parkway and timewise made the trip much longer. It was easy to get lost going through the District. 153 In fact, simply crossing the Potomac between Virginia and Maryland entailed a visit to Washington: one longtime area resident "remember[ s] having to use the DC bridges to get across the Potomac unless you wanted to go all the way to Point of Rocks [far to the northwest]." 154 These recollections about "having to use" the D.C. bridges and "ha[ving] to use Minnesota Avenue" suggest that passage through Washington was not a shortcut, as it would become for some years later, but a necessity for trips around the region. It was not just the nuisance of driving out of the way that frustrated local drivers. Perceived danger was an issue for Sandra J. Saunders, who remembers "having to go through very poor and trashy parts of Washington DC and no matter what time of year it was, we had to lock our doors and roll up our windows." 155 Bud Lewis, living in Northern Virginia, was frustrated by the difficulty of navigating within the District, recalling the hours lost while [t]rying to follow a major route through the district without winding up in the wrong lane and then becoming hopelessly lost while trying to make a simple "go 'round the block" maneuver used elsewhere in the northeastern states to get back on a (poorly) marked highway .... I would rather have tried to ford the Potomac than go through the city again. 156 The amount of time it took--or seemed to take-to get anywhere was a major source of irritation. Driving east from Bethesda to Annapolis and Ocean City, Doug Osmond and 153 Beltway Survey #391. 154 Beltway Survey #596. 155 Beltway Survey #587. 156 Beltway Survey #526. 88 his family "would go through Beach Dr in Rock Creek, and wind around all sorts of ways, to get over to Rt 50 and it seemed to take forever." 157 A former Hyattsville, Md. resident recalls that "[w]hen I was little (1950's) going to Ocean City was an all-day trip. Heck, going to the eastern shore was a¾ day trip." 158 Driving west was no faster: a former Wheaton resident considered the drive to friends in Falls Church, Va., "a real expedition . . . almost two hours, so when the beltway opened, it became a 45 minute ride." 159 Some area residents developed means of coping with the frustrations of limited route alternatives. One former District resident and her friends "found shortcuts or others found shortcuts through the city that we all used." 160 Sandy D'Orazio's family found an educational opportunity hiding in their inter-suburban trips through Washington: I remember going from Alexandria to my uncle's in Wheaton and we had to go through DC (twice a month). My folks would ask us questions about this building or that landmark. When we knew all the answers, m( dad would take another way through DC to teach us about some more stuff.16 But for the most part, area drivers seemed happier to have more efficient options available to them. None of my survey respondents who were area residents in 1964 reported being disappointed by the arrival of the Beltway (in its context of facilitating traffic). The new circumferential offered the first significant correction to the shortage 157 Beltway Survey #265. 158 Beltway Survey #372. 159 Beltway Survey #188. 160 Beltway Survey #135. 16 1 Beltway Survey #338. 89 of inter-suburban travel options provided by existing roads and transit routes, and local drivers were all too willing to take advantage of the improvement, as detailed in the next chapter. Washington's Other Beltways In this study I refer to the Capital Beltway interchangeably as "the Beltway,,, and the road has similarly entered the national lexicon in the same shorthand form. But it Was not intended to be the single beltway around Washington, although it ended up playing that role: area planners proposed a total of five rings inside and around the city to alleviate the frustrations drivers felt before 1964 ( and, in some cases, to allow for the traffic which would follow from future development). The other four circumferentials ' and in fact dozens of miles of other proposed highways which similarly went unbuilt, are "absent components" as described in the fifth operation of the cultural landscape study model: their significance lies in their absence rather than their presence. If the Capital Beltway did not provide a lasting panacea to drivers' concerns, the road itself is not entirely to blame; it was not supposed to do the job by itself. I will later discuss other factors contributing to the Beltway's downward slide in serving as an efficient transportation option; for now, I look briefly at what happened to Washington's other beltways. Although initial plans for concentric rings around the city came in 1950, an earlier, informal proposal for an inter-suburban loop, immediately outside the District, appeared in 1913 in a magazine published by the League of 90 American Wheelmen, a group of cyclists who in the 1880s became the first organized highway lobby pushing for improved roads: Prominent citizens of Virginia are considering a proposition to construct a boulevard 40 miles long, around the original 10-mile square which comprised the District of Columbia as laid out by George Washington in making his original survey of the district. It is proposed that Maryland and Virginia each donate sufficient land for the boulevard, and aid in the work of construction. 162 This proposal went nowhere. In 1932 a joint committee of highway officials from Maryland, Virginia, and the District proposed a set of bypass routes around the city, with bridges at Alexandria and Great Falls. These bypasses, however, did not form a full ring and were not approved by any political authority. Another regional highway planning committee was formed in 1939, but its efforts were stopped by World War II.163 The Bureau of Public Roads and Harland Bartholomew share responsibility for the first stirrings of what became the region's beltway blueprints. In 1948 the BPR used the Washington area for its first major origin-destination survey, in which motorists were asked about their commuting patterns. As the Bureau staff began to plot out the travel demand patterns from the collected data, the idea of what became the present Capital Beltway "just sort of popped out at us," according to Douglas Brinkley, who served as the District's chief of highway planning in the 1940s and SOs. 164 162 "Proposed Boulevard Around Washington, D.C.," Good Roads, 7 June 1913: 319. I thank Richard F. Weingroff of the Federal Highway Administration for bringing this early proposal to my attention. 163 "Beltway Built With Unity of Area Officials," Evening Star, 16 August 1964: E-3. 164 Ibid. 91 Four years earlier, the federal government's second report on a national highway network had introduced the idea of a set of concentric circles. The National Interregional Highway Committee wrote in the 1944 Interregional Highways: In the larger cities more than one circumferential route may be needed. A series of them may be provided to form inner and outer belts, some possibly within the city itself, others without. In the largest cities one such route may be required as a distributor of traffic around the business center. 165 During the discussions leading up to the document's publication, St. Louis planner Harland Bartholomew sold the rest of the Committee on the idea of circumferentials and especially of rings within city boundaries. 166 Six years later, the 1950 comprehensive plan for Washington produced by the National Capital Planning Commission-by then chaired by Bartholomew-included three ring roads (Fig. 3). 167 The three loops introduced into the plan by Bartholomew and pictured in the plan's map circled the White House at radii of a half-mile, three to six miles, and (outside the District) six to ten miles. Both the Washington Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the transportation subcommittee of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City (a voluntary civic organization) endorsed the ring road concept by 1952. The Committee of lOO's endorsement noted that Washington residents might question the need for a series of rings, but "unless people from an ever- expanding trade territory outside the District are brought to its center expeditiously- 165 U.S. Congress, Interregional Highways, 65. 166 Gillette, "A National Workshop," 15. 167 Ibid.; National Capital Planning Commission, Plan for the Year 2000, The Nation's Capital (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1961). For further discussion of Harland Bartholomew's contributions to metropolitan Washington's transportation planning, see Schrag, "Mapping Metro," 6-11. 92 -- and accommodated comfortably when they get there-the city's economic and cultural life will dry up and its residents will have little reason for remaining." 168 The first of the three proposed ring roads, closest to the White House, was known as the Inner Loop. Back in 1942, District highway planners had submitted a proposal to Congress for a series of depressed highways, underpasses, and Potomac River bridges to create a ring around the central city. 169 A 1944 engineering study for the District offered the first detailed plan for such an inner loop to relieve downtown streets of their "unwarranted burden of traffic, most of which is passing through to areas of Federal buildings adjoining the central area on several sides." 170 The report differentiated between a bypass loop, which would not work in such a constricted area, and a "traffic distributor forming [a] belt line," which would: There is a sharp distinction between by-pass routes and such distributors. Whereas by-passes carry vehicles completely around areas of congestion, distributors carry vehicles at reasonably high speeds to points nearest their ultimate destination before they enter the zone of slower speeds and greater congestion. The result is a minimum of milea~f for each individual driver, and a net reduction of traffic within the area. 1 1 The 1944 proposal suggested creating such a belt-line distributor through the "preferential treatment of streets" which for the most part already existed, a strategy which today would fall under the rubric of transportation supply and demand 168 Quoted in Gillette, "A National Workshop," 15. 169 Gilbert Gimble, "Critical Decision Near on Inner Loop Future," Evening Star, 7 November 1961: B-1. 170 J.E. Greiner Company and De Leuw, Cather & Company, Transportation Survey and Plan for the Central Area of Washington, D.C. (Washington: Department of Highways and Department of Vehicles and Traffic, 1944), 18. 171 Ibid., 18-19. 93 management. "The only requirement," the J.E. Greiner engineering consultants wrote ' ,,. Is to make [the roads] so attractive that motorists will use them in preference to streets Whi ch pass through the heart of the downtown area." Beyond a few new or widened st reets, the loop would be created through improvements to "signal timing, protection by st0P signs, provision of modem traffic safety lighting, lane markings, and other expedients to make them of maximum attractiveness to the motoring public." 172 That version of the Inner Loop lay dormant. But the NCPC's 1950 comprehensive plan retained the idea of a central ring serving the same purpose, to siphon off approximately 25 percent of the traffic from gridlocked downtown streets. The NCPC endorsed the Inner Loop again in 1954, 1959, and 1961 plans, and the De Leuw, Cather engineering firm defined route alternatives beginning in 1955. No longer simply a set of roadway improvements, the Inner Loop would now be an expressway built from scratch. 173 In 1961, the NCPC ran into problems grounded in the basic foundation of urban freeway planning, and as a result, the Inner Loop which commission chair Harland Bartholomew continued to promote was cancelled because of a weakness in the definition of intra-city beltways which he had helped write two decades earlier. The 1944 Interregional Highways report, which Bartholomew co-authored, recognized the potential for this kind of inner loop, and gave these suggestions: In some cases it may be feasible to c.onstru~t the distributing belt line within the city- generally somewhere within the nng of ~ecadent pro.rerty surrounding the central business area. Such a. belt lme, conn~ctmg at appropriate points with radial arteries extendmg out of the city, may avoid 172 Ib'd I ., 19. 173 0 . 1mble, "Critical Decision." 94 the cutting of a new route directly through the business sections, and may either serve as a substitute or supplement for the outer belt line. 174 The key word here is "decadent." The earlier Bureau of Public Roads report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, had in 1939 explained that "decadent property" referred to old urban areas dating to the nineteenth century and containing "countless impediments that embarrass the movement of twentieth-century traffic." 175 From this perspective, the Interregional Highways excerpt can be understood to suggest building inner loops explicitly across poor areas of the inner city in order to avoid wealthier commercial areas. This line of thinking characterized highway planning in the 1940s and 1950s, but no longer worked by 1961. After a decade of rubber stamping Inner Loop proposals, the NCPC held up full approval in October, 1961, after member Alexander C. Robinson III, a Cleveland architect, questioned the highway's eventual impact on Washington based on how he had seen expressways create physical gashes in his own city. The American Institute of Architects and the Committee of 100 also challenged the loop and other proposed freeways, arguing that such an approach to traffic problems was outdated and that dealing with "decadent property" by razing it for freeways had the very real effect of uprooting families and destroying neighborhoods. While the Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade and some highway planners continued to push for the Inner Loop, it never regained full support and was eventually dropped from 174 U.S. Congress, Interregional Highways, 97. 175 U.S. Congress, Toll Roads and Free Roads, 99. See also Ellis, "Visions of Urban Freeways," 149. 95 consideration. 176 A few portions, which were built before support for the full ring collapsed, serve traffic today, including the former Center Leg (the northern spur ofl- 395) and the South Leg (I-395, the Southeast and Southwest Freeways). Outside the Inner Loop, the NCPC's 1950 comprehensive plan (Fig. 3) depicted a second, or intermediate, ring road just inside the District's borders. This intermediate loop was a revival of a much older proposal, a plan to link the sites of21 Civil War forts inside the city's perimeter, first articulated around 1880 and formally proposed in a city development plan in 1901.177 Until the 1930s, Washington planners saw this "Fort Drive" as a tourist attraction and a backbone for park development. Playing up the road's tourism potential, the Washington Board of Trade in 1922 endorsed "a boulevard connecting [the] forts as well as a driveway along the ridge overlooking the District and Maryland's valleys." 178 Fort Drive's potential grew after Congress authorized the purchase of right-of- way in 1930. Planners in the 1940s, following the framework of belt-line distributors laid out in Interregional Highways, saw in the intermediate loop an opportunity to draw traffic off the city's congested streets; Fort Drive, if built as an expressway, could serve tourists and alleviate gridlock simultaneously. The NCPC (then still the NCPPC, or 176 Gimble, "Critical Decision." 177 For full descriptions and locations of Washington's several dozen Civil War forts, see Benjamin Franklin Cooling III and Walter H. Owen II, Mr. Lincoln's Forts: A Guide to the Civil War Defenses of Washington (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing Company, 1988). 178 Jessica Ivy Elfenbein, Civics, Commerce, and Community: The History of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, 1889-1989 (Dubuque, Ia.: Kendall-Hunt, 1990), 34; James G. Deane, "1901 Plan for Linking Forts Revived as an Aid to Traffic," Evening Star, 2 March 1952: A-8. 96 National Capital Park and Planning Commission) purchased 98 percent of the required right of way by 1952 for the four-lane, limited-access highway (Fig. 4). But District Budget Officer Walter Fowler's 1947 prediction that the road would "never [be] built because there is no need for it and there will be no money for it" turned out to be prescient. In the end, the only portion built was an improvement to Military Road crossing Rock Creek Park. 179 The Inner Loop, Fort Drive, and the Washington Circumferential Freeway (which became the Capital Beltway) comprised the concentric rings in the NCPC's 1950 comprehensive plan. Even before the Inner Loop was dropped in the 1960s, a fourth beltway, farther out in the suburbs, had made its way into regional plans. A 1955 progress report published by the M-NCPPC (Fig. 5) shows Maryland's portions of what appears to be Fort Drive, the Inter County Belt Highway (Capital Beltway), and beyond that an "Outer Circumferential Freeway," labeled elsewhere as "Outer Circumferential #4." 180 This Outer Beltway became the most controversial road in the history of the Washington suburbs, with its future still unresolved a half-century later. After highway officials in Maryland and Virginia designed their respective segments of the expressway, the Outer Beltway was dropped from regional plans in 1970 (in part due to 179 Deane, "1901 Plan." See also U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems: Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, 85th Congress, 2d sess., 1958, 105-109. 180 Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, M-NCPPC Annual Report No. 30 (Riverdale, Md.: M-NCPPC, 1957), 19. 97 Montgomery County's refusal to allow construction over its relatively undeveloped western section). 18 1 A formal study of a portion of the Outer Beltway in Maryland, newly dubbed the Inter-County Connector (ICC), began in 1979 and was abandoned in 1989. Another ICC study ran from 1993 to 1998, at which point Maryland Governor Parris N. Glendening dropped plans for the road. Glendening subsequently reopened discussion before abandoning it again in 1999-but even then, state officials refused to relinquish control over the right-of-way held for decades in anticipation of the highway's construction, even as the Montgomery County Council was prepared to sell the right-of- way or convert it into a park. Meanwhile, the Greater Washington Board of Trade in 1986 revived plans for a full, 150-mile Outer Beltway, but lack of support from local jurisdictions killed that effort. The story of the Outer Beltway and its successors, the Inter-County Connector and Virginia's Western Transportation Corridor, requires its own study, which will have to wait for a later time. As I write this in 2002, all iterations of the Outer Beltway are officially dormant, but Maryland highway officials, with the support of other ICC proponents, continue to sit on the reserved land with an eye to the future when a different state administration might reopen the fifty-year-old highway plan yet again. In December 2001 , Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend 181 Karl Vick, "Md. Tollway Remains a Road Not Taken," Washington Post, 3 February 1997: Al. See also Maryland State Roads Commission and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Corridor Feasibility Study for the Outer Circumferential Freeway in Montgomery County, Maryland (Maryland State Roads Commission, 1969). 98 announced that she would be willing to consider reviving the ICC if elected governor in late 2002. 182 Yet another beltway even farther into the suburbs appeared in regional plans in the early 1960s. By the time an engineering consultants' report came out in 1964, the Inner Loop and Fort Drive had vanished from the drawing board, so the new beltway, a 165-mile ring 25 miles from the White House, became the "Third Circumferential Highway" after the Capital Beltway and the Outer Beltway. Officials in Prince William County, Va., initiated this proposal with plans for a cross-county highway parallel to the Outer Beltway, and the M-NCPPC extended the arc into a full circle around Washington. 183 The 1964 report shows the Third Circumferential running to the north along the MD 100 corridor in Howard County, to the southeast near La Plata in Charles County, to the west through Loudoun County and southwest of Manassas, and to the south near Quantico. The beltway would more or less delineate the farthest reaches of the Washington region; the engineering consultants suggested "deliberately placing the road in Calvert County, to bring that county into the metropolitan orbit." But by 1968, 182 Ibid.; Daniel LeDuc, "Governor Abandons Road Plan," Washington Post, 7 March 1998: Dl; Alan Sipress, "Glendening Kills Intercounty Connector," Washington Post, 23 September 1999: A 1; Scott Wilson, "Md. Connector Road May Get a Reprieve: Political Leaders Vow to Hold On to Land," Washington Post, 25 September 1999: Al; Daniel LeDuc, "'Grumpy' Comptroller Lets Road Rage Erupt," Washington Post, 19 October 1999: B 1; Amy Argetsinger, "Montgomery Won't Sell Its Connector Property," Washington Post, 5 February 2000: Bl; Steven T. Dennis, "Council Backs Off Park Designation for ICC Land," Chevy Chase Gazette, 19 January 2000: A-19; Daniel LeDuc, "Townsend Revives Debate Over Highway," Washington Post, 11 December 2001: B5; Matthew Mosk, "Top Lawmakers Give a Boost to Connector Road," Washington Post, 26 January 2002: B4. 183 Paul Hodge, "3d Beltway Idea Belted by Planner," Washington Post, 18 November 1968. 99 numerous civic groups and chief planners for Howard County and the M-NCPPC had voiced their opposition to the proposal, mostly based on fears of higher-density development in outlying areas, and the Third Circumferential Highway quietly disappeared. 184 For different reasons in each case, the first, second, fourth, and fifth proposed ring roads were never built. While highway engineers built new radials (in the suburbs) and improved old ones (in the city and suburbs), the series of concentric rings proposed to connect them never materialized. One beltway alone materialized from the plans; in the next chapter, I look at how the Capital Beltway managed to achieve substance when its four sisters did not. 184 Ibid.; Harold Bartholomew and Associates, Third Belt Highway, Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area: A Prospectus (Washington, D.C., 1964). 100 turnpike authorities which designed and built new roads funded by revenue bonds amortized by future tolls. 188 The Pennsylvania Turnpike led the way, but in more ways than were first apparent. Both army officials and the German Wehrmacht kept a close eye through the late 1930s on the turnpike's development, recognizing "the defensive and offensive capabilities of a limited-access, split-lane highway system designed for military vehicles." 189 Pentagon officials had already seen, and respected, how efficiently German armored divisions moved along that country's divided highways. 190 The Pennsylvania Turnpike provided the first concrete example of similar potential in the United States. That potential became significant as the Cold War developed and intensified. Vehicles moved fast and freely along the Pennsylvania Turnpike and other new toll roads; a broader network of similar highways could serve as an unprecedented strategic tool. After all, if armored vehicles carrying guided missiles could roam at will around an extensive highway system, chances were slim that enemy attacks could target them. Military officials already knew, from destroying German and Japanese airfields during World War II, that bulldozers could fill in a day the holes in highways created by bombs, so American expressways would be effectively impervious to conventional warfare. Even damage from atomic bombs ( excepting radiation), officials believed, could be fixed within a day or two. Long and straight sections of highway also served as 188 Americari Public Works Association, History of Public Works in the United States, 1776-1976 (Chicago: American Public Works Association, 1976), 90; Jeremy L. Korr, "Toll Bridges arid Roads," in Dictionary of American History, 3d. ed., ed. Stanley I. Kutler (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, forthcoming). 189 Stilgoe, 92. 190 Ibid., 93. 102 ideal backup landing strips for military planes. 191 A grid of Pennsylvania Turnpikes, in other words, was seen as a valuable strategic tool for the national military. However, the United States government is explicitly prohibited from building roads. The Constitution forbids this of Congress because road creation is, as noted earlier by J.B. Jackson, "the first step toward creating a tyrannical, centralizing national govemment." 192 Congress may establish a road, or declare one to be a national highway, but it cannot actually build the road under its own authority. All of this assumes that a road is a venue for accommodating normal traffic. But if the road instead serves as a weapon, then is it still a road as such? The negotiations preceding the passage of the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which established the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, focused heavily on the highways' dual potential to provide traffic relief and to contribute to national defense. Skirting the issue of whether the federal government can build roads under any circumstances, the 1956 legislation set up a highway system which Pentagon officials and civil engineers of each state would work together to design; the states would be responsible for letting construction contracts for highways which would follow federally-specified standards. 193 The Interstate highway system was then, as it is now, a massive offensive and defensive weapon as well as a panacea (in the best cases) for traffic congestion on other roads. 191 Ibid., 93-95. 192 Ibid., 93. 193 Ibid., 93-94. 103 Interstates were intended to serve as emergency evacuation routes from cities for residents.194 More importantly, from an offensive standpoint, was their provision of bypass routes around heavy city traffic. Francis C. Turner, who helped design the system and who later became Federal Highway Administrator, explained that "[t]he concept was that every major city had to have not only a route that penetrated the city but routes around the city . . . . So in case a bomb dropped, like in Hiroshima, the military needed a route to go around the city, to bypass it. 11195 The Beltway's origin lies in this argument. Although Maryland highway officials had already proposed at least a partial circumferential highway around Washington for traffic mitigation purposes, it was the fear of a Cold War attack on the nation's capital- not Harland Bartholomew's vision of regional planning via concentric circumferential highways, nor the need for cross-county traffic relief- which provided the immediate impetus for the development of what became the Capital Beltway. Military leaders assumed that a nuclear hit on Washington would create massive rubble which would block the area's roads. A bypass highway well outside the city "would give the tanks from Fort Belvoir, say, a route north to cut off an aggressor force." 196 In February 1952, Senator Francis Case of South Dakota sponsored an amendment to the pending 1952 Federal-Aid Highway Act authorizing a circumferential highway around Washington for this purpose. The Senate Public Works 194 Ellis, "Visions of Urban Freeways," 234. 195 Douglas B. Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag," Washington Post, 30 August 1999: A12. 196 David R. Boldt, "Beltway: Planning Problem," Washington Post, 26 December 1972: B5. 104 Subcommittee heard testimony on behalf of Case's amendment from W.E. Reynolds commissioner of public buildings for the General Services Administration; Kenneth Chacey, highway engineer of the Army's Office of Chief of Transportation; John Nolan, Jr., director of planning for the NCPPC; Fred W. Tuemmler, director of planning for the M-NCPPC; and S.R. Harrison, the District's engineer of streets. These officials stressed that while the circumferential would relieve local traffic congestion, it would also constitute a vital link in the national defense infrastructure in coajunction with the extant Shirley Highway and Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Accounts of the Case amendment are unclear as to whether a full beltway was under consideration: one newspaper report describes "(t]he belt road would start at the Washington-Baltimore parkway, form a crescent around the city and connect with the Shirley highway, also serving the new Washington airport at Burke, Va. [emphasis added]." 197 While the Case amendment, which would have authorized $36 million for the new circumferential, was apparently not approved, it did bring the proposal for at least one ring road around Washington to the immediate attention oflocal and federal officials. Here a question remains: would the highway have worked as a military tool as originally proposed during testimony over the Case amendment? Its success would have depended on, first, whether it would be any help in the face of a nuclear attack, and second, whether it could accommodate both resident traffic fleeing the city and military traffic moving around it. On the first count, the chances of the proposed beltway being of any help are dubious. A 1981 analysis estimated that a one-megaton surface blast from a nuclear 197 Harold B. Rogers, "GSA Advocates Belt Highway Around D.C., 11 Evening Star, 19 February 1952: B-1. 105 bomb detonated at the White House would ki11 98 percent of the people within approximately a one-mile radius, 50 percent of the people within three miles, and virtually no one (but would injure 25 percent of the people) six to eight miles away. However, a one-megaton air blast would kill twice as many people, and a 25-megaton air blast would kill over 90 percent of the people within what is now the Capital Beltway. Except for the weakest cases of a nuclear attack, then, a bomb's damage would take effect too quickly for an escape route to be ofuse. 198 Yet even if the effects of such an attack spread slowly, it is hard to believe that I the Capital Beltway could handle the civilian and military traffic fleeing or evading the city. Apparently unaware of the Beltway's originally proposed purpose, a Northern Virginia resident wrote in 2000: "I sometimes wonder how this area would cope with a major disaster ifwe had to depend on our transportation system to move people in an emergency. 11199 This fear is we11 founded. By 1969, only five years after the Capital Beltway opened, planning officials cited its congestion, and its resulting inability to contribute effectively to the national defense system, as a justification for building the Outer Beltway: The Highway Act of 1956 authorize?. by Congre~s declared t~at the early completion of the "Interstate System was essential to the nat10nal interest. Although the Outer Circumferential Freeway is not part of the currently conceived Interstate System, it provides a vital and necessary link in the overall highway network. Sine: the Capital Beltway (~-495) is a part of the Interstate System and is becommg_ ~ore overloaded w1~ traffic, much of which is local in nature, a new facility has to be found 1f we are to provide a good defense highway for the Washington Metropolitan area. The Outer z9s Tad Szulc, "The Unthinkable," Washingtonian, June 1981: 108. 199 Douglas Goodgion, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 13 March 2000: Al 6. 106 Circumferential Freeway will satisfactorily serve this function. 200 The Capital Beltway remains a key component of the Interstate system, but its utility as a defense highway has yet to be tested, some fifty years after its proposal as such. In his history of the development of the Interstate Highway System, Bruce Seely writes that "(p ]ainting highway congestion as a military problem ... added highly visible urgency to road building. These arguments, however, never altered the nature of highway policy. Rather, they provided an easily understood justification for larger highway programs.11201 Seely may be mistaken. On a national scale, highway policy is affected by military concerns when Interstates (usually in rural areas) are used very much in their identity as defense highways: for military aircraft to practice emergency landings, for the planes to deploy during a military intervention, for reserve units to travel en masse from point to point.202 In Washington, discussion of the proposed Beltway's military benefits elevated the highway from one of several loops on a planning map to a seriously considered construction project. With the idea still fresh after the 1952 Case amendment, the M-NCPPC included the Beltway on a planning map later that year, and the National Capital Region Planning Council endorsed it in 1953.203 Finally, on March 15, 1954, more than 50 officials from the District, Maryland, and Virginia met at the Hotel Statler to discuss the need for and viability of that 200 Maryland State Roads Commission and Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Corridor Feasibility Study, 12. 201 Seely, Building the American Highway System, 203. 202 Stilgoe, 95. 203 DO IT Coalition, "The Capital Beltway Owner's Manual," brochure, 1988. 107 particular circumferential highway. By the time the meeting adjourned, plans for the Capital Beltway had been set in motion. The officials agreed to develop a "belt highway" which would cross the Potomac River at a specific location near Jones Point (now the Woodrow Wilson Bridge) and near Cabin John, Md., at a site to be determined. The Maryland State Roads Commission (SRC), represented by chair Russell H. McCain, was prepared to begin construction of its 33-mile portion at a cost of about $33 million. (Because this meeting predated by two years the establishment of the Interstate system, the 90-10 federal funding formula was not yet in effect.) Virginia's Department of Highways (VDH) had not decided how to finance its section, but assistant chief engineer Burton Marye was confident that the state would soon work out the details and begin construction.204 At that meeting, both states and the District pledged to cooperate in making the Beltway a reality. In this and the following two chapters, I look at both parts of that action. First, I examine how the Beltway came to fruition in Maryland and in Virginia. In discussing the engineering, design, and construction processes, I address the second operation in the cultural landscape study model by exploring how the Beltway's boundaries were created and how draftsmen and engineers perceived them as abstract and experiential, respectively. The same discussion, which focuses in depth on how draftsmen and engineers worked on the highway, speaks to the fifth operation of the study model which encourages analysis of the technology used to shape a given landscape. I also look (briefly here, then in depth in Chapter 5) at how the Beltway's development played out in the lives of area residents who suddenly found large clear- 204 "Belt Highway Vital, D.C. and Two States Agree," Evening Star, 16 March 1954: B- l. 108 cuts, and then an expressway, in their neighborhoods. This chapter concludes with discussion of the Beltway's opening in 1964 and the immediate aftermath. Through this chapter and later in greater depth in Chapter 6, I also focus on the second part of the 1954 meeting's action, assessing how effectively the three jurisdictions (especially Maryland and Virginia) followed through on their initial pledge to cooperate with respect to the Beltway. A 1958 M-NCPPC report on the Beltway's early progress explained that "[t]he Circumferential will arc through both Montgomery and Prince George's Counties and will connect with a similar roadway in Virginia [emphasis added]. 11205 Why "will connect with a similar roadway" and not "will continue through Virginia"? Was the Beltway a single highway, or in fact two distinct somewhat similar roads? What are the implications in either case-in short, why and how has it mattered? These next chapters reveal similarities and differences between the Beltway's portions in both states, in both its planning process and physical appearance, and explore the ways in which these characteristics and comparisons are relevant. The Washington Circumferential Highway in Maryland Before the 1950s, the city of College Park, unincorporated until 1945, was more representative of its earlier name than it was of a full-fledged city. The community began around 1860 as a smattering of houses for instructors at the Maryland Agricultural College (now the University of Maryland), clustered around an old county road near the B & 0 railroad stop called College Station, a name the neighborhood 205 Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Annual Report 31 (Riverdale, Md.: M-NCPPC, 1958), 14. 109 appropriated. Well into the twentieth century, College Park remained highly residential. Some services for motorists and university students developed along U.S. 1, which followed an eighteenth-century post road, but for the most part residents and students went to Hyattsville or Washington for serious shopping.206 This changed in 1951. Harry A. Rosenfeld, a Washington-based real estate agent, purchased a plot of undeveloped land at the corner of Knox Road and Baltimore Boulevard (U.S. 1), and built the city's first modern suburban shopping center. An ad placed in a University of Maryland student magazine in May 1951 announced the upcoming July "gala opening of College Park's most complete shopping center," featuring, among other services, a Woolworth's, a People's Drug Store, a Hot Shoppe restaurant, several clothing stores, a bank, and a supermarket. The "College Park Business Center" also offered a ballroom and two floors of office space. "The location was superb," according to the magazine's coverage, given its proximity to the main traffic arteries of U.S. 1 and Route 193.207 Evidently the management of Michael Baker, Jr. agreed. In April 1954, the Pennsylvania-based engineering firm opened a branch office on the third floor of the new College Park Business Center. Maryland's State Roads Commission (SRC) had selected Baker to design its portion of the Capital Beltway, following up on rough alignments drawn in 1952 by the M-NCPPC before the state had officially approved the 206 See T. Raymond Burch, History and Development of the City of College Park, Berwyn Heights, Greenbelt and Adjacent Areas (1965; College Park, Md.: City of College Park, 1970), and Creating Tomorrow Today, A Vision of College Park in the 21 st Century: City of College Park Comprehensive Plan (College Park, Md.: City of College Park, 1995). 207 Pete Neale, "College Park is Finally Coming Into Its Own With a New Shopping Center," Old Line 17.6 (Graduation 1951): 3-5 and inside front cover. 110 project. Political connections were probably responsible for Baker's emergence on the Maryland scene: the firm, based in Beaver County, northwest of Pittsburgh, maintained field offices in several states and countries, but had not previously been a major player in the Washington area. "It was during the [Governor Theodore] McKeldin administration," former Baker employee Isadore Parker recalled in 1998, "and I'm pretty sure that Michael Baker, Jr. [the company's founder] was a strong supporter, probably financial, of McKeldin, and that's why he got the contract outside the state." For the locally established firms, Baker's College Park office was a serious and unwelcome intrusion into their own market.208 "[Baker] was a big, big outsider," former employee Fred Pavay stressed to me in a 1998 conversation. And that ... created some ill will. [J.E.] Greiner was like the resident, big engineering company in the state. They did the [Chesapeake] Bay Bridge! ... Not that that was perfect. Not the point that they were the best. But they were good, thoroughly qualified engineers, and I'm sure they wanted to get into the Interstate business. You know, there's a lot of money involved.209 Parker reaffirmed that the engineering firms which won the big highway contracts in the late 1950s-in this case, Baker; in Virginia's case, a different company discussed in the next section-became the pioneering designers of the Interstate system. At the time, there were few hard-and-fast procedures for developing an Interstate-quality highway, 208 Interview with Isadore Parker, 5 October 1998. Archivists at Michael Baker, Jr.'s current headquarters in Harrisburg, Pa., told me in October 1998 that they could not find any records from the College Park branch office's work on the Capital Beltway; information in this section relies on the interviews cited and on in-house newsletters provided by Fred Pavay. 209 Interview with Fred Pavay, 8 October 1998. All further quotes from Parker and Pavay in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, are from interviews of 5 and 26 October 1998 (Parker) and 8, 15, and 29 October 1998 (Pavay). 111 and fewer places to go to learn those procedures. As a result, Baker and its counterparts in other states served as unofficial training grounds for engineers who later moved on to direct Interstate projects elsewhere. But Greiner, the local powerhouse, had likely expected the contract. "And here comes Baker," Pavay said, maybe with a little better credentials, and let's be honest, maybe a few good political connections, and even then ... I thought, man, it's a little marginal ethically. They ... would buy tickets to some big ... fundraiser in Baltimore. They knew all the politicians. I used to think, I don't want to know about that. I was doing technical work. But this was a mg element of it. And, of course, Baker [himself] could produce, 'cause he must also have had good contacts with the federal government. Baker was in fact an international player, even if not previously well known in the Washington area. Under the slogan "We Traverse the World," Baker maintained branch offices in Jordan, Cambodia, Ecuador, and Peru. In College Park, the branch office quickly picked up a number of contracts from the SRC, the National Park Service, and the D.C. Department of Highways. By 1957, according to an in-house newsletter, the office had already completed design or design supervision of several bridges, highways, and surveys in southern and central Maryland, in addition to some bridges and culverts in Washington's Rock Creek Park. Projects in progress at that time included 14 miles of the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), 45 miles of the Northeastern Expressway (1-95), and 38 miles and 68 "Major Structures" of the Washington Circumferential Highway. 210 Several supervising engineers from company headquarters ran Baker's College Park office, but otherwise the firm hired local talent for its Washington-area projects. 210 The Baker Engineer 3.8 (November 1957): 2-3. 112 -- Fred Pavay had grown up in northeast D.C., attended Roosevelt High School, and took several engineering classes at the University of Maryland before taking a position as a road inspector and engineering aide for the Montgomery County Department of Public Works, specializing in highway drainage. Isadore Parker had previously worked as a topographic draftsman for the federal government, but had been suspended for reasons resulting from McCarthy-era Communism accusations, like many others in the cooperative new town of Greenbelt. "You're living in Greenbelt," Parker remembered, "and everyone works for the government. McCarthyism was guilt by association. So if you knew the Communists, or if you were familiar with one, then that made you a threat to the country." Pavay similarly recalled that "during the pre-McCarthy era, almost everyone in Greenbelt, virtually, at least those that had some ethnic or Jewish background, were investigated." Indefinitely out of a job and saddled by a groundless federal investigation, Parker responded to advertisements for employment at the Michael Baker Jr. office around 1955, where Pavay joined him within a year. Parker and Pavay, both suburban residents, were pleased by the project Baker assigned them to, a new highway which would significantly improve their own commutes. "I remember," Parker told me, "when I had to go over from Greenbelt to the Hecht's [ department store] in Silver Spring; it would take me about an hour on University Boulevard [Route 193]. That was the only east-west road that we had. And it was just jammed. It was only two lanes!" Commuting from Rockville first to the university and then to Baker's office in College Park, Pavay faced the same traffic and alternated between Route 193 and equally congested two-lane roads. 113 To relieve this congestion, Parker literally drew up the Capital Beltway. At his previous job, he had become familiar with "very fine drafting ... which required drawing contour lines of a certain thickness that you had to look in a scope to see that you didn't exceed." Parker's drafting work at Baker, where "all you had to use was a ruling pin," was relatively simple. But for Pavay, who arrived at Baker without the benefit of comparative drafting techniques, the performance of the company's draftsmen was unbelievable. "It was remarkable," he said, speaking of Parker, Jean Miller, and Tom Kelleher, the three draftsmen assigned to the Beltway project. They didn't use a machine to do the lettering .... These three ... made up standards before I ever went there. Each one had a copy on their desk of a typical bit of lettering . ... It amazed me. I was not that good. These three people so skillfully matched the style that you had to be an expert-in fact, I couldn't be sure which one did it. They were all doing lettering on construction drawings, on the Beltway, and you couldn't tell them apart .... And it was a good thing, because one would start a drawing and another one would finish it a week or two later. All three draftsmen worked together on the same squad. "Bob Coughlin was the head of that squad, they would call it," Pavay recalled. "That's the way they organized the yards. They were four-man squads with a squad leader, and they just split up the work that way." The Baker office was further divided into a highway section headed by Jack H. Frantz and a bridge section led by Bernt 0. Lundbeck; Coughlin's squad was part of the highway division.21 1 Each section had a staff of draftsmen and a staff of engineers, the latter of which was larger for the bridge division. All staff members worked at adjacent rows of desks with no separating partitions. Pavay emphasized that while the bridge engineers prepared some of the bridge plans, "Izzy [Parker], Tom Kelleher, and Jean Miller were the three draftsmen that did all the detailed work on the 211 Ibid., 2. 114 Beltway .... [They] did virtually all the construction drawings for [it]." Fellow staff members included Parker's supervisor John McCormick, bridge engineer Webster Collins, project chief and Bureau of Public Roads veteran Logan L. Ratliff, Hungarian and former dentist Istvan (Steve) Temessy, and former German soldier Friedrich Jacobs. While Parker sat mostly at his drafting board, Pavay's duties included preparing cross-sections, computing earthwork, and doing preliminary inspections. The most invaluable tool during these processes seems to have been the "typical section," a kind of template for the engineering design of any given portion of the highway. "Anyone can get a sketchy idea of the cross-section of the road by looking at what they call a typical section," Pavay recalled. These came into use, for example, during preliminary inspections, or P.l.s, when a group of five or six, including engineers and representatives of state and local planning authorities, would literally walk the line of the planned highway, tracing surveyors' routes to check for any impediments the original surveyors may have missed. "What they would take on a preliminary inspection," Pavay said, "would be typical sections, cross-sections of the road, which on the Beltway, for example, would show the entire width of the paved area, [ and] the median." These cross-sections accounted for the need to deal with water accumulating on the highway. "What we used," Parker remembered, "was a template which showed two lanes on each side, and then a grassy median on the inside. And you caught the water in the median, so parts of the inner lane sloped toward the median. Parts of the outer lanes sloped towards the edges," likely for the same reason. The Baker engineers intentionally structured their 115 - typical sections for the Beltway with wide enough medians-36 feet, Parker recalled- that 12-foot lanes could later be added on either side to what was originally designed as a four-lane highway. By the time Pavay moved on to work for the M-NCPPC in the 1960s, engineers were using photogrammetry, a combination of aerial photography and optical equipment, to assist in generating topographic maps. But in the late 1950s, Baker engineers did their work manually: surveyors went out into the field, set a series of benchmarks, and calculated elevations. Neither Pavay nor Parker worked with these surveying parties, but they did use the surveyors' calculations. Pavay explained how he helped prepare preliminary estimates for earthwork: "You first did the profile, then you stretched out the typical section by a scale of, as I recall, ten inch; one inch equals ten feet vertically, one inch equals ten feet horizontally." After measuring various dimensions of the section of land, "by going down the line, in fifty foot increments, you could estimate ... the total cubic yards of earthwork." For his storm drainage design, earthwork planning, and other duties, Pavay relied almost entirely on surveyors' work and typical sections, and hardly set foot in the field himself, in what seems a disconnect between the author of the landscape, in a sense, and the product of his work. Parker, too, stayed in the office and used the figures and data he was given. After drawing right-of-way plats, he progressed to designing the highway proper. Here algebra and geometry came into play. Parker explained to me how the design process progressed: Well, the way the system worked, as I recall it, when the surveyor'd come in with his notes, he translated his notes. In other words, he would start at an elevation of 350.12 or something, and he'd take a sighting, and he would say, like, 15 .2, which meant it was 15 .2 feet above the level he was sighting in. So 116 you had to go down the list of it as he'd sight. You'd have to transpose that, you'd have to add them on or take them off from the level that he was sighting them at. And that's called, I think, translating notes. I think that's the term for it. Then you had to translate that onto a piece of paper. And you had graph paper, and ... if it was ten feet in elevation, you'd put your point there and a point there. And then you'd connect all your points. Then you had a sheet of paper like that [ spreading his hands far apart, horizontally level] with zigzag lines like this showing elevation [making sine-wave motions with one hand]. The designer would come along and would draw a curved line through there ... keeping within the restraints of how large a curve you can have. So everything translated into graph paper. And, actually, you didn't need any construction plans. All you needed was a set of graph paper designs. On each- there'd be one line here, and then you'd go another fifty feet, there'd be another line here and one down there. And then you would translate that into your construction drawings. Because you would start out in the middle, and that would be the point that they're going horizontally. And ... with a template you'd put in the median strip and the pavement. And then, depending on what you'd hit, you'd either go down or you'd go up ... depending on what that land was. This translation process, the art of articulating a design in two and then three dimensions, was what made the job worthwhile to Parker. "I thought it was a great learning experience for me," he explained. "It was fascinating how an engineer could work out any kind of a problem, you know, build a bridge, build a freeway .... It's all done on paper! Somebody has to translate it into a real structure." For Parker, it really was all done on paper; in all of his drafting work, he only visited the field once, while designing the extension of 16th Street in Silver Spring. More comfortable at the drafting table, he "never was anxious to get out with the surveyors out in the field. I don't know why; it just never interested me." In fact, although he essentially scripted much of the current Beltway's path, he did so half-blindly, as he told me with a grin: I didn't even know half the roads that we were crossing. When I drive on the Beltway now, I see "Brunett Avenue" [in Silver Spring]. Well, I remember lettering in "Brunett Avenue"! I remember lettering in "Georgia Avenue," stuff like that. I knew where they were, but some of the streets that they 117 bridged, you know, they were new to me, they were in Montgomery County. For the most part, then, Parker related to the highway he was constructing in abstract rather than experiential terms. The Beltway, like other roads, was a work of multiple phases of what Parker called "translation." Parker, Pavay, and their colleagues sat in the Baker office and turned surveyors' figures into draft illustrations and detailed construction plans. From there, State Roads Commission engineers, who spent the time in the field which the consulting engineers and draftsmen did not, supervised the "translation" of Baker's plans into an actual highway and conducted a far more experiential relationship with the landscape.212 William Shook, who like Pavay and Parker had attended engineering classes at the University of Maryland and had earned a B.S. in civil engineering in 1950, headed the SRC effort through the years of the Beltway's construction. Unlike the Baker supervisors, Shook was no stranger to Maryland's roads. Immediately after graduating, Shook began work for the SRC as a junior bridge engineer, assisting first on construction of a bridge over the Patuxent River at Benedict, and then on the construction of the Washington National Pike (then new U.S. 240, now I-270) between Rockville and Hyattstown. After additional bridge projects in Frederick and Montgomery Counties and the reconstruction ofVeirs Mill Road in Montgomery, Shook in 1956 became Area Engineer and then Assistant District Engineer for Construction in SRC's District 3, which encompassed Montgomery and Prince George's Counties. In 1960, with the Beltway's construction in those counties well underway, 212 M-NCPPC staff members also contributed to the design process by supervising right- of-way acquisition along the Beltway's alignment. See interview with Lester F. Wilkinson, Jr. , 27 October 1998. 118 Shook was promoted to District's 3's District Engineer.213 Supervising much of the Beltway construction fieldwork was the district's Area Construction Engineer, Slade Caltrider, who himself had begun work for the SRC in 1948 after one semester of engineering classes at the University of Maryland, and who later became Maryland's State Roads Commissioner.214 At a public symposium in 1999, Shook explained how his duties regarding the Beltway's construction picked up where Pavay's and Parker's left off: My involvement started in the fall of 1956 ... At that time, the Beltway was under design, and my function in the design area was, at various stages of the design, to review the plans from the district and from the standpoint of construction activities, and to suggest changes that might be necessary also. Another function was to, in the very preliminary stage, when the preliminary plans were completed, which weren't much more than a center line and a few major drainage structures located and that sort of thing, was to walk the alignment of the road. Not only the Beltway, but all the roads that we had designed at that time in [Montgomery County].215 Walking along the proposed alignment during these preliminary inspections, Shook held copies of the initial plans, which sketched roughly the land's topography, the proposed center line of the highway, and the projected grades for the highway. The inspection team checked to ensure that all significant physical features of the landscape appeared on the preliminary plans and attempted to pre-empt potential construction problems. "I guess I probably walked about half of the Maryland section of the Beltway before it was built," Shook said. "Interesting. And during that time we had some very 213 William L. Shook to Jeremy L. Korr, 3 March I 999. 214 Interview with Slade Caltrider, 28 September 2000. 21 5 William Shook, comments made during "Building the Beltway: The Montgomery Experience," oral history panel moderated by Jeremy Korr, Montgomery County Historical Society's Arumal Symposium on Twentieth Century History, Montgomery College- Rockville campus, Rockville, Md., 24 October 1999. 119 good times on those walks. Odd things would happen."216 I cite Shook here at length because these events have not been recorded elsewhere: I remember walking from University Boulevard to the east, toward New Hampshire Avenue, and when [I] came to an overlook over the Northwest Branch ravine, standing up on a rock up on top of what's now-we cut through, actually, and looking down. The [current] bridge deck itself, ifl remember correctly, is about 127 feet above the streambed. And we were up a few feet even higher than that. Quite a spectacular view down into that valley, which is not-we don't think of that in this area, having a close to a 150-foot drop here, looking into a valley or a gully-that deep! And then on the New Hampshire side, it was even higher .... [W]e were really huffing and puffing by the time we walked down the hill and then had to climb up the other side ... a very steep climb out of there. I recall another occasion ... in Prince George's County we were walking along and suddenly one of the right-of-way agents who was there disappeared. And I mean, just dropped out of sight. Literally. He walked over an old cistern, I guess it was, that had been dug by a previous home. The house was gone, but you could see the foundation. But they apparently had covered the opening with some boards, which were very rotted and were covered with leaves and weren't visible, and we were walking through what we thought were just leaves, and he stepped on this and disappeared, fell right down and fortunately he wasn't hurt. Another time ... it happened to be a right-of-way agent again, decided-we came to a stream in Prince George's County where it was about a foot deep, and none of us had boots. So, I guess the stream was about 15 feet wide. And this one right-of-way agent spied a grapevine and he decided he was going to swing across it. Well, he got about halfway across and the vine pulled free and the tree dropped him right into the stream. Of course we all had wet feet 'cause we had to wade across. And another time, not so happy, over near Cabin John Bridge, American Legion Bridge now .... I use it as an [anecdote] to say, I can tell you the difference between city slickers and country hicks. We heard, we were walking along single file through a little light-wooded area, a lot of brush around. And somebody kicked up a yellowjackets' nest, had walked over the top of one. Well, anyway, the cry of "Bees!" went out. Of course the city slickers froze in their tracks. The country hicks immediately ran into the brush. I was raised in the country and I learned that, at an early young age, that if you kicked up a yellowjackets' nest the best defense was to run through brush, trees, anything 216 This and all further quotes attributed to Shook, unless otherwise stated, are from interview with William L. Shook, 1 February 1999. 120 Y?u c~uld find, to get 'em away from you. So ... we had to take one of those c1ty s.hckers to the hospital, he got stung about a dozen times, before somebody got him to move and get out of the way .... But we had to take him to Suburban Hospital 'cause he started having a little bit of a breathing problem. Shook's recollections o~the valley, streams, woods, and bees offer a rare glimpse into the physical appearance of the Beltway's landscape in Prince George's and Montgomery Counties immediately before the highway was built. After he and the preliminary Inspection teams completed their tours, filed their reports, and suggested ~hanges to the initial rough plans, construction crews working for the state began in 195 [ 5] the task of "t ranslating" the Beltway into three dimensions. In general, both the SRC and the Baker engineers followed the basic alignment Which the M-NCPPC had proposed in its 1952 master plan before Maryland and Virginia had even agreed to go ahead with the project. SRC and Baker engineers made some changes to that original alignment because ofissues related to right-of-way acquisition and to other physical impediments. W. Lee Mertz, a BPR official who accompanied Shook's team walking the line, remembered in a 1988 oral history interview how the party translated the rough two-dimensional line into a concrete alignment: Mertz: I had the pleasure of.- I will say to give vent t? my ego-of laying out the Beltway. I walked every foo! of that With Garland Maple and the State people nailing down the locat10n of the Beltway. That made me feel like I w~s in the presence of the great there. Flying with the Eagles. John Greenwood: What were the problems associated with that? Mertz: As far as we saw it, any time we ran into anything that looked like development, we moved further out. Greenwood: So you had successive locations for where you were placing your road or your location? 121 Mertz: I am not aware of it being pinned to a specific mapped location-we just went out there the same way we used to out in the Forests and Parks. We would just strike out through the timber and- Greenwood: Find the best road? Mertz: Yes. And if we ran into any development, we would go further out. Greenwood: And evened it all out in your detailed location? Mertz: Yes.217 Even before Mertz and Shook went into the field, the M-NCPPC itself had already changed its oldest routing plan back in 1952 for apparently political reasons. In November 1952, about 300 residents of Berwyn, a neighborhood in central College Park, gathered to protest the M-NCPPC's plan to route the northeast arc of the circumferential through their community, about a mile north of the University of Maryland (Fig. 6). State delegate J. Frank Lillard, Jr. agreed with the group that the highway section in question suspiciously dipped down to the south-straight through the Berwyn neighborhood-rather than following what he called a more logical path to the north. At the meeting, fingers pointed directly at university president Harry "Curley" Byrd.21s M-NCPPC planners were concurrently developing a bypass for old Route 193 to the north of the university, which at the time the road traversed. They acknowledged that their ideal plan would link the bypass to the new beltway just north of the 217 AASHTO [ American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials] Interstate Highway Research Project: Interview with Mr. W. Lee Mertz, conducted by Dr. John Greenwood for Public Works Historical Society, March 5 and 12, 1988, 39. Richard F. Weingroff collection, Federal Highway Administration. 218 "Maryland U. Pressure On Freeway Route Hinted by Legislator," Evening Star, 15 November 1952: A-2. 122 university. Because this design would clearly create improved access to the university- at the expense of Berwyn-those residents considered it likely that Byrd, with extensive regional political connections, was involved with the plan to swing the beltway down to th e campus. Using tenns commonly known to refer to Byrd ("kingmaker") and the university ("college on a hill") Lillard said at the protest meeting that "I intend to Ill . vesttgate whether there has been any pressure from the 'kingmaker on the hill' to bring the freeway closer to the university. And you can draw your own conclusions as to who I mean. "219 Within a week of the protest, the M-NCPPC disclosed alternate plans under consideration which would send the highway a mile north of Berwyn through federally- 0wned property used by the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. Later plans followed that northerly routing, and the Berwyn protest became insignificant. 220 Because an alternate route came to light so quickly, the university's Byrd never had to address accusations of intervention in the Beltway's design process. Did he, in fact, pressure the M-NCPPC to swing the original plan's routing southward to the university? Byrd's presidential papers in the university's archives are missing all cotrespondence from the several months surrounding the Berwyn episode. However, Byrd was certainly in a position to push his influence if he chose, with good relationships with top officials of both the M-NCPPC and the SRC. His list of suggested invitees for a luncheon at a Maryland football game in October 1953 included three administrators and the chief engineer of the SRC, eight administrators and two planning engineers for the M-NCPPC, and notables with the NCPC, National Capital Regional 219 Ib'd 1 . 220 "New Route Suggested North of Berwyn for Proposed Freeway," Evening Star, 17 November 1952: A-2. 123 Planning Council, the Montgomery County council, and the Prince George's County . . ??! C01rumss10ners. -- Furthermore, a letter to Byrd written ten months before the Berwyn protest indicates a working relationship between Byrd and M-NCPPC and SRC officials, and suggests plans already at that time to link the beltway and the Route 193 bypass adjacent to the university. In a letter focusing otherwise on road improvements near the campus, M-NCPPC Director of Planning Fred W. Tuemmler wrote: I certainly hope that you can succeed in getting the State Roads Commission to commit itself to improving some of the highways in the University area. The widening of University Lane [Route 193] into a dual highway and the building of what we have called the "Proposed Maryland Parkway," which goes past the stadium, are particularly important, and, in my opinion, should b . h fi f . 222 e m t e 1rst stage o construction. Since the earliest proposals for the Maryland portion of the Beltway often described it as an "Inter-county belt parkway," Tuemmler may well have been referring to it with the term "Proposed Maryland Parkway." If so, his letter provides the strongest existing evidence for some sort of collusion, however informal, between Byrd and the two agencies over the initial routing of the Beltway. While College Park residents ended up satisfied, their neighbors to the immediate east in Greenbelt were not. Already their town had been sliced by the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in 1948. In 1954, Greenbelt residents learned that the 221 "Memorandum- September 16, 1953," in "Maryland-National Park and Planning Commission" folder, Box 119, Presidents' Files, Archives and Manuscripts collection, Maryland Room, University of Maryland Libraries. 222 Fred W. Tuemmler to H.C. Byrd, 14 January 1952, in "Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (Fred W. Tuemmler) 1952" folder, Box 117, President's Files, Archives and manuscripts collection, Maryland Room, University of Maryland Libraries. 124 forthcoming "Inter-County Belt Freeway" was plotted to run adjacent to the community's central lake and straight through a proposed housing area. Such a routing would have destroyed or damaged local recreation areas, the city's sewage disposal system, a natural spring, and the overall development of Greenbelt as a carefully planned new town. The Greenbelt City Council asked Governor Theodore McKeldin to force a change in the SRC's plans for these reasons; the Commission did alter its route through Greenbelt- not in response to the community's concerns, but because a cemetery blocked the original path.223 Outside of Greenbelt, through most of the highway's alignment in Prince George's County, sparse development made right-of-way acquisition fairly simple. In Montgomery County, already existing residential and commercial developments meant that the state needed to buy the houses and business in the proposed path. In Silver Spring, the SRC purchased a ten-store shopping center and several houses off Forest Glen Road, as well as four holes of the Sligo Golf Course near the Route 193 interchange. Between 1955 and 1958, the state paid about $875,000 for 58 lots in Silver Spring along the highway's alignment on Bristol Avenue, Brunett Avenue, Colesville Road, Dallas Avenue, Forest Glen Road, Grayson Avenue, Hastings Drive, Lorain Drive, Merwood Lane, Stirling Road, and Sutherland Road. Many of these neighborhood roads were altered to come to dead-ends at either side of the Beltway. Maryland also purchased the Golden State Dairy at the site of the New Hampshire A venue (Route 650) interchange. However, the state did not offer to purchase lots near 223 Cathy Dee Knepper, "The Gospel According to Greenbelt: Community Life in Greenbelt, Maryland, 1935-1990," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland at College Park, 1993, 152-153. 125 but not within the Beltway's alignment; the resulting effects on the remaining residents is discussed in the next chapter.224 Actual construction began in February 1955 with a bridge over Cedar Lane just inside Rock Creek Park, east of Wisconsin A venue.225 This was not the only time that construction crews built bridges-and nothing else-in the middle of woods, anticipating the highways but befuddling nearby residents. William Shook recalled that one of the interesting things we did on the Beltway-we also did it on 70-S [now I-270], and in a couple instances on other roads-we'd go out in the middle of the woods and cut trees down. Either dig a hole and build a bridge across it. And a few occasions in other cases we'd build two mounds of earth and build a bridge between them. That caused some interesting articles in local newspapers at the time .... [W]e were explaining . . . why would you put two mounds of earth up and put a bridge between them! Well, of course, the idea was get these bridges built ahead of time. And it was always a help to have the bridges up ahead of time.226 The first construction bids for the highway itself were opened in April 1956 for the 1.5-mile stretch between Wisconsin and Connecticut Avenues in Montgomery County. That section, after overcoming controversy outlined in Chapter 5, opened to drivers in October 1957 after just over a year of construction at a cost of nearly $1 million. Governor McKeldin's wife cut a dedication ribbon just east of Wisconsin Avenue on October 25, while McKeldin and Bureau of Public Roads Commissioner C.D. Curtiss cut a separate ribbon fifteen miles to the east at the Kenilworth Avenue interchange, at the time the largest interchange in the state. In a speech, McKeldin 224 "Council Weighs Freeway Path," Evening Star, 11 May 1955: A-27; "Construction Initiated on 4 Corners-Langley Leg of University Blvd.," Evening Star, 13 March 1958: A-1. 225 George Beveridge, "Inter-County Road Belt Work to Start Despite Park Dispute," Evening Star, 20 February 1955: A-1. 226 Interview with William Shook. 126 --- called the Beltway "a conspicuous symbol" of Maryland's effort to deal with the "ever- tightening tangle of traffic around our big cities. 11227 October 25, 1957, was a day ofrecognition for partial accomplishments: Kenilworth Avenue had a 3.5-mile interchange structure but no highway attached to it, while Wisconsin A venue had a 1.5-mile highway stretching away from Pooks Hill but no completed interchange. Construction crews from the Wright Contracting Co. worked on the Wisconsin Avenue interchange from February 1958 through November 1959 under the supervision of engineers from the Michael Baker, Jr. office. The Pooks Hill site was finally completed two years later, at a total cost of $2.3 million, as a massive interchange serving the Beltway, the Washington National Pike (l-70S), and Wisconsin A venue, comprising 4.2 miles of paved lanes and approaches and six bridges. Governor Millard Tawes presided at a second ribbon-cutting ceremony on November 30, 1959.228 Reuben D. Cook, a supervising engineer for Baker, told the media that work on the Pooks Hill interchange had proceeded smoothly.229 This was not true. The engineers directing construction at one point erred while reading the surveyors' notes, and began to build an abutment in the opposite direction from the intended design. Fred Pavay remembered that his squad's chief, draftsman Jean Miller's husband, took a wrong dimension from the plan, and staked it out in the wrong location .. . . I remember a lot of talk about who was going to pay for it. It was not a completed bridge, but the abutment was in the wrong place by-it may not have 227 "Bids Asked for First Lap of Inter-County Beltway," Evening Star, 19 April 1956: A- 30; "First Section Dedicated of Circumference Road," Evening Star, 25 October 1957: A-25. 228 G.O. Herndon, "Pooks Hill Interchange to Open For Northbound Traffic Monday," Evening Star, 6 November 1959: B-1. 229 Ibid. 127 been more than six feet or something, but you know, for a bridge ... that's a major mistake .... But he didn't lose his job ... he was a good man, and apparently it was just one of those mistakes that can happen. And luckily they caught it before they put a bridge on it. William Shook, who played a central role in this episode, offers an example of what type of negotiations went on behind the scenes during the Beltway's construction: As I recall, the abutment was built 12 feet behind where it should have been. Which meant that the span of steel would have been too short, cause the steel was being fabricated already, to meet the planned location. When I became aware of it was when the consultant, Michael Baker, was also doing, of course, the inspection and the engineering on the project. ... Michael Baker had sent in a request for an extra work order for, I don't remember anymore the amount of money, but quite a few thousand dollars. More than ten thousand, I know. To tear out this abutment that was improperly placed. And I was sent over by the district engineer to investigate and find out what was going on. And I found out, of course, the abutment had been laid out in the wrong place, contractor had driven the piles and poured the concrete cap on them. The only thing remaining to be poured was what's called a backwall. There's a thin retaining wall-type affair that goes up behind the steel at the roadway level and retains the earth fill behind it. There was steel sticking up for that, reinforcement steel. So I took one look at it and I could not [envision] spending the money to tear it out. It was far enough back that we could simply extend the fill to where it belonged. Drive new piles in front of it and build a new abutment. And just cover the old one up. So that's what I had recommended. I recall, there was an adverse reaction from the Michael Baker people. In fact, I received a call on our two-way radio. We'd just gotten them, and the chief engineer wanted to see me immediately in his office. Not a phone call, but in his office. So, I recall making a trip from Montgomery County to the Baltimore office. In those days, before I-95 and the Beltway and so forth, that was over an hour's drive. And he said, what's going on? What's the problem? And I explained it to him . . . . He said, well, you're right, we're not going to tear it up. And he indicated he had gotten a phone call from higher up. I don't know who it came from, but normally, if it had come from the chairman of the State Roads Commission, he would have said that, I think. So I suspect it may have even come from the governor's office. There was a big disagreement going over that. So I couldn't see paying a contractor to take that abutment out. It wasn't necessary. On top of that, Michael Baker would have then received their percentage fee for it. They were being paid on the basis of construction costs. In fact, I recommended that Michael Baker should pay for the cost of building a second abutment. I don't know whether they ever did or not. 128 Construction crews put in the correct abutment, and the interchange as designed opened in November 1959. But that design itself was fatally flawed in the eyes of the drivers who would eventually use it; I will return later to the reactions over the Pooks Hill interchange and the responses of highway officials.230 Construction of the northern section between Georgia A venue and Route 193 proceeded in 1960, and a southern portion near the Woodrow Wilson Bridge was built in 1961.231 On December 28, 1961, opening ceremonies for the Wilson Bridge were cancelled in the face of 33-degree weather and a howling wind, although a group of dignitaries and the U.S. Marine Band had gathered bravely on chairs in the middle of the bridge before the proceedings were called off.232 Halfway around the Beltway, the opening of the other Potomac River crossing was also delayed, a year later, by extremely cold weather. The Cabin John Bridge represented another compromise in the M-NCPPC's and SRC's original alignment, resulting from its passage over Plummers Island, a 12-acre scientific retreat in the Potomac River that was owned by the Department of the Interior but operated since 1901 by the Washington Biologists' Field Club. Members of the club successfully 230 Maryland officials were not alone in responding to that type of error. A former Northern Virginia resident recalls that she was dating a highway inspector at the time they were building the section in Alexandria, and ... the surveyors didn't stake the thing quite right and when the 2 sections met somewhere around Van Dorn/Telegraph the lanes were nearly three feet off the mark for "connecting"-you couldn't have driven the golden spike on that one because the tracks just didn't meet. (Beltway Survey #596) 231 Gilbert Gimble, "Year's Speedup In Beltway Set By Maryland," Evening Star, 2 November 1960: A-1. 232 Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag"; interview with Slade Caltrider. 129 convinced the SRC to shift the Beltway's path 200 yards upstream, where it still crossed the island but was expected to have less environmental impact. 233 Because Mruyland 0 wned the Potomac River, it paid for most of the $2,800,000 bridge cost; Virginia was responsible only for the 20 percent of the bridge which ran over its land. The Cabin John Bridge, and the surrounding highway from Fairfax County's Route 7 to Montgomery County's River Road, were scheduled to open in early December 1962, but "wind whistling down the river [ made J it too cold for the Workmen" and delayed the laying of some pavement, SRC district engineer Shook explained at the time. The bridge, built by two Indiana contractors, opened "with absolutely no fanfare" on December 31 in 13-degree weather, with strong winds bl · • fc J:'.t:': 'al · 234 0 wmg across the river, too cold once agam or ou1c1 ceremorues. On November 1 S, 1963, the three-mile segment between River Road and Old Georgetown Road also opened without ceremony, in part because of an anticipated grander celebration the following year for the Beltway's completion, and also due to the previous day's fonnal opening by President John F. Kennedy of the Northeastern Expressway northeast of Baltimore (I-95). A few weeks later, the mile-long section between Old Georgetown Road and Wisconsin Avenue opened. 235 With links open between the Beltway's northwest arc and I-70S, drivers could now speed between 233 Anne H. Christmas, "New Span to Unmask Island Jungle," Evening Star, 5 July 1960: B-3; John c. Schmidt, "65-Mile Capital Beltway Opens," Evening Star, 16 August 1964: DI. 234 Ibid.; "Beltway Section, Span to Open in,,Dece~ber," Evening Star, 19 August 1962: E-2; "Cabin John Bridge Opening Delayed, Evenmg .star, 17 December 1962: B-1; "Cabin John Span Opens On Cold, Quiet Note," Everung Star, 31 December 1962: B- l. 235 Anne Christmas, "4 Mile Beltway Link Is Opened Quietly," Evening Star, 1 S November 1963: B-1. 130 Bethesda, Cabin John, northern Virginia, and points northwest. After the eight-mile segment in Prince George's County between Pennsylvania Avenue (MD 4) and Indian Head Highway (MD 210) opened in July 1964, all that remained for the Capital Beltway to become a full circumferential was the connection between Indian Head Highway and Alexandria and the reconstruction of the very first section to have opened, the 1.5 miles between Wisconsin and Connecticut A venues, for reasons described in the next chapter.236 The full Beltway's opening in August 1964, though, was only possible because of Virginia's efforts to catch up to Maryland's progress in building its own 22- mile portion, after having delayed following the 1954 multi-jurisdictional agreement until funding could be secured. Both states had to coordinate on the placement of the two Potomac River crossings, but otherwise the Beltway in Maryland and the Beltway in Virginia were planned in essentially autonomous processes. The Capitol Ring in Virginia In Maryland, the engineering firm Michael Baker, Jr. assisted the State Roads Commission in planning the state's Interstate highways. On its side of the Potomac, the Virginia Department of Highways (VDH) hired Howard, Needles, Tammen, and Bergendoff, now called HNTB, a New York-based firm which had been active in designing several of the postwar toll expressways, including the Maine Turnpike ( 194 7) 236 "New Eight-Mile Section of Beltway To Open in Prince Georges July 17," Evening Star, 5 July 1964: B-3. 131 and New Jersey Turnpike (1952).237 Engineers from HNTB attended VDH's initial meeting outlining the state's vision for its roughly one thousand miles of Interstate highways; Virginia then selected the firm to define, design, and supervise the construction of most of those highways. HNTB's first commission under this assignment was to plan the alignment of the entire 22 miles of the Capital Beltway in Virginia and to design the Beltway from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to between Little River Turnpike and U.S. 50 (VDH designed the portion from there to the Cabin John Bridge). Separately, HNTB also contracted directly with the Bureau of Public Roads to plan and design the Wilson Bridge itself.238 HNTB in Virginia and the M-NCPPC in Maryland both charted almost completely new aligrunent for the Beltway's path, because so few inter-suburban roads existed in the mid-l 950s which could have been upgraded as part of the route. Robert Mannell, an HNTB junior draftsman during the Beltway's construction, recalled that it appeared that most of the better geophysical routes were already taken up by development, and consequently the Beltway had to traverse a path along areas that were not amenable to development. The terrain was rough. You had the stream bed locations, along the banks of stream beds coming up Hunting Creek and that type ofthing.239 HNTB's Interstate highway plan for Virginia, published in 1956 before construction for the Beltway began, confirms that the so-called Washington Circumferential Route was "an entirely new facility, which neither supplements nor replaces any existing routes ... 237 The former HNTB engineers I spoke with referred to the company interchangeably as "Howard, Needles" and "HNTB." I will use the term HNTB. 238 Interviews with *Sidney Miller, 6 and 23 February 2001. All further quotes attributed to Miller in this chapter are from these two interviews. 239 Interview with Robert Mannell, 9 January 2001. 132 · It is notable that this line foIIows virtually the only open corridor through the area. To shift from this alignment would either involve considerable property damage to heavily developed areas or require the location of this route much further from Arlington and the Washington area. n240 * Sidney Miller, an HNTB engineer who later helped design other Northern Virginia highways including reconstruction of the Shirley, remembered how the s 'fi pec1 1c alignment was detennined: [A] line was scratched. And I don't remember exactly who, but I know that certainly our finn, working with VDOT, determined-and in those days we did it in several ways. One way was aerially. We would have a photograph of the area, an aerial photograph. And then you would plot as you looked where you thought it was reasonable, and then you would field-check it. In regard to the field-checking, at that time as a young engineer, specializing at the time in bridges, my ~ction was to take. a look at where the b7idge crossings would be, and what I anticipated to be the difficulty .... What I did in estimating the bridges, every time I came to where there was an existing crossing ... I was jotting down notes and things of what I envisioned the bridges would be, so that when I got back to the office we could be doing some preliminary estimates as to what would be involved in the costing, both in the design and costing of the Beltway. Like WiIIiam Shook in Maryland, Miller walked along the future alignment of the Beltway in Virginia. His description of the rural character of the landscape suggests that ManneII's reference to development limiting the potential alignments may have had the southern, Alexandria portion of the Beltway in mind. There, existing houses and businesses did make the Beltway's siting slightly tricky, though business leaders were very much in favor of the highway; the Chamber of Commerce lobbied the state to build extra interchanges beyond the single one (at U.S. 1) in the original plan 24 ° Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Highways, futerstate Highway System CNew York: Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, 1956), n.p. 133 specifically to better serve the city's commercial district.241 But Fairfax County, to the west, was still countryside: [O]n my own initiative ... I walked the line, so to speak. And as I mentioned, it was kind of rural. There were scattered homes, here and there, and many of the homes had outdoor plumbing rather than indoor plumbing, and kids walking barefoot. ... If you can believe what this area looks like now, and what it looked like then, how can I put it? One never would have estimated such growth could develop. But all I can say is that it was very rural. I was surprised, if not shocked, that in many of the cases I was walking through virgin area, that there were houses where people had outhouses ... quite rural. And obviously very undeveloped .... So all I can say is that it was an enlightening walk, and it wasn't an easy walk because I had to sort of detour a little bit around things in order to follow a line that was just scribbled, more or less, on an overall planning map. It is important to note that while the alignment Miller describes was rural land, it was not vacant land. The alignment did not plow through developed neighborhoods, but it did cut across "scattered homes" with outhouses. And because the routing was not random- as Miller explains above, engineers plotted where they thought it would be "reasonable" while looking at an aerial photograph-the HNTB engineers must have considered this rural land "reasonable" in spite of the people already using it. The alignment did have to go somewhere, and Miller's description suggests that HNTB's design impacted relatively few people. But that routing literally uprooted pieces of history from the ground, as C.C. Swink of McLean explained in a 1972 oral history, speaking about his family's farm and mill: Stephen Matthews [interviewer]: Well, I have seen a lot of Civil War maps, they have this fort built up on your hill. Was there much to that? Swink: That I can remember that it was just this trench running from out there to the [Georgetown] Pike and then on around the side here and wound up right in back of the house. 241 "Chamber Asks Three Links With New Road," Fairfax County Journal-Standard, 26 April 1957: 8. 134 Matthews: Yeh. And it must have been a great defense to be able to look all the way out there, and it's quite a protection. But did you pick up any kind of artifacts or anything like that? Swink: We found some bullets when we plowed the ground. And then when they went through here and cut that Beltway through, oh Christ, they were running in all directions, the bullets and pieces of glass, buttons, Army buttons. Matthews: You found that, some of that stuff? Swink: Well, I didn't. I didn't go out there to look for it. Matthews: But other people were? Swink: Yeh, we found-somebody did here, was a shell, two in fact. That was one of them had never exploded. Matthews: But when they built the Beltway, did they completely cover up anything that would be left there from before? Swink: Yeh. Matthews: With fill dirt and everything? Swink: They dug it all to down there where that Beltway went and, you know, and they go up that grade there to get to the old Pike. Matthews: Yeh. And it's all been just about taken out. Swink: Um-huh.242 While much of Northern Virginia was relatively undeveloped at the time of the Beltway's design, highway planners recognized that in the time it would take to build the highway, Virginia was likely to experience at least some of the same kind of suburban growth as Maryland. Virginia Highway Commissioner Douglas Fugate 242 "An Interview with Mr. C.C. Swink of 1001 Balls Hill Road, McLean, Virginia," interviewed by Stephen L. Matthews, Northern Virginia Oral History Project Collection, Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University Libraries, 20-21. 135 explained in 1964 that "it is important that the Beltway was built before further development could take place in the county, so that now future development can be made in relation to the traffic artery. "243 Fugate omits the detail that in order to ensure that development would not impede the Beltway's construction, planning officials resorted to what was in effect blackmail. Anne Wilkins, who served on a Fairfax County planning commission, explains that the planning commission adopted a transportation plan and it was used as a guide all these years. One of the things that we got as a result of that was the location of the beltway. The beltway was on Fairfax County's master plan, which had not been adopted by the [Fairfax County] Board [of Supervisors]. But when various subdivisions went in, they were not required, but coaxed, shall we say, some of the builders would say blackjacked into dedicating or at least reserving the right-of-way for the beltway so that when the state got ready to build the beltway the right-of-way was there most of the way. Where it had been reserved they had to buy, but many places it was already dedicated. This was what we were trying to do, but politically the plan could not be adopted officially. 244 Fairfax County's strategy worked; while Maryland residents challenged segments Planned through certain areas in their state, as described in Chapter 5, in Virginia enough relatively undeveloped land was kept that way to allow for construction without protest. Actual construction in Virginia on what the state first called Interstate Route 413 began some three years after Maryland's, in April 1958, between Little River Turnpike and Backlick Road in Fairfax County.245 Engineers proceeded with few hitches other 243 Douglas B. Fugate, "22 Miles of Beltway Open Today," Annandale Free Press, 2 April 1964: 1. 244 "Interview with Mrs. Anne Wilkins," 17. See also Fairfax County Planning Division Master Plan Section, Freeway System, Part I: Highway Master Plan (Fairfax County, ' Va.: Fairfax Co., [1960?]), 14. 24s F.L. Burroughs, "The Capital Beltway," Virginia Highway Bulletin, January 1961: 6. 136 th an a segment between Route 7 and Arlington Boulevard, delayed until 1963 or 1964 because of difficulties in letting a contract for the construction of a bridge overpass for th e Washington & Old Dominion Railroad line, and challenges created by marsh conditions in Alexandria, detailed in Chapter 7 in a discussion of environmental considerations. The stretch from Shirley Highway to U.S. 50 was the first to open to the public, in 196 I. 246 On April 2, 1964, opening ceremonies to mark the completion of.the full 22- mile portion and of the first Interstate project statewide were held a half-mile west of the U.S. 1 interchange in Alexandria. On yet another cold, wet, and windy day-a hallmark of Beltway openings-a group of about 200 listened to speeches by highway commissioner Fugate, Bureau of Public Roads Chief Rex Whitton, and Governor Albertis Harrison, and music by the 75th Army Band of Fort Belvoir.247 Full access to Maryland's suburbs still awaited the completion of Prince George's and Montgomery County segments in August. Still, with both the Wilson and Cabin John Bridges open With the entire Virginia portion up and running in-between, drivers could now cross from Maryland's six-lane Beltway ... into Virginia's mostly four-lane version. Virginia engineers were well aware of this mismatch. Jack Hodge, who worked for VDH and later for VDOT, pointed out that Virginia was ahead, initially, of Maryland, and had approval to design and build 246 "B 1 b " V Dyne "Getting There" 202 s e tway Section, Span to Open in Decem er ; an ,, . ' . , · ee also "Local,, F ·..s:: H Id 27 November 1959: 1; and Bids Let on Highway p . , ruu.ax era , roJects," Fairfax City Times, 21 February 1963: I. 241 "Govemo H . t O Beltway "Fairfax City Times, 27 March 1964: 2; Phi r arr1son o pen , . 0 d " N rth v· · · Hip Saw· k' "F' al v· .. Stretch of Beltway is pene ' o em rrg1rua Sun 3 IC 1, m 1rgirua · H ald 10 A ·1 ' April 1964: 1; "Beltway Opening Ceremonies," Fairfax er ' pn 1964: 1. 137 four lanes. But in that interim period of time [while Virginia waited for funding to be approved], Maryland came through and built six lanes. Now how would you like to be in charge of the Capital Beltway on the Virginia side, looking at six lanes coming to your four? ... Well, it was discouraging, but the Beltway d d.d fi . "48 was open an 1 unction. - Hodge and fellow state engineers had good reason to be frustrated. Before it began building its portion of the Beltway, the VDH had in fact recognized the same thing that Maryland's SRC did: imminent suburban growth would be better accommodated by a six- or eight-lane highway. Maryland, which ran its portion through some already heavily developed areas, managed to change its plans in time. But federal officials would not allow Virginia to do the same. In a 1988 oral history interview, former BPR official F. Lee Mertz accepted responsibility for the decision to limit Virginia to four lanes: Mertz: I really hate to admit to this, because I was the one that furnished all of the traffic estimates for the Beltway, but we just could not find any prospect of all the development that took place outside the Beltway. We just couldn't foresee it. I was responsible for the original two-lanes and two-lanes on the Beltway in Virginia. And believe it or not, the GAO [General Accounting Office] did a study on us, and criticized us for being too conservative, that we should have gone four and four. We just kind of grinned and said, "Okay, fine." But they were proven right. John Greenwood: But how do you project growth? Even your projections didn't show it? Mertz: Didn't show it. Greenwood: Well, what [Virginia Highway Commissioner Douglas Fugate] said was when they came to the bridges, everybody picked on them because they said, "You fools , the guys in Maryland have three lanes coming in. You have two. What the hell is wrong with you?" He said they [VDH employees] really resented it. As the traffic got worse and worse, he said, "We originally had planned for four [lanes in each 248 Interview with Jack Hodge, 9 January 2001. 138 direction]." He said, "Then we would have looked great, but we couldn't have them." Mertz : Yes, he is absolutely right. But that is a good example of the dynamic tension that went on between the Highway Departments and BPR over the cost estimate. 249 Mertz's decision to restrict Virginia's Beltway to four lanes made sense at the time, and was consistent with the BPR's policy of building Interstates to meet existing needs (which the Bureau later revised with an eye toward meeting future needs~ well).250 Douglas B. Feaver, who later covered local transportation for the Washington Post, recalled that even four lanes seemed "crazy" to both state and federal officials through an extremely rural area.251 Former HNTB and VDH engineer Robert Mannell, who had to deal with the criticism of the mismatched lanes, felt that It's not a disappointment. Someone looks at the munbers and says, how can we spend public money on putting these lanes in when the traffic doesn't justify it? The feds at that time had a perfectly legitimate argument for not putting the lanes in. Virginia saw that the potential for development would be greater than what the traffic forecast was bein~ proP_Osed, and felt i.t ~ould be the best money to be spent at this time. But that's 3ust difference of oplillon. That occurs every day and goes on today. 252 The "difference of opinion" led directly to Virginia's opening a four-lane (for a short portion, six-lane) Beltway in 1964, which was quickly overwhelmed by the increased traffic predicted by the state. It would take decades before Virginia could build enough additional lanes to catch up to where it had hoped to be from the beginning; discussion 249 AASHTO Interstate Highway Research Project, 40-41 . 250 Schmidt, "65-Mile Capital Beltway." 251 Interview with Douglas B. Feaver, 26 January 200 l . 252 I . nterv1ew with Robert Mannell. 139 of its efforts to improve the Beltway in this respect as well as others follow in Chapter 7. Why did Maryland have the advantage? Unlike Virginia, it already had a beltway, which opened just in time to give Maryland engineers a sense of what kind of traffic they could realistically expect on the Capital Beltway. In the mid-1950s, Maryland had only enough funding to build one beltway at a time; an SRC spokesman explained in 1964 that the "Baltimore Beltway had been in planning stages for a much 1 . d d b . 1 . ·1 fi 11253 onger peno , an ecause its p annmg was more advanced, it was bm t irst. Former M-NCPPC engineer Lester Wilkinson explained that the lessons from the new $68 million Baltimore Beltway were applied as the Capital Beltway construction was literally in progress: [O]riginally the Beltway was designed as four lanes. And then, because of the experience the state had in Baltimore, the Beltway there, that the traffic volumes, they had reached what they had expected to reach in ten years in about three; they decided in Washington to go ahead and build three lanes [in each direction]. By the time they reached that decision, part of it had already been built. .. . As a matter of fact, you can go over some of the bridges ... around the county line. You can see a big joint going parallel to the highway, with the bridges. And that's where they had first built the bridges to be two lanes and then had to suddenly make the bridge four lanes. But what they did, they decided to build three lanes and make it expandable to four. In each direction. And that was really occurring almost while it was being built.254 Patrick Zilliacus, who grew up in Silver Spring, recalls that the section between Georgia A venue and Route 193 opened in 1962 as "two lanes in each direction with a HUGE green median. Part of the median was almost immediately taken away as this segment 253 Qtd. in John C. Schmidt, "65-Mile Capital Beltway Opens," Baltimore Sun, 16 August 1964: Dl. 254 Interview with Lester F. Wilkinson, Jr.; Schmidt, "65-Mile Capital Beltway." Wilkinson's account is corroborated by former Michael Baker, Jr. draftsman Isadore Parker; see interviews with Isadore Parker. 140 was widened to three lanes in each direction prior to 1964. "255 Clearly the BPR did not find Maryland's decision to build as it did as objectionable as it did Virginia's request for the same expansion. As a result, as the Beltway's full completion neared in August 1964, drivers noticed and questioned the obvious physical disconnect between the states even as they looked forward to the speedy drives the road would allow. But even before the Beltway opened to traffic, local residents had found a role for it in their lives. Before the Opening: Playground and Racetrack From 1955 to 1964, the Beltway belonged not just to the construction crews laying it out or the drivers taking advantage of each segment as it opened. It also became a site of social activity for children and teenagers, as well as a meeting place to bring them together from around the region. Highway officials neither planned nor condoned this use of the partially completed roadway, but they do not appear to have gone to great lengths either in preventing it. The cultural landscape study model suggests, in the fifth operation, that landscapes frequently carry multiple and contested meanings; during this period, the Beltway was perceived and used in drastically different ways by the people building it and the ones appropriating it for their own purposes. Before it became a commuter highway and a bypass expressway, as intended by its planners, the Beltway was, in essence, a playground. That is the term used by respondents to my survey from both states who joined their friends and family members in the fun to be had on the construction site. One man, 255 Beltway Survey #128. 141 who moved to Silver Spring at age 11, remembers that "[t]he Beltway right-of-way between Georgia Ave. and Sligo Creek was our 'playground.' We were approaching driving age when the Beltway opened so our new 'playground' became a highway for our new 'toys,' our cars. "256 A woman who grew up halfway around the Beltway in Annandale, Va., recalls that "[t]he area was our playground. We spent many afternoons in the cisterns beneath."257 A former Silver Spring resident is more effusive: "Great fun .... road [sic] my bike and home made go kart on the highway ... met kids from near by neighborhoods that did not go to my school ... raced, played ... what a great playground [ellipses in original]."258 These remarks suggest that before the Beltway connected adult drivers from around the region in 1964, it brought together children or teenagers from different social networks, serving as a unification device in a different way than intended. These social gatherings were not limited to children. One former area resident recalls seeing "greasers" taking part in drag races on unopened parts of the highway.259 These races occurred all around the loop and often on regular schedules. A former Langley Park (Silver Spring) resident remembers "going to the weekend drag races on the beltsville section," while Bonnie Douglas, who grew up in Alexandria, writes that "[b]ack when the Beltway had not opened yet ... [s]ome ofus Alexandria teenager[s] (back in the 60s) used to sneak on to the new beltway and have drag races - until of 256 Beltway Survey #259. 257 Beltway Survey #257. 258 Beltway Survey #253. 259 Beltway Survey #605. 142 course the Alexandria Police would show up and run us off."260 The formality and regularity of the drag races is apparent from this description by a self-described area "native": Long before the beltway was completed, Cabin John Bridge was there and if you measure it, it makes a great drag strip. We would flag off on the Virginia side, make the run and turn around on the other side. The side from VA to MD is the best side to race, it's actually a bit straighter than the other side. We raced nearly every night of the week. And some of those races were really serious, people came from all over the DC area, some raced for car titles, some raced for what at the time was very big money. We ran a "rail" across it once with the trailer waiting on the other side - 180mph from start at VA end to the MD end was pretty impressive. Only once can I remember anyone actually getting caught - one of the guys was out of the car when the sirens roared and everyone took off so he jumped over the side (right at the beginning where it isn't a great drop) and had no place to hide ... the troopers thought it was funny and they didn't write him up for any illegal activity .... it was a great 1/4 mile track with no other traffic. It should be noted that they were watching what was called H road by the Pentagon and so racing there was very difficult. This was back when everything with 4 wheels had monster engines (409,426,427) and ran like a "striped ass ape" - 300 horsepower was a pansy vehicle, iou had to run at least 325hp to get a slot on the "race card." [ellipses in original] 61 That this woman and her friends raced "nearly every night of the week," in spite of its being "very difficult" because of official surveillance, attests to the allure the empty road must have had for the participating drivers. In addition to the racers' cars, bicycles and go-karts were regular sights on the unfinished Beltway. Several of my respondents rode their bicycles on the road either as a shortcut or to explore new territory.262 One man has "[f]ond memories of Georgia Ave to Colesville Road over Sligo Creek Pkwy. We used to run go-carts there after it was 260 Beltway Surveys #546, 357. 261 Beltway Survey #596. 262 Beltway Surveys 436, 503, 597. 143 paved but before it was opened to traffic."263 Carolyn Marion, who grew up in Silver Spring, describes yet another unanticipated use: as a "member of the precisionettes (majorette group) [I] took lessons at the silver spring boys club (forest glen road) and during construction of the beltway, we would practice for parades on the 'road being constructed over the hill from the boys club! !'"264 In addition to serving as a social, or more public, gathering site, the roadway also was a private playground to some. One woman, whose house was adjacent to the new highway, felt a sense of ownership, "as though that section of the beltway that was next to our house did in some way 'belong' to us." She took full advantage: While under construction, my brother and I had a great time taking our bikes down the hill and riding on all that endless pavement that was completely free of cars! It was great! We made little forts underneath the bridge that went back over the beltway next to our house. I remember how incredibly QUIET it was back then. We had a lot of fun before it was opened to traffic.265 Others found solitude by climbing out on the bridge spanning the Northwest Branch in Montgomery County over the deep ravine into which engineer William Shook had descended; one boy and his friend "used to just hang out on the bridge, throwing objects off the bridge, climbing on it, looking out over the river. "266 In 1964, this option, as well as the biking, drag racing, go-carting, and parading, disappeared as vehicles entered the Beltway at all hours. But for a few years, the construction efforts of both states 263 Beltway Survey #259. 264 Beltway Survey #588. 265 Beltway Survey #436. 266 Beltway Surveys #600, 597. 144 inadvertently created, in lifelong Silver Spring resident Charles Mercogliano's words, "a child's dreamland. "267 Closing the Circle The ceremonies of August 17, 1964, celebrated the grand opening of Interstate 495, by then called the Capital Beltway. In the years after its introduction on the 1950 NCPPC and 1952 M-NCPPC planning maps, the highway had been referred to interchangeably as the Washington Circumferential Highway, the circumferential, the belt road, the belt parkway, the inter-county freeway, the inter-county belt highway, the inter-county belt freeway, and the inter-county belt parkway. Maryland and Virginia. officials, working separately, brainstormed during the construction period for names which would fit easier on road signs and would be easier to say. Maryland's SRC first proposed Colonial Parkway and Colonial Beltway in March 1960, then switched to the Capitol Beltway. Fairfax County officials approved the name Capital Ring, but that bombed at the state level, where the push was on to honor George Mason or George Washington. Virginia conceded and agreed to call its portion the Capitol Beltway. That spelling lasted for four months until M-NCPPC planners responded to criticism that the spelling of "Capitol" with an "O" refers strictly to the building, whereas "Capital" with an "A" indicates the entire federal city. From 267 Beltway Survey #491. 145 June 1960 forward, the highway was officially designated the Capital Beltway in both states.268 On August 16, 1964, local retailer Giant Food sponsored a cycling tour around part of the (unopened) Beltway, publicized in local newspapers. The event was held 0stensibly to promote "an ideal family sport for people of all ages," but, as was apparent from the ads announcing the tour, it also encouraged shoppers to buy the bicycles on sale at 17 area Super Giant groceries. Publicizing this event put Giant in the awkward position of promoting the use of bicycles on a superhighway, which was prohibited throughout the Interstate system. The company acknowledged this problem within its advertisement in small print: "Needless to say, cycling on the Beltway is not permitted; also, cycling on any high-speed thoroughfare is not advised by area cycling clubs, whose members suggest you enjoy scenic roads for this healthful pastime. " 269 The Giant tour would be the last time bicycles were legally permitted on the ~apital Beltway. The next day, a crowd of at least 3,000 gathered just east of the New Hampshire Avenue interchange at the Montgomery-Prince George's County line, to witness the completion of the entire loop, as officials opened the final 25-mile segment between Old Georgetown Road in Rockville and Pennsylvania Avenue in Prince George's County. Construction on the road had tasted nine years and involved some 80 contractors in Maryland alone (Fig. 7). The total cost for the highway was approximately $189 million, includiDll $115 million in Maryland, $60 million in " ' Dickson, "Capital Beltway: The Medium and the Me'_"~e,". 10; "Maryland Picks Name for Highway," Evening St!!, J3 March !960: B-1, ~ap1tal Planners Right C~pital Spelling Error," Evening Slfil'., 23 June J960: B-3; New Capital Beltway Name S1trs Roads Commission," li_vening SW, 18 AuguS t 1960 · B-Z. "' Advertisement for Giant Food Inc.,~· 16 August 1964 ' E-5. 146 Virginia, and $14 million for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge ( owned by the federal government). Maryland paid $17,984,692 in right-of-way costs for 832 parcels of land. The Beltway included 3 8 interchanges numbered consecutively through both states, though four were not in working order by opening day: Exit 9 connected to Interstate 66 which was not yet built; Exit 15 for the George Washington Memorial Parkway would open several months later; Exit 22 was reserved for the Northern Parkway which was never built; and Exit 26 for Interstate 95 north to Baltimore would open in 1971 (Fig. 8).270 Unlike that for previous openings of various segments, the weather held for the day's festivities, although heavy clouds the previous night had forced Kensington aviator Carl Cramer to land his Gaithersburg-bound private plane on the Beltway, between Old Georgetown Road and Wisconsin Avenue.271 At the New Hampshire A venue interchange, the assembled crowd heard speeches from Maryland Governor Millard Tawes, SRC chair John Funk, and Federal Highway Administrator Rex M. Whitton. Dozens of other officials were introduced to the crowd as guests of honor, among them D.C. Commissioners Charles M. Duke and John B. Duncan and former House and Senate leaders instrumental in sponsoring the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that had created the Interstate system. Whitton spoke glowingly of the functions the new highway would fulfill: This route means many things to many people . ... For Interstate 495 is an 270 Lee Flor, "Ceremony Tomorrow Opens Last of Beltway," Evening Star, 16 August 1964: A-1; "Last Leg of 65-Mile Capital Beltway to be Opened Tomorrow by Gov. Tawes," Evening Star, 16 August 1964: E-3; John C. Schmidt, "65-Mile Capital Beltway." 271 "Beltway Landing," Washington Daily News, 17 August 1964: 1. 147 integral part of the 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System ... Interstate 495 is also a mighty traffic circle, 61 miles around and 17 miles in diameter. It will provide a swift channel for through travel, whether truck, bus, or car. Since it will take them off their present routes through the heart of the city, it will help relieve Washington's in-town traffic congestion, too. Interstate 495 is also a huge wedding ring for the metropolitan area, uniting all of its suburbs. We can be better neighbors-and have better opportunities for employment, recreation, and sho~ping. And Interstate 495 is a breeding ground for the region's economy.2 After a series of speeches and a 15-minute delay for Tawes to autograph programs and highway maps for dozens of children, the dignitaries walked to the dual black and gold ceremonial ribbons, symbolizing the state's colors. At 12:40 p.m., Tawes cut the ribbon (some eight miles to the west, Carl Cramer had managed to remove his plane from the highway only a half hour earlier,just in time to beat the forthcoming traffic), and the Capital Beltway was officially open.273 Tawes, however, was not the first to make the cut. James Landolt, who lived in the Oakview neighborhood near the New Hampshire interchange, had walked to the ceremonies with his family and friends. Years later, he recalled how his father, unnoticed by the media, upstaged the governor: It seemed like there were about two million kids from the surrounding neighborhoods there and all of them wanted a piece of those ribbons. Governor Tawes was going to cut them to open the Beltway. But we beat him to it. We were standing next to the south post that held the ribbon. I was shocked when my father started asking people for a pocket knife-he was going to cut it before the Governor did and cut pieces to hand out! ... He had several of us hold the ribbons so they could not tell he had cut it off the post. He went ahead and cut them and started cutting pieces off the hand and handing them out to the crowd. When Tawes cut it-about a minute later-we dropped it and there was a big rumble for the rest of it. We pocketed a few pieces and 272 Whitton, "The Minus-Ten-Minute Road." 273 Lee Flor, "Ceremony in Maryland Opens Last of Beltway," Evening Star, 17 August 1964: A-1; Mike Causey, "Tawes Snips a Ribbon, Opening D.C. Beltway," Washington Post, 18 August 1964: B 1; "Beltway Landing." 148 walked away .... Being an adult now over 35 years later, I still can not believe he did that.274 After the ribbon-cutting, spectators dashed for their cars, which were lined up two miles deep "like jet pilots on red alert." Immediately the Beltway experienced its first traffic jam, which took state and county police officers 20 minutes to clear.275 Drivers sped off at the temporary 45 mile-per-hour speed limit, which would later be raised to 60 after workers completed landscaping and erecting pennanent signs; in Virginia, the initial speed limit was 65 miles per hour.276 The Washington media treated the opening as a major event. The Evening Star ran a special section devoted to the Beltway, essentially an opening-day program, and lauded in an editorial: This magnificent stretch of superhighway is by all odds the most exciting and in many respects the most important public works project ever built in the Washington area. Practically as well as symbolically, it unifies the entire region. It will drastically change the transportation habits of thousands of residents.277 Editors at The Washington Post agreed that "[t]here is a danger of using too many superlatives, but there is no doubt that the dedication of the Capital Beltway today is a major event for the entire Washington area." The Post's editorial noted that the Beltway 274 James Landolt, e-mail to Jeremy Korr, 17 December 2000. 275 "Commuters Give Beltway First Test," Evening Star, 18 August 1964: B-1. 276 Flor, "Ceremony Tomorrow." For one reporter's notes on his circumnavigation of the Beltway immediately after the ribbon-cutting, see Samuel Stafford, "Our Men Buckled Down to the Beltway," Washington Daily News, 18 August 1964: 14. 277 "Ring Around the City" [editorial], Evening Star, 16 August 1964: B-4. 149 Would "buckle together scattered suburbs," create new neighbors, and encourage residential and commercial developments within close range of the highway. 278 This "buckling together [of] scattered suburbs" was perhaps most dramatic in the connections the Beltway provided between Virginia and Mazyland. Before the two Potomac River bridges opened, drivers had to head into Washington to move between th e two states. The improved access made it much more reasonable for residents of one state to consider shopping or working in the other. A local Virginia newspaper projected months before the grand opening that the Beltway would bring "Maryland and Alexandria 'closer' to Fairfax residents, and Fairfax 'closer' to Maryland and Alexandria residents. 11279 In the weeks before the opening ceremonies, Charles County, Md., to Washington's southeast, ran a two-page spread in several Northern Virginia newspapers advertising its proximity via the Beltway. Across the top of the advertisement was the banner "Not a stoplight from Fairfax to Maryland on New Circumferential Highway, Rt. 495." The center of the spread included directions to "take newly opened Capital Beltway #495 past Alexandria across Woodrow Wilson Bridge" before heading south on Branch A venue (Route 5) to Charles County. Smaller ads within the spread for Buddy's Steak House, Smitty's Steak House, Jimmie's Paddock Restaurant and Motel, and the Pirates Den restaurant all specified "35 Minutes from Fairfax County via Circumferential Hwy. 495." Fairfax County, of course, became equally accessible to 21a "Closing the Ring" [editorial], Washington Post, l~ August 1964: Al6. 279 "Impact," Fairfax City Times, 3 April 1964= 2· 150 Charles County residents, as did many other area jurisdictions with respect to one another.280 Drivers around the region loved the Beltway, at the very beginning. Many viewed it as an enormous advance in quality transportation, with its limited access, lack of traffic signals, multiple lanes, and wide medians. So smooth were the initial weeks that an urban legend developed that local bars were experiencing a drop in business because workers could no longer call home after work and claim to be stuck in traffic, while actually catching a quick drink.281 Readers flooded the Washington papers with letters of praise: All I can say is from my point of view "it is the best thing since the invention of the wheel"! The persons responsible for it being built are to be congratulated. Time saved: morning 20 minutes, evening 45 minutes. No lights. No stops. Extra mileage: 0 miles. I can now get to work in 35 minutes instead of the hour and 15 minutes it used to take. It saves me 15 to 20 minutes and considerable aggravation. The scenery is beautiful, too. Thanks to the interstate highway engineers the Washington area has shrunk- so that we may well appropriate the name of one of our suburbs and use the term "Beltsville. "282 Within two months of opening, the Beltway was attracting as many as 47,000 vehicles per day, nearly exceeding the projections of both states for years in the future. Traffic dropped by 13 percent on the 14th Street Bridge, a key river crossing in Washington 280 Advertisement for Charles County, Md., Fairfax City Times, 7 August 1964: 10-11. 281 Dickson, 10; Van Dyne, "Getting There," 202-203. 282 Letters to the editor, Evening Star, 23 August 1964: AlO. 151 which drivers could now avoid by taking either the Beltway's two bridges across the Potomac. 283 Maryland, meanwhile, dealt with extra land it had condemned but no longer needed for the Beltway by leasing sixteen acres to Prince George's County, which worked with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Penn Central railroad to build a suburban station for the company's Metroli~er trains; that "Capital Beltway" Metroliner station is now Amtrak's New Carrollton station.284 Lost in the excitement in the autumn of 1964, at least initially, was recognition that the Beltway was not a godsend to everyone. In the weeks after the grand opening, as commuters, politicians, and developers fell over each other in their eagerness to praise the new highway, a trickle of dissent emerged in the newspapers' letters pages and in neighborhood conversations. In September 1964, Evening Star writer Anne Christmas noted that even as the "Baby Beltway has us ga-ga" and had inspired some enthusiasts "to regard its miles of cold concrete with the same warm emotion usually engendered by a beloved, flesh-and-blood human being," others living near the road "rate the new highway as a gargantuan monster that threatens not only their sleep, but also the safety of their children and dogs. "285 Published one month after the opening ceremonies, Christmas's article scratched the surface of a side of the Beltway's development which had long been carefully 283 Lee Flor, "14th Street Bridge Load Cut 13% by Beltway," Evening Star, 4 October 1964: B-1; "47,882 Cars Fill Beltway on Weekday," Evening Star, 11 October 1964: C- l. 284 Jim Noren, "The Great Beltway Station Disaster," Washingtonian, March 1971: 36- 41. 285 Anne Christmas, "Baby Beltway Has Us Ga-Ga," Evening Star, 17 September 1964: B-2. 152 hidden from public view. The many articles and speeches commemorating the highway's opening almost completely glossed over the difficulties in bringing the Beltway to fruition, even though a major protest, national in scope, had almost prevented the road's construction a decade earlier. As we will see in Chapter 9, Whitton and the newspaper editors were correct in their assessments that the Beltway would unite the region and would spur development, but they neglected to mention that those benefits would come at a price. Who paid the price? How was it negotiated? Was it worth it for those who paid and for the larger population of people who used the Beltway? In the next chapter, I look at the other side of the coin and examine what conflicts were papered over to reach the consensus represented by the completion of the Beltway. 153 CHAPTERS "THIS WAS A NICE PLACE": CONFLICT AND ANGER My parents bought this house in January of 1960. There were woods in the back yard, and a creek where we caught tadpoles and frogs, and animals, rabbits and chipmunks and deer. We had a wonderful garden, hung our clothes in the yard, kept doors and windows open in the summertime. We would have picnics in the back yard. It was the perfect place to be a kid. When the beltway arrived, it was dirty and noisy, still is. Rats replaced the rabbits. The house stayed closed, no more picnics. We became an easy target for thieves. Of course, it was always fun being awakened by people who had had accidents behind the house, pounding on your door in the middle of the night. The beltway ruined a beautiful neighborhood, mine, and I don't like it. - Lisa Loflin, 2000.286 In 1980, the consulting firm of Payne-Maxie published for the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development an extensive analysis of the land use and development impacts of beltways nationwide. In Chapter 9, I will return to what Payne-Maxie found and will compare their conclusions to those in other studies of American beltways. Unlike those other studies, however, Payne-Maxie explicitly recognized the dynamics in the original planning process which led to beltways- . including the Capital Beltway-becoming at once a boon to many drivers and a scourge to the communities through which they passed. The 1980 report stated: Oriented to engineering, the Interstate program initially did not include rigorous planning requirements .... Not until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1978 was legislated were transportation planners forcefully encouraged to tie their planning to land use planning and to recognize the socioeconomic, environmental and energy implications of particular transportation projects. As a result, beltway planning in the 1940s and 1950s mainly involved coordination with local agencies and little analysis of the effects of highways on urban areas: alternatives rarely were evaluated comprehensively, and land use and infrastructure impacts for the most part were given little attention. 286 Beltway Survey #542. 154 Further, effects on central cities and urban revitalization programs were not . d . d 1 287 examine , nor were impacts on eve opment patterns assessed. In short, beltways, like other Interstate-type highways, were regularly construed by their designers as decontextualized engineering projects. In their conversations with me, original engineers Isadore Parker, Fred Pavay, and *Sidney Miller each reaffirmed that the Capital Beltway was one assignment among a lifetime of assignments; their primary concern was to create the best road they could to handle traffic efficiently and safely, and any additional effects, for better or worse, were incidental and outside their purview. Payne-Maxie's assessment of the planners' and engineers' mindset is written in the passive voice (thereby deflecting responsibility from any particular individual or group), but that mindset created social and environmental effects that were anything but passive. The first signs of these effects appeared at the outset of the planning process, when the residents of Berwyn and Greenbelt voiced their concerns over the initial routing of the Beltway; in neither case did the M-NCPPC or SRC actually respond directly to the specific concerns brought forward, a harbinger of things to come. Furthermore, the Beltway had to go somewhere, and although much of its alignment went through sparsely developed woods and farmland, some of it did not. How the planning and highway authorities responded to the implications of that scenario would go a long way toward determining how displaced residents and business owners themselves would react. Consistent with Payne-Maxie's analysis, officials gave minimal attention to this concern, which loomed large in the lives of the individuals affected. 287 Payne-Maxie Consultants, The Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of Beltways: Executive Summary (Washington, D.C., 1980), 5-6. 155 Highway officials in both states downplayed the extent of displacement caused by the Beltway's construction relative to the effects of other highways. Lester Wilkinson, who reserved the right-of-way for the Beltway in Prince George's County, remembered that "[t]here were some [displacements]. Obviously. It's almost impossible for a highway that big to go all the way through a county without displacing a few homes. But essentially at that time it was all undeveloped land. "288 Virginia engineer F.L. Burroughs, writing in 1961, similarly noted that "[s]ome public inconvenience has been caused because of the displacement of people and their homes. However, 1 think it is remarkable that fewer than I 00 houses had to be taken. "289 Both Burroughs and Wilkinson speak about displacement in technical, non-emotional terms~ they focus on the overall positive note that relatively few people were affected, but do not address the types of effects the displacement had on those individuals. Nor did those displaced have much chance themselves to express their concerns. Public hearings on the Beltway's construction, though extremely limited, did exist. Before the late 1950s, planning officials designed and built highways virtually unchecked. Under the Interstate program after 1956, the federal government required states to hold some form of hearing to incorporate the public into the planning process. So both Virginia and Maryland did hold public hearings- at least one apiece-while planning the Beltway. However, in my research examining three major newspapers, over a dozen county or community papers in both states, and records from Maryland's SRC and M-NCPPC and Virginia's YOH, I found no mention of any public hearings at 288 Interview with Lester Wilkinson. 289 Burroughs, "The Capital Beltway," 36. 156 all-let alone any changes the states made in response to them-during the entire 1952- 1964 planning and construction period, beyond the following two. Local newspapers announced in April 1957 that Virginia would hold a public hearing at Annandale High School on the 19th of the month. The announcement itself served notice that the purpose of the hearing was not so much to solicit residents' suggestions as to reveal to them what decisions the highway department had already made. A small announcement in the legal notices of the Fairfax Herald read, in part: In accordance with provisions of the 1956 Federal Highway Act, a public hearing will be held by a representative of the State Highway Department ... for the purpose of considering the proposed location of the Interstate Highway .. . known as the Virginia Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C. Circumferential Route, 22.1 miles.290 A community newsletter highlighted the point that residents would be seeing plans already developed, noting that at the hearing, "presumably, the proposed location of the entire 22.1 mile highway will be unveiled."291 Other than a passing reference a week later in another local paper that community representatives lobbied at the hearing for as many interchanges as possible in their respective areas (to bolster commercial access and development), the print media were quiet on the April 19 hearing and any others that may have been held. 292 In Maryland, the record is more silent still. A contentious public hearing was held in 1959 in Cabin John, Md., but I have found no reference to it in any source other 290 "Public Notice," Fairfax Herald, 19 April 1957: 8. 291 Fairfax Newsletter, 6 April 1957: 4. In Virginia Room, Fairfax County Public Library. 292 "Chamber Asks Three Links With New Road," Fairfax County Journal-Standard, 26 April 1957: 8. 157 than a single transcript. Fulfilling federal obligations under the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, the State Roads Commission invited residents to a hearing at Glen Echo Town Hall on December 17, 1959. The transcript of the meeting leaves no doubt that there was some degree of heated opposition toward the Beltway's construction beyond the Rock Creek Park segment. At least a dozen residents of Cabin John and Bethesda testified in no uncertain terms against the construction of the Beltway leg through their communities; residents of Cabin John were especially irate that the new road would decimate their healthy and quiet neighborhood (Fig. 2). Representative of their concerns was AM. Dodson of Cabin John, who insisted that he and other Cabin John residents "would not hold still for being carved up in any manner that would ruin our community as aplace [sic] to live in. "293 But what frustrated Dodson and the other attendees even more was the absolute intransigence of the highway officials, who through the entire hearing offered no sympathy or even acknowledgment of the points they were hearing again and again. The transcript shows State Roads Commissioner John Funk and other officials responding to each speaker by repeatedly dismissing their concerns through reference to a greater good or by moving to the next speaker with no comment at all. Cabin John residents had their hearing, but in their view, they were not meaningfully heard.294 293 Transcript of Proceedings of Public Hearings by the Maryland State Roads Commission on the Proposed Interstate Route 495 and the Cabin John Connection to the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Dec. 17, 1959, Glen Echo Town Hall (Washington, D.C.: Hart & Haskins, Shorthand and Stenotype Reporting, 1959), 75. 294 This transcript is the only reference I found to this contentious public hearing; even former SRC officials claimed no recollection of it. My discussion here draws on the copy held in the M-NCPPC archives in Wheaton, Md., which the facility's archivist produced for me during a research visit in early 1998. Unfortunately, in responding to repeated future requests, she was unable to find the document again, a function of the 158 This was not a surprise. Nationwide, the first generation of public hearings for Interstate highways progressed much the same as at the Glen Echo Town Hall. Highway officials, unaccustomed to having their plans checked, much less altered, used their federally mandated public hearings to show the public what plans they had made, but were not prepared yet to incorporate the public in more substantial ways. This was apparent even at the time. Landscape historian Grady Clay, writing from his own experience, offered this contemporary account in 1958: What about public hearings? I cannot speak of the thousands of hearings I have not seen, but from some personal observation I am forced to conclude that the public hearing is a carefully staged performance designed to show the audience why the route officially agreed upon in private cannot be changed. As one of the British motor magazines recently described it, these are affairs where "at worst, aggrieved persons may hear very sound reasons why things cannot be altered." The burden of proof is placed on the private citizen, who often is poorly informed and easily buffaloed by technical mumbo-jumbo .... In other words, don't make any fuss about the route we've already picked. Just be thankful. And if not, be quiet.295 . Since there were no official venues where residents or others could express their concerns over the Beltway and have them meaningfully addressed, officially there was no serious opposition to the Beltway. But it was there. In some cases, as in Cabin John, residents had social concerns; in others, as in Rock Creek Park, the concerns were environmental. In all cases, residents found themselves let down by planners' and officials' responses, or more often their lack of response. In this chapter, I discuss episodes in which the Beltway's construction or operation sparked social or environmental concerns-sometimes both at once-and unfortunate virtual absence of cataloguing in the M-NCPPC archives, a major hindrance to research. 295 Grady Clay, "The Tiger is Through the Gate," Landscape Architecture 49.2 (Winter 1958-1959): 80-81. 159 how those conflicts played out. These case studies directly address the issues of power, access, and competing meanings raised in the fifth operation of the cultural landscape study model. The first section, which focuses in depth on one segment of the Beltway, also looks at the tensions between the cultural and natural components of the landscape and the perceptions underlying those tensions, as suggested by the model's third and fourth operations. The second section, which discusses the Beltway's effects on the lives of individual neighbors, addresses aural and other sensory aspects of the Beltway, playing off the multisensory dimensions of cultural landscapes as noted in the first operation. Together, these case studies suggest that the effects the Beltway had on communities, individual lives, and parts of the natural landscape were not nearly as negligible as its original designers claimed. The Disappearing Parkway Although Maryland began construction of its portion of the Beltway some two years before Virginia, its first section built and opened turned out to be the most controversial leg of the entire loop. The 1.5-mile section of the highway passing through Rock Creek Park in Montgomery County proved to be a P~dora's box which still has not closed. The nearly forgotten battle over the road's construction witnessed the unusual convergence of five governmental agencies with overlapping jurisdiction, multiple judicial challenges, ambiguously defined legal tenns with critical consequences, impassioned debates on the floor of Congress, and thy imposition of a new set of rules, resulting from the creation of the Interstate Highway System, in the midst of the controversy. In hindsight, it remains unclear who "won" this early freeway 160 face-off. While the road was eventually built, the final result--a serpentine pattern well- known to Washington commuters as the "Roller Coaster"--was neither the originally planned highway nor any of the compromises reached during the course of the controversy. Still, the battle over the "belt parkway" in the early 1950s, at a time when highway planners nationwide took little notice of challenges to their plans, opens a window into what some Maryland residents and planning and political officials considered acceptable in the realm of highway building, why they felt that way, and how they engaged in dialogue at a time even before the ineffective public hearings of the Federal Highway Act of 1956 had been instituted. Even as construction of the Beltway began in February 1955, with a bridge over Cedar Lane in Kensington, just inside Rock Creek Park, the road itself was on trial in the federal courts and in the Senate. At issue was the Beltway's routing through the Montgomery County portion of Rock Creek Park. This piece of parkland was a northern extension of the better-known Rock Creek Park in the District, itself owned and maintained by the National Park Service. North of the Maryland/Washington border, however, Rock Creek and its surrounding forest were not federal property. Maryland had acquired its share of Rock Creek Park under the federal Capper-Cramton Act of 1930, discussed below. As a result, while Rock Creek Park (Washington) and Rock Creek Park (Maryland) often appeared indistinguishable to the public, Maryland's section was in fact subject to a confusing array of restrictions and overseeing authorities, established by the Capper-Cramton Act and concurrent state legislation.296 296 George Beveridge, "Road Dispute Poses a Query on 'Parkway," Evening Star, 22 November 1953: A-12. 161 Although some overlap appeared inevitable between the east-west leg of the Beltway and the north-south stream valley park, more efficient planning might have sidestepped this episode altogether. In 1955, the SRC claimed that the earliest highway planning maps showed a beltway-prototype road from the 1940s which ran the route north of Rock Creek Park (Maryland). But by the time the Beltway appeared in the M- NCPPC's 1952 master plan, that agency's engineers realized that intense residential development and some poor topographic conditions had eliminated the northerly option. For other planned highways, the M-NCPPC used its zoning and land reservation authority to discourage or stop development along a planned route. But since the beltway was not formally articulated on a master plan until the early 1950s, the agency had not taken such steps soon enough to prevent development along a northern route. Seeing no choice, officials from the M-NCPPC and the NCPC, which shared jurisdiction for Rock Creek Park (Maryland), agreed on a route which sent the Beltway across the park.297 This proposal raised two related problems, which together set the stage for years of debate. First, residents of the neighborhoods surrounding Rock Creek Park (Maryland) were loath to see the park's relative tranquility compromised by an expressway. Their concern was exacerbated by a piggyback proposal to build a second highway through the park at the same time. The Washington National Pike (successively designated U.S. 240, I-70S, and I-270) was built in bits and pieces between Frederick and Bethesda between 1952 and 1960. At Pooks Hill in Bethesda, 297 Beveridge, "Inter-County Belt Work." 162 the future junction of that highway and the beltway, U.S. 240 was originally planned to continue southward into Washington along the Wisconsin Avenue corridor.298 Because of vocal opposition to this route by business owners and residents along Wisconsin Avenue, SRC engineers proposed a different routing to bring U.S. 240 into Washington. Under this Rock Creek route, the highway would run south from Frederick to the Beltway (along the current path ofl-270), run eastward concurrently with the Beltway along part of Rock Creek Park (Maryland), then dip south through the park toward and into Washington. Rock Creek area residents did not want the Beltway passing through the park in the first place; they certainly did not want that section doubling as a second heavy-traffic highway which would eat further through the park. They were even more upset that the proposed southern extension of U.S. 240 would, after thoroughly disrupting the park, indefinitely dead-end at East-West Highway in Chevy Chase until District officials decided to extend 240 into the city.299 In August 1953, members of the Rock Creek Hills and Parkwood Citizens' Associations requested that Rock Creek Park routings be prohibited both for the Beltway and U.S. 240. By October, those groups had beenjoined by the Forest Glen and Locust Hills communities and the Citizens' Action Committee for Fair Road 298 Bredemeier, "l-70S." 299 Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Staff Report on Feasibility Studies for the Extension and Location of U.S. 240 to Connect with the District of Columbia, January 1958 (Silver Spring, MD, 1958), 1-7; Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Staff Feasibility Studies for Location of a Proposed Wisconsin A venue Expressway, January 1959 (Riverdale, MD, 1959), 2; Coit Hendley, Jr., "How U.S. 240 and the Belt Route Would Affect Rock Creek Park," Evening Star, 13 August 1953: A-32. 163 Planning, headed by local resident and former U.S. senator Gerald P. Nye. In a prepared statement, Nye argued that the persistence of the Maryland State Roads Commission and certain members of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in demanding access to reaches of Rock Creek Park for highways and belt routes would seem to make it clear that what they seek is free land for superhighways. Obviously, if they succeed in using four or five miles of Rock Creek Park for the proposed belt, they will have established a precedent, one which could ultimately make Sligo Parkway and Anacostia Park the normal continuing route for the belt around the east side of Washington.300 In fact, Nye's concern about setting precedent for opening stream valleys to highway development was not unfounded. In 1946, the M-NCPPC had submitted a confidential report to the U.S. presidential budget office proposing limited-access parkways through the very stream valley corridors Nye mentioned as well as several others.301 Beyond the worries over adverse environmental effects to Rock Creek Park and to its abutters, the proposed Beltway routing also raised a sticky legal issue. Residents' complaints aside, could an expressway legally be constructed in the park in the first place? Members of the Parkwood Citizens' Association argued that their subdivision's developer had sold the adjacent section of parkland to the M-NCPPC in 1938 with the contractual restriction that the land be developed "as a parkway to be used and maintained as part of the Rock Creek Park system." If the NCPC had known about that 300 Qtd. in "Belt Highway Plan for Rock Creek Park Opposed by.Citizens," Evening Star, 14 October 1953: A-8. 301 "Planners Asked to Revise Stand on Belt Route," Evening Star, 7 August 1953: B-1; Maryland-National Park and Planning Commission, "A Program for Park Purchase in the Maryland-Washington Regional District," M-NCPPC archives, Wheaton, MD. 164 restriction, Parkwood residents said, it would not have approved the Beltway's routing through the park.302 The problem lay in the terminology. The 1938 stipulation required that the parkland be developed as a parkway. What exactly is a parkway? The local press had referred to the highway interchangeably as a "belt highway" and a "belt parkway." If it was in fact a parkway, the problem would become moot. This question--was the Beltway in actuality a parkway--took on paramount importance after the parties involved reread the fine print in the Capper-Cramton Act which governed the park. On May 29, 1930, Congress had passed an omnibus cultural resource management package for Washington, D.C. and its suburbs. The Capper-Cramton Act provided $33 million for the development of parkways along both shores of the Potomac River and the extension of Rock Creek Park into Maryland, as well as protection of the historic Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, three forts, and the river gorge of Great Falls, under the blanket auspices of the acquisition of lands in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia for the national capital's comprehensive park, parkway, and playground system.303 Washington's section of Rock Creek Park had been created by an act of Congress in 1890, following decades of proposals. Some forty years later, under Capper-Cramton and concurrent Maryland legislation, the state acquired the northern extension of Rock Creek Park. Maryland paid two-thirds of the acquisition costs; the federal government covered the remaining third. Maryland held title to that section of the park and was 302 "Planners Asked," Evening Star. 303 Leach, "Fifty Years of Parkway Construction," 188-189. 165 charged with developing it (subject to restrictions in the Capper-Crarnton Act), but the federal NCPC retained control over approving the actual development decisions.304 Until the Beltway question arose, discussion of Rock Creek Park in political and environmental contexts had generally focused on the better-known Washington section. In 1953, the spotlight shifted to the newer Maryland portion and the unfamiliar dynamics introduced by the obscure Capper-Cramton law. For Washington's Rock Creek Park, the appropriateness of a parkway--a road conceived as a means for providing access to that recreational area--had never been in doubt. Completion of the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway in Washington was delayed nearly forty years by seemingly endless squabbles in securing congressional approval, a final design, and funding, but the project itself was long considered a done deal. Certainly there was no disagreement over whether that road would truly be a parkway.305 But unlike the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, the Beltway was never conceived by anyone in primarily recreational terms. Because of the stipulations in the Capper-Cramton Act, this distinction posed a serious roadblock. As noted above, the law's preamble specifically designated its purpose as provision for the "comprehensive park, parkway, and playground system of the area." As such, any development in Rock Creek Park (Maryland) would need to be shoehorned into the categories of park, parkway, or playground. Parks and playgrounds made no sense in this context. One choice remained: to overcome this legal obstacle, state officials needed to position the 304 Davis, "Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway," 137; Beveridge, "Road Dispute"; Hendley, "How U.S. 240"; Linda Wheeler, "Georgetown Gets a Waterfront Park," Washington Post, 29 October 2000: B4. 305 Davis, "Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway," 143-144. 166 Beltway leg as a parkway in the eyes of the National Capital Planning Commission, the ruling authority in this case. The future of the Beltway thus came down to two questions. Was this segment legitimately a parkway-and what defined a parkway to begin with? The significance of these questions came into full public view on October 30, 1953, when NCPC chair Harland Bartholomew approved the use of Rock Creek Park (Maryland) for the Beltway, on the grounds that within the park's boundaries, the Beltway would be a parkway. Bartholomew explained that the Beltway segment would be built at "substantially a parkway standard" and that there would be coincident development of the park's recreational facilities. Defining a parkway as a "special type of automobile travelway of more than ordinary width and having park-like characteristics," Bartholomew confirmed that the proposed Beltway leg would meet the stringent legal requirements.306 This strategy of shielding an environmentally sensitive highway under the term "parkway" was not unusual, as Timothy Davis explains: Highway engineers ... had little use for the expensive amenities and scenery- saving measures endorsed by landscape architects, and saw little need to accommodate park concerns once widespread legal endorsement of limited- access freeway construction rendered the protective "parkway" designation superfluous. Highway engineers and transportation planners were eager to cloak their express highways under the more appealing term parkway, however, when the roads they wanted to develop encroached on existing or proposed park lands. 307 306 Beveridge, "Road Dispute." For a comprehensive survey of the development of the American parkway, see Davis, "Mount Vernon Memorial Highway," 29-104. See also Nelson M. Wells, "The Parkway Influence on Highway Design," Landscape Architecture 49.2 (Winter 1958-59): 92-94. 307 Davis, "Mount Vernon Memorial Highway," 848. Davis adds that Maryland and D.C. traffic officials practiced this approach freely in the Washington metropolitan area (848). . 167 In the case of the Beltway leg, local residents sensed the chicanery inherent in Bartholomew's application of the parkway strategy. Three weeks after his announcement, six Maryland residents filed suit in federal court to challenge his ruling with its generous definition of a parkway. The obvious argument from a modem standpoint-how could an interstate highway be considered a parkway-could not have been made, because the interstate system was still three years from authorization. Still, the litigants argued that the Beltway was clearly a multi-lane, limited-access, high- speed highway, a key piece of Maryland's transportation network, and that it did not conform to the restrictions concerning parks and parkways. Conrad Wirth, the National Park Service director, was the only NCPC member to agree with this argument. Wirth defined parkway as "an elongated park, with a road usually used to connect two or more parks." As such, he considered the beltway's use of the park to be a direct violation of the federal legislation. 308 Wirth's definition gave primacy to the "park" and secondary emphasis to the "way." Alternative definitions reversed the order and focused on the road itself. The American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) defined a parkway as "an arterial highway for non-commercial traffic, with full or partial control of access, and usually located within a park or ribbon of park-like development. 11309 The Beltway would not link two parks, as per Wirth's definition, but could conceivably meet the AASHO standards if commercial traffic were prohibited-a concern to business interests, but not an insunnountable one. Parkway design recommendations issued by 308 Beveridge, "Road Dispute." 309 Jbid. 168 the Secretary of the Interior in 1935 and the BPR in 1938 seemed to slightly prioritize the park over the road, but the issue was still sufficiently muddled for the Department of the Interior to complain in 1944 that "to date, Congress has not defined parkways. Legislation pertaining to parkways is piecemeal and lacks uniformity."310 This issue remained unresolved into the next decade. Thus in 1954, the lexicographical question before the federal appeals court, in the case of the Beltway-parkway, was to settle among competing definitions: was a parkway contingent upon its park or its way? There was no ambiguity on this issue from the perspective of Louis C. Cramton, co-author of the 1930 legislation authorizing the Rock Creek Park extension, which included the controversial parkway stipulation. While the NCPC tried to convince the federal court that the Capper-Cramton "parkway" designation applied to the proposed Beltway leg, Cramton made clear in a letter to the commission that its interpretation was wrong: To save for the Nation in its greatest value Rock Creek Park, we proposed Federal and Maryland cooperation that would extend the Rock Creek Park values for miles into Maryland. We had the very fullest cooperation of Maryland authorities at the time, including Governor Ritchie. The extension was authorized, and the result was the wonderful Rock Creek Park of today extending for miles into Maryland. All of this was park planning, not setting aside a great valley as a possible site for a 4-, 6-, or 12-lane highway. And to open that valley today in any part of it to such superhighway use opens the door wide to ultimate destruction of the most beautiful park any capital city enjoys. There is an attempt in some quarters to call this wonderful park area a parkway. And when they do that they put all the emphasis on the second syllable and would have it become "way," dropping all emphasis on "park." It is not a parkway and was never intended to be a parkway. In the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Rock Creek became world famous as a park. The Capper-Cramton law says nothing about extending a parkway. It does propose and does extend that great park for many 310 Qtd. in Leach, 186. 169 miles not as an avenue by easy vehicle approach to a city that already has more street traffic than it can endure. I, therefore, appeal to your Commission to close the door with definiteness to any alluring proposals that involve preeminence of highway use in any part of this park. Highways, of course, were to be permitted, but only as necessary incidents to public use of these delightful areas. Pending proposals would reverse the situation and make highway use preeminent and any recreation use only incidental.311 Federal Judge Matthew F. McGuire heard arguments in March 1954 for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Speaking for the Rock Creek valley residents, attorneys J. Joseph Barse and Edward Northrup contended that the Beltway was planned exclusively as a major highway, not as a facility to serve Rock Creek Park (Maryland). The Capper-Cramton Act's reference to parkways indicated roads which distinctly served the parks, not thoroughfares incidentally passing through those parks. As a result, the planned Beltway leg neither benefited the park nor could be defined as a parkway. Barse and Northrup asked McGuire to declare the NCPC's approval of the Beltway segment illegal on these grounds.312 Assistant U.S. Attorney Oliver Gasch pushed for dismissal of the case, arguing that the N CPC clearly recognized its legal responsibilities and had pointed out explicitly that it would approve the road only if it met all required standards. The Capper-Cramton Act, Gasch noted, inarguably gave the NCPC authority over the park's development, and this case represented a reasonable use of that authority.313 311 Louis C. Cramton to National Capital Planning Commission, June 8, 1954, qtd. in Congressional Record, 101: 1033. 312 George Beveridge, "Court Studies Dismissal of Belt Road Suit," Evening Star, 24 March 1954: A-21. 313 Ibid. 170 McGuire refused to rule in favor of either side, since neither had provided specific plans showing where and how the road would cut through the park. Within weeks of McGuire's non-ruling, the Olmstead Bros. firm of Brookline, Massachusetts, submitted a plan subsequently approved by the NCPC in June 1954, stipulating that the southern leg of U.S. 240 would not be built from the beltway south through the park. While the M-NCPPC's chairman, Robert M. Watkins, considered the NCPC's decision a "clear-cut approval" for the Beltway leg, the final ruling would need to come from the Court of Appeals.314 On July 27, 1954, Judge Edward A. Tamm threw out the lawsuit, effectively ruling that the NCPC did have the authority to approve the beltway through Rock Creek Park (Maryland). Tamm explained that Barse and Northrup had raised a number of pertinent "collateral issues," but that Congress clearly had vested authority in the NCPC to make decisions concerning the approval of the park's development, and that the commission had made such decisions. Arguing in vain for a full trial, Barse called the Olmstead Bros. plans "window-dressing to try to make this highway fit the category of some kind ofparkway."315 Barse asked Tamm to issue a temporary injunction to halt construction. Tamm declined, but the appellate court to which Barse then appealed agreed to hold up construction of the Beltway leg through the park, to the consternation of the NCPC and 3 14 "Court Denies Motion to Throw Out Suit on Belt Freeway," Evening Star, 4 May 1954: A-2; George Beveridge, "Planners Get Detailed Plan on Belt Road," Evening Star, 21 May 1954: A-19; George Beveridge, "Road Decisions by Planners Renew 2 Fights," Evening Star, 11 June 1954: A-19. 315 George Beveridge, "Appeal Planned With Dismissal of Parkway Suit," Evening Star, 28 July 1954: A-17. 171 M-NCPPC. However, in September, the appellate court rejected the motion for a permanent injunction, apparently clearing the way for work on the road to begin at last. Maryland officials planned to move immediately and take no chances on further delays from opponents. "[T]he [State Roads] Commission," according to its chief, Russell H. McCain, "directed its chief engineer to instruct consulting engineers to proceed as rapidly as possible in connection with completion of detailed contract plans for the construction of the intercounty belt parkway which involves the use of certain parklands. "316 But the parkway fight was not over; the battlefield now shifted from the courts to the legislature. Gerald P. Nye, still in a leadership role with the citizens' associations protesting the Beltway leg, turned to his former colleagues in the U.S. Senate and encouraged several of them to inquire formally into the controversy. James E. Murray, a Montana Democrat, accepted Nye's invitation. A dramatic beat-the-clock sequence of events ensued. 317 In January 1955, Murray, Chairman of the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, introduced legislation drafted by the National Park Service which "would require the National Capital Planning Commission to rescind its permission for the beltway leg, restrict its approval of subsequent roads in the Maryland park, and proscribe additional roads in the District park without specific congressional 316 "Maryland Planners Again Assail Foes of Park Belt Road," Evening Star, 25 July 1954: A-16; "Maryland to Hasten Plans for Contract on Belt Parkway," Evening Star, 23 September 1954: A-1. 317 Beveridge, "Inter-County Belt Work." 172 approval n318 S ak' · pe mg to the Senate, Murray offered a joint resolution "to prevent what has been described to us as a threat to Rock Creek Park in the Greater National Capital Area. · · · This modem superspeed highway, while bearing the name of a 'parkway,' would of course destroy, in its area of the park, the scenic and recreational purposes for Which the park was intended." During the same week that the Senate opened its hearings on Murray's bill, the Ralph E. Mills Co. of Salem, Virginia, began construction on the beltway's first project, a $143,000 bridge over Cedar Lane,just inside the southem boundary of Rock Creek Park (Maryland). 319 At hearings on Murray's proposal, John M. Butler, a Republican senator from Baltimore, requested that Congress refrain from "invading the sovereign rights of Maryland" by removing itself from what was fundamentally an internal state matter. Other .Maryland politicians and officials agreed, as did the Bureau of the Budget, which considered the bill redundant in light of existing legislation. But Murray rejected those arguments on the grounds that Rock Creek Park "both in the District of Columbia and as extended into Maryland [ remain J a part of our national park system." Further, the NCPC oversight specified in the Capper-Cramton Act mandated a federal role in this context.320 Murray cited several hundred letters from all parts of the country-and one each from park associations in Japan and Belgium-protesting the Beltway leg through the 318 Barry .Mackintosh Rock Creek Park: An Administrative History (Washington, DC: National Park Servic~, History Division, 1985), 85-86· 319 .Qwgressional Record, 101:1033; Beveridge, "Inter-County Belt Work." 320 .Mackint h R k C k p k 87· George Beveridge, "Butler Assails Senate Role in B os , oc ree ar , , 1 G B 'd "B elt Road Row," Evening Star, 25 Feb~ 1955: A- ; eorge eve:1 ge, elt Road Plan Probe Defended by Chairman," Everung Star, 26 February 1955. A-1. 173 park. Several individuals, including National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth and Major General U.S. Grant III, chairman of the American Planning and Civic Association, spoke against the negative effects of the highway. However, the two-day hearing before Murray's committee adjourned with sharp conflict remaining between Maryland officials and Murray whether Congress could intervene without Maryland's approval. That question was never resolved. Murray's bill did not come up for a vote in either house, and again was ignored after its reintroduction in the subsequent congressional session.321 So two complementary questions remained unanswered: Could Congress order Maryland to take any action with respect to that state's portion of Rock Creek Park? And in tum, could Maryland take any action concerning the park without federal approval from either the NCPC or Congress? That Maryland officials remained confused years later is apparent from the wording of a 1958 proposal reviving a plan for U.S. 240 through the park: Numerous studies have been made by various agencies for the construction of an expressway facility into the District of Columbia using principally lands now a part of Rock Creek Park. This report does not contain design details of this route, but there is little doubt that such a facility could be built within the broad expanse of Rock Creek Park possible on the extreme western side. The problem with which we are confronted in the use of any portion of Rock Creek Park for a longitudinal highway facility is the opposition to date of the National Capital Park Service as well as opposition from other groups devoted to parks, recreation and conservation. An Act of Congress might release the necessary lands for highway purposes.322 321 Mackintosh, Rock Creek Park, 87; George Beveridge, "Belt Highway Inquiry Ends in Row on Rights," Evening Star, 27 February 1955: A-10. The issue of routing U.S. 240 through the park did resurface in Congress; see Congressional Record, 101 :5992; 102: 14945; and 104: 19431. 322 Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Staff Report on Feasibility Studies, 7-8. 174 The conditional "might" in the last sentence indicated officials' perplexity over the rules governing Rock Creek Park. Who had the authority to enable whom to do what, in terms of building highways in any section of the park? A joint agreement, spelling out a consensus for respective responsibilities among regional, state, and federal authorities, would not occur until 1963. Having received no further injunctions or congressional directives to the contrary, the Maryland State Roads Commission built the Rock Creek Park Beltway leg as a parkway, as per its plan approved by the National Capital Planning Commission. In effect, it was purposeful inaction which enabled the road's construction: neither the courts nor the Senate ruled explicitly that the controversial leg could be built, but more importantly, neither one declared that Maryland could not build it. How, then, did Maryland go about making a parkway out of a Beltway? And, considering the lack of visible parkway manifestations today, where did the parkway go? In his administrative history of Rock Creek Park, Barry Mackintosh answers these questions succinctly: "Planning for the beltway leg in Maryland proceeded amid state assurances that it would be a low-speed 'parkway' from which commercial traffic would be forever barred--assurances that were forgotten when the beltway was completed in the mid-l 960s and became part of the interstate highway system."323 That assessment is only partially accurate. Mackintosh's evaluation is equivocal in several respects: first, the assurances of parkway standards were not simply "forgotten"; second, he neglects to mention that the road was actually built as a parkway as promised; third, 323 Mackintosh, Rock Creek Park, 87. 175 he fails to note the full significance of Rock Creek valley residents' participation in the Process. It was this third factor which most profoundly shaped the ultimate form of the Beltway park leg. Of the two primary obstacles to the highway, the Capper-Cramton " Parkway" challenge drew the public attention and brought the c~e to Congress and the courts. But the opposition from residents, in addition to initiating the question of the Parkway's viability, played a greater role in the road's final design, and foreshadowed similar activist intervention in road-building projects nationwide which would follow Within a few years. Until the 1960s, engineers and planners regularly routed new highways through areas Which would provide the least resistance. In practical terms, that often meant sites occupied by minorities or the poor, or riverfronts or stream valleys housing few residents or business owners to complain. 324 Rock Creek Park occupied a stream valley, but it was a stream valley passing through a prosperous suburb of the nation's capital, Whose residents included some of the most powerful politicians and journalists in the country. The NCPC was responsible for permitting the road to exist in the first place, by approving its construction as a parkway, but Rock Creek residents with political connections, in conjunction with engineers working for the state of Maryland or its hired finns, determined the actual serpentine route. No one prime mover was responsible for the curves commonly called the "Roller Coaster." Rather, they were the cumulative result of repeated political interventions into what area engineers had previously considered a relatively apolitical 324 Lewis n· 'd d H' h 241 · Ellis "Visions of Urban Freeways," 266-267. , 1v1 e 1g ways, , , 176 process. Resident Esther Coopersmith, for example, used her ties as a prominent Democratic fundraiser to urge Governor Millard Tawes and state highway officials to reroute the parkway around certain trees. Gerald P. Nye, who coordinated the opposition efforts of several citizens' associations, was a former U.S. senator. At a Senate hearing on the parkway, Senator Russell B. Long, a Democrat from Louisiana, "told reporters ... he 'was pressured by his wife' to oppose the park road because their home [was) near the Maryland section of the park. He added, laughingly, that he refused to do so and 'ran into real trouble."' The wife of then-Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey may also have been involved in the protest effort.325 Rock Creek residents were well aware of the political dynamics, and watched as the route shifted time and again in response to their intervention. That is not to say that all residents were pleased by the outcome; after all, every tum the parkway took to avoid a specific tree or house brought the road closer to a different tree or house. Paul Foer, whose family lived within blocks of the parkway's route, recalled in 2000 the neighborhood gossip from when the road was constructed: People would say ... "I hate driving there," because you curve one way, you curve the next, you curve the other. ... [My neighbor, an attorney with the Justice Department,) was railing on and on about why the beltway curved and curved way over toward us rather than took the short swath it should have taken down the other side of Rock Creek Park. And he swore it was because there were influential federal legislators. I don't know exactly who; you could say, those senators and congressmen. On our neck of the woods, I don't believe we had any senators and congressmen, right over in our area. But there were some living over there, according to him. And this was fairly common knowledge, that that's why the beltway curved the way it did.326 325 Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag"; Beveridge, "Butler Assails Senate Role"; interview with Neil J. Pedersen, 5 February 2001. 326 Interview with Paul Foer, 11 October 2000. 177 Before the road opened to drivers, the first beneficiaries of this political pressure were the engineers charged with designing the road. Sitting in their office on the second floor of the College Park shopping center, the Michael Baker, Jr. engineers fielded political requests to reroute the Rock Creek Park segment. Former Baker draftsman Isadore Parker observed "a lot of calls coming in to [Supervising Highway Engineer Jack H.] Frantz from members of Congress, or at least their offices, asking that certain houses be saved, that certain trees be saved. There seemed to be a lot of political influence there. And as a result, when you go through that portion of the beltway now, you do have a lot of curves." Parker repeatedly redrew his own designs for the road to accommodate the requests; the route was changed as frequently as four times in a single week as a direct result of the political pressure.327 Fred Pavay, in the Baker office alongside Parker, was not pleased by the politics or by the blame for poor road design which was (and often still is) directed at engineers. Pavay stressed that the parkway leg "was not an engineering design. The engineers designed it within certain parameters that were laid down for them, political parameters . . . . Some of the curves in that [section] were specifically, for political reasons, to take care of the environment before the environment was a buzzword." The Baker engineers created the park leg with a design speed of 60 miles per hour, compared to 70 miles per hour for most of the rest of the beltway in Maryland. Thus the "Roller Coaster" section only appears unsafe, according to its original engineers, because most drivers regularly exceed the safe speed of 60 miles per hour for which it was designed. 328 327 Interview with Isadore Parker, 5 October 1998; interview with M. Slade Caltrider. 328 Interview with Fred Pavay, 8 October 1998; interview with M. Slade Caltrider. 178 As a result of these pressures and the restrictions imposed by the Capper- Cramton Act, when the contentious Rock Creek Park leg of the Beltway opened on October 24, 1957, it was in the form of a parkway with many curves, running 1.5 miles between Connecticut and Wisconsin A venues. It is important to note that the road was distinctly a parkway. Truck travel was banned; only light vehicular traffic was permitted. Parker recalled that "there seemed to be an effort to maintain a parklike quality to the road .... So as a result, instead of steel guardrails, they were designed to have wooden guardrails. And there was also great care given to retaining trees and other kinds of structures that were parklike in nature." Construction crews working for the John H. Ensey Contracting Co. of Baltimore were instructed·by the M-NCPPC to protect at least one hundred specific trees, using gravel fill and rock walls if needed.329 Despite the extensive efforts of Maryland planners and engineers to build this segment as a parkway, the road itself survived only six years. By the time the full 64- mile Beltway opened in 1964, the parkway was nowhere to oe seen. The creation of the Interstate highway system spelled the end for the ambitious beltway-parkway at the same time that it provided federal funding to Maryland and Virginia to help make the entire Beltway a reality. The parkway controversy had played out mostly between 1953 and 1955, when the planned Washington Circumferential Highway was not subject to stringent interstate standards. But after the road was absorbed into the interstate system authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, Parker's "parklike structures" and the overall design 329 Interview with Isadore Parker; "Inter-County Parkway Link Gets Under Way," Evening Star, 11 July 1956: B-1; "First Section Dedicated of Circumference Road," Evening Star, 25 October 1957: A-25. 179 of the four-lane parkway rendered it noncompliant with interstate specifications. Maryland officials could have chosen to leave the parkway alone, but would have forfeited the federal aid which the state would otherwise have received for an interstate highway. The lure of federal funds won out, and the State Roads Commission elected to rebuild the parkway in 1963 to meet interstate standards.330 Here history repeated itself. Under the Capper-Cramton Act, the NCPC needed to give explicit permission for the state to rebuild the beltway within the Rock Creek Park (Maryland) boundaries. Because new construction was imminent, residents saw another opportunity to change the routing to avoid certain trees and houses. Park area residents formed the "Save the Trees Committee" to, in their words, spearhead "a fight to reroute this 7 / 10 of a mile stretch of the Beltway in a straighter line, not only to save the magnificent stand of old trees in the Park south of the Creek and reduce the adverse impact on [our] properties from the proposed winding route at the very edge of the Park, but also to achieve a shorter, straighter, and safer road." While the NCPC and M- NCPPC indicated some willingness to compromise on the new routing, the State Roads Commission stood firm and allowed only a "30 to 80 foot move northward over a few hundred yards. "331 The more serious obstacle was the matter of overlapping authority. For the reconstructed parkway to meet all pertinent requirements, the new plans needed 330 "Old Section of Beltway is Tom Up," Evening Star, 27 September 1963: B-10; Anne Christmas, "4 Mile Beltway Link is Opened Quietly," Evening Star, 15 November 1963: B-1. 33 1 Memorandum, M.F. Donegan, Stephen Timke, Shalon Ralph, and Thomas Kessing, January 17, 1968, Project File 0255, Maryland--Capital Beltway--Rock Creek Park, National Capital Planning Commission, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter NCPC Project File 0255). 180 concurrent approval from the M-NCPPC, the NCPC, and the SRC. The NCPC had the most reason to be wary of new plans for the highway, because of its obligation to safeguard the park under the Capper-Cramton Act. For the NCPC to again grant approval, it would take a persuasive argument that such approval and the resulting construction would be in the park's better interest. On September 12, 1963, officials for all three authorities signed a landmark agreement enabling reconstruction of the park leg and therefore the completion of the Beltway as a whole. Under the seven-condition document, the M-NCPPC conveyed approximately 80 acres of parkland to the State Roads Commission as a perpetual easement for the Beltway's right-of-way through Rock Creek Park (Maryland). In return, the State Roads Commission traded to the M-NCPPC, "as a replacement for the parkland used in construction of the Capital Beltway," approximately 38 acres of adjacent land. In addition, the State Roads Commission paid $700,000 to the M- NCPPC, to be used for the acquisition of future stream valley parks in Montgomery County.332 For its part, the NCPC considered the trade adequately beneficial to the park system, and gave its approval for reconstruction. The ultimate form and route of the Rock Creek Park beltway leg, then, was enabled by this reasoning: [TJhe National Capital Planning Commission approves the proposed construction of the Capital Beltway, being a part of the Interstate Highway System, through the Rock Creek Stream Valley Park, Units Nos. 2 and 3, in recognition of the public need for completion of the Maryland segment of said Beltway at an early date; that any alternative of said Beltway through residential neighborhoods would result in the displacement of a large number of families at a great cost to the residents of the State of Maryland and the United States; that the proposed use of such park land in this instance should not be 332 "Agreement," September 12, 1963, NCPC Project File 0255. 181 construed as a precedent for or endorsement of the use of other park lands in the National Capital Region for Interstate Highway purposes.333 Two weeks after the agreement was signed, construction crews authorized by the State Roads Commission dismantled the entire 1.5-mile leg between Connecticut and Wisconsin A venues, the first Beltway segment opened to the public six years earlier. William Shook recalled that we literally tore it up ... that section was totally, was closed, the roadway tom up, bridges rebuilt. I remember Cedar Lane and so forth were just essentially tom out and reconstructed 'cause the alignment did change a little bit, and the grades and so forth. We also enlarged it from the original design, [which] was for a four-lane, two lanes in each direction .... [W]e built six lanes and then added the ... seventh and eighth later. Which caused a redesign of the Beltway at the last minute, really. A lot of the Beltway had been designed prior to 1960. And then we had to last minute redesign a good bit of it, widen out bridges to accommodate the extra lanes, the future. 334 Within a year, the rebuilt road reopened with three lanes in each direction. The only sign of the years of struggle over the parkway were the conspicuous curves.335 Later challenges to proposed expressways in the Washington area, including the Northeast and North Central Freeways (the portions ofI-95 and I-270, respectively, in Maryland inside the Capital Beltway), at times resulted in cancellations of those projects. In contrast, since the Rock Creek Park leg of the Beltway was built in the end-twice-it is not cut and dry whether the local and national protests over the "Beltway-in-the-park" can be deemed successful. The answer depends on how a successful protest effort is defined, and who is making the definition. When the 333 Ibid. 334 Interview with William Shook, 1 February 1999. 335 Christmas, "4 Mile Beltway Link"; "Old Section of Beltway is Tom Up," Evening Star, 27 September 1963: B-10; interview with William Shook. 182 parkway was first put through in 1957, in fact, Rock Creek area residents for the most part considered the fight lost. Their neighborhoods, and the park itself, changed significantly as a result of the presence of the road.336 But for some engineers and political officials, the parkway episode represented an unprecedented capitulation on the part of the Bureau of Public Roads. Slade Caltrider, who worked with William Shook to supervise Beltway construction for the SRC, was astonished to see the federal authority (to which he refers by its later name) concede to public pressure: [F]or the first time in my life I saw the Federal Highway Administration back off and take action based on somebody else's desire .... They were hard-headed, they don't give in too easy. But they danced a pretty tune .... And we were all amazed, that [ residential opponents] could make the Federal Highway Administration dance. Because ifwe would have gone to the Federal Highway Administration and suggested they do what was done, they'd have told us, you're crazy, we won't participate. But what you see is what we've got.337 At that time (1953-55), long before U.S. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe cancelled New Orleans's Vieux Carre Riverfront Expressway in 1969 in what is generally considered one of the first major capitulations of federal officials to highway protesters, there was no widely known--or possibly any--precedent for even the limited federal action to which Caltrider reacted so strongly.338 336 lnterview with Paul Foer. 337 Interview with M. Slade Caltrider. 338 For the New Orleans episode, see Richard 0. Baumbach Jr. and William E. Borah, The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carre Riverfront- Expressway Controversy (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1981 ); Lewis, Divided Highways, 209, 216; and Jack E. Patterson, "Halting the Highway Men," Business Week, 19 July 1969: 37-38. For an example of a smaller federal highway project cancelled in response to concerted opposition, see Barry Mackintosh, "Shootout on the Old C. & 0. Canal: The Great Parkway Controversy, 1950-1960," Maryland Historical Magazine 90 (Summer 1995): 140-163. 183 While Rock Creek Park may thus have set a precedent for federal intervention in st ate highway-building programs, ambiguities in the case left other legacies as well ' wh· h ic have proved germane to the future of that Beltway leg as well as to other highways in Maryland. For example, the 1963 agreement between the NCPC, M- NCPPC, and State Roads Commission did not in fact eliminate the potential for future expansion and development of highways within the park, as it seemed to do at first glance. State officials later recognized an opening for further construction on the Rock Creek Park leg, made possible by two contradictory clauses in the 1963 agreement: (2) The Capital Beltway through the park shall have a maximum of six lanes. (3) Wherever possible, existing roadways in the park shall not be relocated and additional lanes shall be constructed in the median. 339 Which clause held precedence? If (2), the beltway's form in the park was set in stone, or at least concrete. But if (3), additional lanes could feasibly be added, and the road could conceivably even be relocated. In 1976, Maryland's assistant attorney general, in consultation with lawyers for the NCPC and M-NCPPC, decided that (3) was the ruling clause. The phrase "additional lanes shall be constructed in the median," Nolan H. Rogers wrote, "indicates to us that the intention of the parties to the September 12, 1963 agreement was to permit the addition of new lanes in the median, as is now being considered." Rogers's interpretation enabled the eventual expansion, Within the pre-existing rights-of-way, of the park's beltway leg from six lanes to eight,340 339 Unknown to Charles H. Conrad and George H.F. Oberlander, 23 July 1976, NCPC Project File 0255. The file contains only the carbon copy of the first page of the letter; the remainder, including the author's signature, is missing. 340 Nolan H. Rogers to M. Slade Caltrider, IO August 1976, NCPC Project File 0255. 184 That decision once again raised concern among Rock Creek area residents that future expansion would always lurk as a possibility. In 1996, a group of residents formed the Rock Creek Coalition in response to the Maryland Department of Transportation's Capital Beltway Corridor Transportation Study, an extensive project to improve traffic conditions and discussed in the next chapter. While focusing generally on "the effect the Capital Beltway has on neighborhoods and the ecosystem in Montgomery County," the Coalition in the late 1990s was most concerned about the potential for widening the beltway, which for this particular leg "is tantamount to paving over parts of Rock Creek. "341 Both the 1963 agreement and Rogers's 1976 interpretation apparently constrain the beltway within the park to its current right-of- way, but the Rogers interpretation in and of itself suggests that there is room to maneuver within the agreement. Underlying each successive protest concerning the Rock Creek Park leg, from 1952 to 1996, was concern for the environmental impact of the proposed road. Well before "environment" became a buzzword in a planning context, the citizens' associations and congressional leaders arguing against the parkway in the 1950s used primarily what would now be called environmental arguments to protest the road's construction. At a time when highway planners routed and built their roads almost at will, it is remarkable how close the parkway protesters came to winning a legal victory which would have at least seriously hampered completion of the Beltway, if it had not stopped the circumferential altogether. Timothy Davis writes that the highway officials' 341 Rock Creek Coalition, "Fourteen Miles Long and One-Tenth of a Mile Wide," [1997] document in possession of the author. 185 casting of the Beltway segment as a parkway "fooled nobody and only served to further cloud the difference between parkways and ordinary expressways, helping to turn enviromnentalist sentiments against both forms of development. "342 But the first part of his argument cannot be right: if the Beltway-as-parkway gambit had failed, the road would not have survived its challenges in the courts and in Congress. Federal authorities may have chosen to be "fooled," in Davis's words, by this strategy, but they accepted it nonetheless. Using the stipulations of the Capper-Cramton Act as support, parkway opponents forced planning and political officials to pay serious attention to enviromnental considerations with respect to at least a portion of the Beltway. However, another, overlapping group of Beltway opponents found no such platform through which to get officials to recognize their concerns. Residents who lived near the highway found themselves displaced from virtually all phases of the road's life, from plarming to construction to routine operation. If the Beltway was a godsend to the commuters quoted in the previous chapter, it was a living hell to its neighbors who found their concerns to be of little interest to the authorities who had the power to make the situation otherwise. Living by the Beltway In 1920, Neal Potter and his parents and siblings moved to a farm along the C & 0 Canal in rural Cabin John. The land was rocky and in poor shape, but by 1940 the 342 Davis, "Mount Vernon Memorial Highway," 848. 186 Potters had rebuilt the farm structures and added sewer, telephone, and electrical lines. All members of the family worked in the fields and the dairy; Neal ran a daily milk route and helped found the Farm Women's Market in Bethesda in 1932 to provide income from the farm's garden products and from baking. The canal was still running when the family moved to the farm in 1920, and Neal grew up watching boats passing through the three locks adjacent to his farm and chatting with the lockkeepers.343 In 1958, an official from the National Park Service visited to present the Potters with a 12-page mimeographed document which in fine print outlined the planned route for the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The parkway was routed near their farm and would require several acres; the family was on notice that at some point the federal government would likely purchase a piece of their land for that purpose. So it was a shock a year later when, as Neal Potter recalls, a State Roads Commission agent came by and told my mother, and she was alone in the house at the time, that they were going to take the farm in 30 days [ for the Beltway] .... Well, after 40 years of struggling with that place and beautifying it with all kinds of flowers and gardens, as well as the vegetables and such, Mother just strangled at the thought; she couldn't catch her breath. They took her to the hospital and they kept her for three days to sort of recover from the breathing problems created by the thought. ... She wrote, I think, the only letter to the editor she ever wrote, after she recovered, saying that sometimes highways kill people before they are driven on. And that was probably the case with her. At the time and in the years to follow, Neal Potter was not upset by the development of the Beltway in and of itself. What frustrated him was the SRC's tendency to ignore the effects of the way it handled the situation. For one, the surprise 343 My discussion of the Potter family draws on Neal Potter to Jeremy Korr, 10 March 1999; "Building the Beltway: The Montgomery Experience," oral history panel, 24 October 1999; and interview transcripts from Barbara Greenbaum, producer, "Paths to the Present: Montgomery County Stories," program #9, television documentary produced 26 February 2001 for Montgomery County Cable. 187 notice was inappropriate: "To say you want it in 30 days is just too much to take," Potter recalled. Also, the SRC had without notice changed the Beltway's alignment from an earlier master plan which sent the highway to the east of the Potter farm through wooded and unoccupied areas; no arguments based on the impact to the farm and its residents could convince the engineers to consider returning to the earlier routing. Thirdly, the SRC ignored not only the working farm and its residents but also the structures in the Beltway's path, including at least one well-preserved canal lock house which still served as a working residence; with no historic preservation movement in effect at the time, the lock house was demolished during the Beltway's construction.344 Potter's anger at the callousness of the planning process inspired him toward a political career; in his later years on the Montgomery County Citizens Planning Association and Montgomery County Council, and during his term as county executive, he supported reforms to make planning processes more responsive to the concerns of individuals and of the environment. SRC officials were not exceptionally impolite to Potter's family; the commission followed standard procedure in giving the landowners 30 days' notice to vacate, and in fact it took two years before the SRC fully took over its portion of the Potters' farm. Businesses and other residents faced the same constricted timetable. Near the Colesville 344 In contrast to the SRC, the National Park Service showed stronger concern toward building roads in the C & 0 Canal area. The NPS opposed the Cabin John Parkway, a link between the Beltway and the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as "ruinous to the long-treasured scenery of the quiet stream valley." But SRC and M-NCPPC officials insisted the Cabin John Parkway would be an essential commuter link and in fact would showcase the valley's historic and natural features. The NPS acquiesced, and the Cabin John Parkway was built; in the process, a canal lock house and an African American cemetery (Mount Glory) were demolished. See Davis, "Mount Vernon Memorial Highway," 879-880. 188 Road (U.S. 29) interchange, a shopping center and 53 houses were condemned for the Beltway; the SRC took ownership of all of them between 1955 and 1959 and leased them to tenants on terms which provided for mandatory abandonment on 30 days' notice. But few of the tenants believed the state would actually give them such short tum-around time. When on October 6, 1959, the SRC told 30 house tenants and the Fairway Shopping Center merchants to vacate by November 6 after which demolition would begin, the shopkeepers felt "consternation," in the words of a local newspaper. Walter Moyer, a pharmacist at the Fairview Drug Store, said that "SRC officials earlier led him and other merchants to believe that at the earliest they would have to evacuate by the beginning of next year." SRC officials insisted they had stressed the 30-day termination clauses, but the technical truth did not make the merchants feel that the SRC respected their needs.345 From a different perspective, the Fairway retailers and the previous owners of the 53 condemned homes were the lucky ones. Because their buildings stood directly in the Beltway's path, the state compensated them for their property and enabled them to move elsewhere. Those living near the alignment, though, were not so fortunate. These neighbors became what today might be called collateral damage resulting from the Beltway's construction, for several reasons. Foremost among them was the ever-present noise: once the Beltway opened, the soundscape near it changed forever. Among the many letters of praise commuters sent to newspapers in the Beltway's first weeks, this critique from Joan L. Donegan of Chevy Chase stands out: Far beyond the cost to me as a taxpayer of this convenient (as distinguished 345 "Road Work to Demolish Shop Center, 53 Homes," Suburban Record, 22 October 1959: I. 189 from necessary) road is the cost to me and all other homeowners whose properties border on this beltway. I and hundreds of other adjoining homeowners were hit on the opening of the beltway with "noise blight," the extent or even the existence of which, judging from these [overwhelmingly positive newspaper] articles, was simply not worth mentioning. No one who does not live next to this road can possibly imagine the amount of noise issuing from this six-lane high speed truck and automobile highway-the constant din that permeates our yards and houses even with all windows shut. It disturbs our conversations, our sleep and ordinary enjoyment of life.346 This effect of the new road was permanent. Fifteen years later, another angry resident wrote that "[t]o those of us who live adjacent to the Beltway the most noticeable problem is noise. We cannot ever open the windows at night. We must resort to air conditioning."347 Highway officials in both states eventually tried to mitigate the noise problem by using sound walls-formally, sound attenuation barriers-but these brought problems of their own, as described later in this chapter and in Chapter 7. In addition to bringing unwanted sound, the Beltway also disrupted community life in the areas it passed through which had been previously developed. Besides Cabin John, the road also cut across the Silver Spring neighborhoods of Hillandale and Oakview just inside Montgomery County around the New Hampshire Avenue (Route 650) interchange (Fig. 2). Charles Mercogliano, who grew up close by, remembered that " [ o ]ne thing that did affect us was our ability to walk to the shopping center in Hillandale. We had to go to 650 once the beltway was completed instead of just walking through the field [which was used for the Beltway]. The completed beltway effectively 346 Joan L. Donegan, letter to the editor, Evening Star, 30 August 1964: B-1. 347 Murray H. Schefer, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 25 June 1979: Al 8. 190 isolated our · hb h d ,.34g · . . neig or oo , too. James Landolt, who lived m Oakview, recalled that th e Beltway created a barrier both physical-cutting off the woods route which children from Oakview and Hillandale used to visit and play with each other-and cognitive: But I t~ink the real impact on Oakview was psychological. It was already becommg demographically isolated from the rest of Montgomery County by the end of the 1950s. It was seen as a place to "get started" and then move on to something better in another part of the County. Although in the 1960s Oakview probably had a much higher average income than the US as a whole, because Montgomery County had by that time become the wealthiest in the country, we could not shake the feeling that Oakview was sort of a poor relative and got the short end of the stick when it came to county services. When the Beltway was built it became "the other side of the tracks" and exacerbated the problem. It was considered to have more in common with Prince George's County than with Montgomery. 349 The Beltway separated neighborhoods in lesser-developed Prince George's County as it did in Montgomery. Greenbelt, as noted earlier, was a carefully planned community originally designed in the 1930s, but those careful plans did not envision the 1948 Baltimore-Washington Parkway nor the 1964 Beltway. "These two highways," hist · 0 nan Cathy Dee Knepper writes, formed immense barriers between original Greenbelt and later housing areas. If the homes had existed first and relationships had been formed before the barriers were put in place, it might have _been possi?le to keep connections with these outer areas. As it occurred, with the barners first and newer neighborhoods later, it became almost impossible to form a cohesive Greenbelt. 350 In some cases the Beltway disrupted communities simply by existing; the traffic drawn to the highway clogged the local roads used to access it and made it difficult for local 34s B eltway Survey #491. 349 James Landolt, email to Jeremy Korr, 17 December 2000; interview with James Landolt, 20 December 2000. 350I. 429 Si press, "Beltway Collision." 270 CHAPTER 7 "A DEER DOESN'T STAND A CHANCE:" GOOD CALLS, BAD CALLS, I0-45s, AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD OF I-495 We've got to be out there every day t~ keep it clean from the debris, coming from the rubble trucks, the tractor-trader trucks, even the public. Trash seems to accumulate everywhere. Things fall off vehicles. Everything from mufflers to equipment on tow trucks, tractor-trailers, mud flaps. You name it, it's there. - Larry Kidwell, Maryland State Highway Administration430 The preceding two chapters have focused on conflicts which are played out in planning and political contexts and in the personal lives of the people who live near the Beltway. However, as SHA engineer Charlie Watkins pointed out in Chapter 6, the Beltway does function fairly smoothly at the operational level, where the people who make it run must reach sufficient consensus on contentious issues to be able to work together and keep the highway in working condition. In this chapter and the next, I shift from planning issues to an approach examining the Beltway's day-to-day life. In this chapter, applying the cultural landscape framework, I focus on the physical version of the Beltway; in Chapters 8 and 9, I will turn to cognitive conceptions of the Beltway, how it appears in the minds of the people who use and maintain it. To examine the physical manifestation of the Beltway, I explore here the three primary components of a cultural landscape as explained in the first operation- natural elements, human-constructed objects, and people. Discussions about traffic controllers and emergency response teams underscore the different ways in which 430 Interview with Larry Kidwell, March 20, 2001. 271 -- people interact with the landscape depending on whether or not they occupy its space, an additional path of analysis suggested in the first operation. In studying the interactions between the people, objects, and natural components, as encouraged by the model's fourth operation, I find a common thread of danger and safety; I also explore how aesthetics, an issue raised in the model's third operation, relates to these interactions. I conclude the chapter by discussing what groups are pointedly excluded from this equation-who does not get to use the Beltway-and what implications follow from their absence. This discussion of absent components and issues of class and disability draws on suggestions in the study model's fifth operation. I begin by looking at some of the non-human natural phenomena affecting the Beltway and its users. The Nature of the Beltway As drivers who have skidded on rain or ice know well, the Beltway is no more immune to weather events than any other road, though highway departments may respond to those events differently with respect to the Beltway. While commuters stalled in congestion generally focus their attention on the vehicles around them and on the pavement ahead, that pavement is only as safe as it is because of engineers' responses to dealing with the natural environment of which the Beltway is a part. Finding ways to improve the Beltway, as Virginia and Maryland are both trying to do, is important but is also, in a sense, a luxury; the road needs to function in the first place before that type of concern can be given attention. And from an engineering standpoint, 272 ..... former draftsman Isadore Parker suggests, "the most fundamental thing is to get rid of water," not to worry about overloaded traffic.431 For Parker, working as an early designer of the Maryland portion of the Beltway, water came into play because of the slopes created in the construction of the road. "When you're designing the road to go through an environment that has hills and valleys and streams, and crosses other streets, and ... is not going to have any intersections except interchanges," he told me, "you have to learn about what they call 'cut and fill."' Cutting through a high area, he explained, creates side walls, or hills, which need to be sloped down to the road. Conversely, when sending the highway through a valley, "you have to fill that in with some of the dirt you took where you cut." Though "borrowing" dirt from an outside site is also an option, ideally the high areas and valleys match up, so that "the entire design of the road is based on that balancing out your cut and fill. And then," Parker finished, "when you build the road over the valley, then you have slopes going down toward the stream, and so you design your sewer system to catch the water right at the bottom of a hill, and then siphon it off through pipes to the nearest stream." The basic landscaping of the Beltway, then, represents the connections between rain and terrain. Fred Pavay, who with Parker worked on the original design of the Beltway in Maryland, specialized in storm drainage and hydrology and helped develop the surface drain ditch system placed in the Beltway's median. These were open ditches covered by grates, designed for either 25- or 50-year storms. Pipes from these ditches drained the 43 1 Citations in this section draw on interviews with Isadore Parker of 5 and 26 October 1998; interviews with Fred Pavay of 8, 15, and 29 October 1998; and Fred Pavay, email to Jeremy Korr, 13 December 1998. 273 rainfall either to nearby culverts or to "a side ditch in a cut section or a cut-off wall at the toe of the slope in a fill section." Pavay explained that "the pipe could usually cany, you might have a little water ponded in the median ditch for a while, but it wouldn't overflow. In most cases, it was kind of self-adjusting . ... You wouldn't have a .. . washout or anything like that." Pavay recalled that outside of hydrology specialists, highway engineers were not attuned to this aspect of road design. "It's funny," he laughed, referring to the engineering teams he worked with at Michael Baker Jr. "There were engineers that were fully schooled in design, structural design, but it just had never been emphasized. These are like modern details to a structural engineer. Where are the inlets going to be placed? What size pipe do you need? . .. They just never were bothered with hydraulic design." In Virginia, the HNTB and VDH engineers designing the original Beltway similarly paid some attention to the water on and around the road. Former engineer Robert Mannell remembered that on the streams in particular, we had to align the stream beds to prevent erosion. How to put sedimentation into the streams themselves was a major consideration . .. The edge of the shoulders where you would direct water down the flumes and what have you to prevent erosion, those types of things were brought to bear. 432 Later innovations in optimizing water quality, through providing ponds and other water collection sites, were still to come. But even during the planning stages in the 1950s, engineers in both states gave careful attention to getting rid of unwanted water from the 432 Interview with Robert Mannell, 9 January 200 I. 274 Beltway, a concern more serious in the Washington area, with its 39 inches of average annual precipitation, than in other areas such as Los Angeles with its 12 inches.433 What those engineers did not consider was how to provide water on the Beltway in situations where it would be desirable. This issue went unnoticed until 1984, when a tractor-trailer caught fire on the American Legion Bridge, broke through the guardrail, and hung over the side, leaning toward the Potomac River, as firefighters raced to extinguish the flames before the truck exploded or fell off the bridge. But once positioned on-site, the fire companies realized there were no hydrants to supply their hoses. The bridge, and the rest of the Beltway, were designed to siphon water off, but nothing was built in to provide water for a case like this. A follow-up task force stressed the need for a water supply system around the Beltway, "and that's why they have those doors in the walls," Rick Blandford of the Chevy Chase Fire Department explained. But even after the task force's report, state officials have not taken seriously this need for water. Blandford expressed his disappointment in a conversation with fellow Firefighter Timothy Bell and me: 434 So now there's a standpipe system that actually runs--when they rebuilt the bridge back in '87 or whene~er, th~y p_ut a dry pipe sy~te1? ~?ugh the Beltway. And there's a hydrant--ifyoure gomg mto No~ern Virgmia, if you look up in the hills there's a mansion up there. A couple big houses up there. There's a hydrant up there. And they were supposed to lay a _line for the hydrant down through the woods, and then connect to the standpipe so they could pump it. 433 Borgna Brunner, ed., Time Almanac 2002 (Boston: Information Please, 2001), 607. 434 Citations in this section from Blandford and Bell draw from interview with members of the Chevy Chase Fire Department, 9 February ~001. F?.r ad~itional background on the episode cited, see Joanne Ostrow and Rosa Michnya, Cabm John Crash Snarls Rush Hour," Washington Post, 2~ July 1 1 ;83: C!; and Joanne Ostrow, "Fatal Cabin John Accident Causes Classic Area Gndlock, Washington Post, 24 July 1983: Bl. 275 And the_re's another standpipe where you go down the Parkway, the G. W.--on the Cab_m John Parkway. And there's a connection to be connected there. Once they bmlt that connection, the state never maintained in. Cabin John [Fire and Res~ue] went up there to look at it, and it was all rusted. All the connections fell off, 1t was totally out of service. Bell: Where was this at? Where was it? Blandford: The Legion Memorial Bridge. The whole system. I think the state's working on that now. Korr: So you don't know, if you had to go tap the connection right now-- Blandford: We don't know if it works or not. Bell: Is that right! Blandford: We have the keys to the doors that go to the Beltway. They don't work. Station 16 right now is working on the Beltway water supply, as far as getting the keys to the state and making sure they all work. Some of the--you'll see connections outside; there's one connection on one side so you can pump through the wall. And some of those are messed up. Cause once they built it the state never maintained it. And some of them just rotted away . ... It was ' something never brought to mind, how are we gonna get water on the Beltway. In this case and in the original concerns for dealing with hydraulic design, water is important because of its effects on the Beltway's safety and, potentially, on its infrastructure. In Washington's Metro system, where engineers planning in 1960s and 1970s underestimated this factor, water and its mineral deposits are damaging the track bed, power system, electrical components, steel girders, communications cables, and power lines at a rate far greater than anticipated. 435 Though the Beltway's infrastructure 435 Lyndsey Layton, "Water in Metro's Basement: Seepage Ruining Rail Equipment in Most Tunnels," Washington Post, 13 Jul~ 2000: Al; Lyndsey Layton, "Metro Experiencing Flood of Problems," Washington Post, 19 November 200 l: B4. 276 is dif:6 · d erent, ma equate drainage or uncontrolled water flow could still have hannful effects on bridges, supports, and other elements. The more pressing issue for most drivers is safety; drainage systems minimize the dangers of water, but cannot eliminate them entirely. Thus Jennifer O'Keefe, an Alexandria resident, recalls that "I've hydroplaned several times - I doubt the integrity of the draining in some areas - thank goodness I didn't swerve or wreck. 11436 A resident of Radford, Va., "once watched, in my rear view mirror, as several other cars spun wildly behind me, crashing into each other, during a horrific rainstorm. 11437 This type of spinning and hydroplaning usually occurs when a thin layer of rain makes the highway surface slippery. Drivers face a different problem when the Beltway's drainage system cannot accommodate rainfall. Omid Jahanbin of Bethesda describes his experience driving on the American Legion Bridge during an exceptionally heavy rainstorm in 2000: 436B In the left lanes I was following an older model Volvo until it also promptly came to a stop at the lowest part of the bridge. Little did I know as soon as I came to a stop right behind him, the water that. he had parted away folded together right over the hood ofmy car. Immediately thereafter the engine to my car made a deep gurgling sound and ~to~ped. Thr~e seconds later my car started to float and water began entering the. mSide. Opemng ~he door :was impossible because the height had reached the sill of where the wm~o~ slides into the door and the force of water restricted movement. I began panickmg and moved to the passenger side, rolled down the window, and ~limb[ edJ out and into frigid, dirty water that was two inches below my cheS1. I tned movmg to the front of the car and noticed the driver of the Volvo also get out and come towards my car. Together we pushed (actually it was more like floated!.!!) I?Y c?1° up onto the dry incline (about twenty feet backwards) and followed swt with his car. With the little remain[ing] battery power left in my phone I called the state police and my eltway Survey #216. emy o ciences. ee · · · 290 The unnecessarily dangerous elements included: 1. Unsafe "gore" areas (where drivers must decide whether to go left or right; often unsure drivers decide too late and drive into the gore) containing heavy signposts, lampposts, and pointed guardrails. 2. 1-495 shield markers and other signs mounted on twin metal four-inch I- beams which destroy cars striking them at full speed; single wood support posts would have been far safer. 3. Short sections of guardrails too short to shield dangers behind them but long enough to spear a vehicle and its passengers. 4. Rigid lampposts immediately adjacent to the pavement, unshielded. 5. Exposed pillars and abutments on bridges, and fuardrails on bridges which directed vehicles into rather than past obstacles.46 These flaws were directly responsible for many of the Beltway's deaths and injuries in its first years. In 1966, for example, 16 of the 30 deaths on the Beltway involved drivers running off the side of the road into one or more stationery objects. At the Wisconsin A venue interchange alone that year, 41 of 78 accidents involved cars striking light poles or bridge piers. 466 In 1967, a House subcommittee studying highway design and safety problems heard testimony about potential reasons and solutions for the Beltway's dangers. House members were shown pictures of accidents with "guard rails which impaled cars like bugs on a pin," and of a single six-inch steel pipe holding up a sign on Shirley Highway near the Beltway which helped cause cause an accident resulting in four deaths and five injuries. Joe Linko, a safety advocate who testified in 1967 and continued to press highway and political officials for years afterward, later pointed to "the stupidity of engineers and construction crews who just don't think about what they're doing. They put up a guard rail. Then, 15 feet away, they put up a heavy steel signpost, so you have 465 Ibid. 466 Lee Flor, "House Unit Studies Reasons for Rise in Beltway Deaths," Evening Star, 8 June 1967: B-1. 291 to knock down the signpost and kill yourself before you get to the guard rail that's supposed to protect you. "467 Editors of the Washington Post in 1971 echoed that in most accidents [ one every three hours in 1970), the carnage resulted when cars strayed from the roadway and then ran into objects that were supposedly placed there to protect the motorist. These include signs, light poles, sign posts guard rails, lane dividers, and bridge abutments. Built as an example of the bes; that American technology could provide, the Beltway, in some nine years of operation, has become one long danger zone. 468 Following up on these concerns, both states began by 1968 to replace the dangerous objects with safer versions. Maryland, for example, dismantled guardrails less than 75 feet long and turned down the ends of the remaining ones. Virginia removed signs from the roadside and gore areas and moved them to overhead locations or sites farther removed from the shoulder. Both states began to switch to breakaway light poles and sign supports. 469 But institutional memory fades quickly, and within a decade Virginia officials had reintroduced an old problem while trying to solve another. Virginia began in the mid- l 970s to build additional lanes to add capacity to its original four-lane design, but in doing so used timber barriers to separate drivers from the ongoing construction. This, recalls Virginia State Police Master Trooper Bill McKinney, resulted in many many accidents involving the type of barriers that we used at the time, which were basically just a 12 by 12 bl~ck of~?od with a r~iling attached to it. We had many accidents with people JUSt drivmg and gettmg mesmerized 467 Ibid.; Lee Flor, "House Study of Beltway L~ys Toll to Poor De~ign," Evening Star, 9 June 1967: B-1; Hank Burchard, "Bronx Repamnan Warns ofBmlt-In Death Traps," Washington Post, 26 February 1972: B4. 468 "Safety on the Beltway" [editorial], Washington Post, 20 November 1971: Al6. 469 Ann chr· "M . r Improvements Due for Beltway," Evening Star, 18 August e 1stmas, aJO 1968: B-6. 292 looking at them as they drove, and before they knew it they were into them.470 In 1976, five Beltway drivers and the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO sued Virginia over the unsafe barriers and asked for a cutoff of federal money to the Beltway widening until safety standards were improved. The wooden barriers provided multiple hazards, the suit charged. In the first place, they were not strong enough to withhold an out-of-control car, so that drivers were plowing through the barriers and into construction crews and equipment on the other side. Worse, as the barriers splintered apart, they sent showers of wooden spears toward nearby vehicles and onto the construction crews. VDH officials noted that the barriers had been approved by federal and state officials and were only intended to warn drivers away, not to be capable of protecting them. 471 Increased use of concrete Jersey barriers by the late l 970s put an end to this particular concern.472 In both states, addressing the hazards created by the Beltway's objects did not entirely solve safety problems; the road surface itself tended to crack and break, especially in the first few years after the Beltway opened. In later years, heat caused sections in Virginia to expand and buckle, and winter weather and age led to large 470 Interview with Bill McKinney, 24 April 200 l. 471 Doug Brown "Wooden Barriers at Beltway Work Sites Called Hazardous," .Washington Po~t, 3 August 1975: B3; Jane Seaberry, "Va. ~eltway ,~afety Plan Accord Set," Washington Post, 19 September 1975: Cl; Laura A. ~e~an, Hazards on Beltway Unavoidable," Washington Post, 16 A~r1st 1~75. B2, Douglas B. Feaver, "Beltway Hazards Cited: Drivers, Workers Sue, Washington Post, 27 February 1976: BI. 472 See Scott M Kozel "New Jersey Median Barrier History," (22 October 2001 ). 293 potholes opening on bridges in Maryland. 473 But it was the original process for constructing the pavement in Maryland which caused what former State Roads Commissioner Slade Caltrider calls "one of the biggest mistakes," although it was standard procedure at the time.474 The State Roads Commission paved part of the original Beltway with Portland Cement concrete, which cracks when exposed to changing temperature while expanding in heat and contracting in cold. To control the cracking, reinforced steel is placed in the fresh concrete at regular intervals, and to relieve tension on the steel, it too is interrupted at regular intervals ( 40 feet on the Beltway). Cracks form at those intervals. To control them, engineers form narrow trenches across the width of the pavement at regular intervals. 475 In earlier years, these trenches were formed by hand at great cost. For the Beltway, SRC engineers used new techniques in which concrete or masonry saws cut the trenches, or joints, into the concrete. To their surprise, within a few years of the Beltway's opening, these joints began to crack and create bumps on the pavement's surface. Former District Engineer William Shook recalls that we experienced serious problems with fail~s of the concret~ within two feet of these joints within two years after complet10n: These early fru!ures occurred only on Kenilworth Ave. ai:1d the B~Itway proJect from Geor~1a Ave to University Blvd. Investigat10n ofth1s problem revealed f:hat 1t occurred only on pavement using gravel for aggregate ~d not ~hose usmg crushed stone as an aggregate in the mixture. The SRC immediately barred the sawed joint method of forming these joints when the contractor elected to use gravel as the aggregate in the mixture. 47J "Beltway Buckles, Backs Up Traffic," W~~ngto~ Post, 28 July 1973: B4; Alan Sipress, "Potholes Cause Jam on Outer Loop, Washington Post, 2 February 2000: B2. 474 Interview with Slade Caltrider. 475 William Shook, email to Jeremy Korr, 20 October 2000. 294 This same problem and conclusion of its cause was experienced in other parts of [Maryland] and in other states where mined gravel was used. Extensive research was done by the Portland Cement Association and others to find the cause without much success ... but it was conclude[ d] that vibration caused by sawing through the very hard stones in the gravel while the concrete was still weak and had not gained very much strength was the probable cause. 476 While state engineers believed they were using state-of-the-art construction methods the burst joints instead created a headache for drivers, a hazard to their tires, and "a substantial effort" for the SRC to deal with. 477 ' Within a decade of its opening, highway officials in both states finally had the dangers posed by signs, posts, guardrails, and pavement under much more control than in 1964. What they could not control as easily were the additional objects added daily to the Beltway in the form of litter and debris falling from passing vehicles. For this, officials had to respond in the same way they did to water and rain: assume that debris is inevitable and develop strategies to minimize its danger. Litter, though, offers a different challenge than rain, snow, or even deer, because its distribution is so random; maintenance crews do not know where it will appear or even that it has, and drivers are not attuned to it because they rarely see more than single pieces. Still, these pieces are hazardous. Both states send crews of workers or inmates on regular rotations to collect garbage from the roadside, but large objects in the roadway demand immediate attention. Within his jurisdiction in Prince George's County, SHA maintenance supervisor Larry Kidwell oversees a "spot litter" team consisting of "two guys in a truck, and all they do is patrol the Beltway, an 18-mile 476 Jb·d 1 . 477 Interview with Slade Caltrider. 295 stretch from Route 50 to the Woodrow Wilson, every day, just to pick up the large debris that flies off those vehicles. Every day." Kidwell emphasizes the danger posed by the objects: When I say big debris, I'm talking about bed liners. I'm talking about hoods bumpers. Very large boxes. Mud flaps. Retread. A whole lot of retread. Re;eads eve~ going into the wintertime. It used to be just a summertime project, where the tires get hot from the heat and from the road, the blacktop being real hot· they explode. The truckers on the CB call them alligators. When you get a big retread laying there about 8 to 10 feet long, they call them alligators. That's just a CB slang. But we're out there everyday, just to pick that stuff up. You wouldn't believe the stuff that you run across. I tell you, the worst nightmare was a box of nails. Roofer nails. A 50-pound crate of roofer nails fell off on the Beltway one way. I'm telling you, there was cars lined up down the shoulder with flat tires. My guy, in the dump truck, the one that runs up and down and picks up the big stuff: He ran down there, and when he came into the shop, he only made it in here on four tires. And he's got six tires on that truck. He only came in on four. And every tire had at least eight to twelve nails in each tire.478 Unexpected debris can appear at any time, Kidwell warns; most drivers, who have not seen the possibilities firsthand, are not as vigilant as they should be. Unsuspecting drivers can be hit with debris from above or below. A Greenbelt police officer describes a colleague who drove south on the Beltway past the Baltimore- Washington Parkway interchange, and he ran over a piece of a leaf spring that looked like it had co.me off of a dump truck. And this thing came up through the ~oorbo~d of his car and hit him in the ankle .... It looked like a small explosive device had gone off underneath the car. Cause it just ripped the floorboard open. And he was off work a couple days. It just badly bruised him. But~ saw the one piece of the leaf spring And you could tell the leaf spring, because 1t was curled on one end, the other ~nd was real jagged. And the first thing I thought ~f, if that sharp end had come through, there's no doubt it would have sev7red. his leg, or ~evered his foot. I mean, that's another thing most people don t think of, runmng over 478 Interview with Larey Kidwell. 296 something .... That was the first time I had ever heard of anything coming u through the floorboard. 479 P In other cases, the unexpected object is much more apparent. Kenneth James of Arlington relates the foIIowing experience: One afternoon, when I lived in Silver Spring, I was driving home to my parents' house in Bowie. It was right about the coIIege park area, when I noticed r was behind an SUV with a LARGE small boat tied to the top of it. The boat was twice as long as the vehicle, was properly flagged, but was bobbing up and do~ in t?~ wind. It b~gan to bob up and down more violently. I made a very qmck dec1s10n to floor 1t and pass the truck. When I puIIed even with it I looked over at the suv thru my sunroof and could see the boat and the roof of the truck. Suddenly, as I suspected was going to happen the boat lifted up, and disappeared. I glanced in my rear view mirror, and after about 3 seconds saw it crash on the beltway, right in the middle. It broke in half, one half smashing the front of a car, the other smashed into a hundred pieces under a tractor trailer. The car kind of wrecked into the jersey wall in the center, the truck swerved all over, almost lost control, but managed to. c?me to a stop half off the beltway on the inner side of the inner loop. I kept dnvmg, very shaken, and VERY thankful i had the presence of mind to get out of harms way, before harm happened! 480 Survey respondents tel1 of metal pipes, metal frames, and plywood sheets falling from vehicles in front of them; one writes of a "tractor trailer load of oranges dumped all over the beltway ... it wreaked havoc on the cars behind me, while I only drove through a dozen or so bouncing oranges. 11481 Bonnie Douglas, an Elk Creek, Va., resident, remembers "vividly when the tanker truck carrying vegetable oil overturned and 479 Interview with *Ethan Gould, 2 February 2001 · 480 B eltway Survey #407. 481 Beltway Survey #380. The other examples .cited appear in Beltway Surveys #254, 267 51 7 F 1 of unexpected debns ( a 27-pound fragment of a brake drum) ' . or an examp e "D th O t f N h " W h. serving as a deadly projectile, see Stave Bates, ea u o ow ere, as mgton f.Qfil, 29 July 1983: Al. 297 ruptured at the Van Dom Street exit. It was freezing and the veggie oil became thick. I remember them using snow plows to plow the 2 inch thick mess from the road. 11482 Between boats, nails, boxes, "alligators," frames, pipes, oil, oranges, potholes, guardrails, signposts, deer, dogs, turtles, rain, and heavy traffic, the Beltway, highway officials and police officers in both states emphasized to me repeatedly, deserves a higher level of alertness than most drivers believe they need to give to it. The physical components of the Beltway do have some positive attributes as well. Highway officials have for decades tried to use the Beltway's structure to enhance rather than impede safety and traffic flow. Fences along the Beltway, initially chain-link in Maryland and both "farm-type" (on creosote-treated wooden posts) and chain-link in Virginia, discourage pedestrian and wildlife trespassing.483 A $461,000, 31-inch high median barrier was added to the Wilson Bridge in 1968, where the original 7-inch high curb-like median had previously failed to prevent ten fatal accidents caused by vehicles crossing the median.484 By 1983, Virginia had installed over 15,000 foils, green plastic slats mounted atop median strips to block the glare from oncoming headlights; a VDOT official called the foils "the single most effective thing we have ever done to reduce accidents on the Beltway. 11485 Maryland experimented with a system of 264 solar-celled 482 Beltway Survey #357. 483 "Fences to Line Entire Route of Highway," Evening Star, 16 August 1964: E-7; "Beltway to Get Chain Link Fences," Evening Star, 22 December 1964: B-13. 484 "Contract Let to Build Wilson Bridge Barrier," Evening Star, 16 October 1967: B-2; "Barrier to Avert Crashes is Begun on Wilson Bridge," Evening Star, 4 March 1968: B- l. 485 Jim Wolffe, "Foiled Again," Fairfax Journal, 22 March 1983: Al. 298 call boxes in 1967, but with 20 to 35 percent of the phones routinely broken by 1973 and with one-third or more of emergency calls proving to be false alarms, the state eventually discontinued the practice. The call boxes were effectively replaced by widespread use first of CB radios and then cellular phones. 486 Corrections to early versions of objects along the Beltway increased their potential for protecting drivers and passengers. Guardrails, after highway officials changed their original dangerous configurations, became the safety boosters they were intended to be; Ruth Liljenquist of Williamstown, Mass., recalls merging from Northbound GW Parkway in VA onto the beltway, and as I went around the very tight bend on this ramp/merge lane, the car skidded on the wet road, flipped around a few times and then went straight toward the beltway. I hit head-on one of the guard rails lining the beltway. It was a good thing it was there. Otherwise I would have plowed straight across four lanes of fast-moving traffic, and would have most certainly lost my life. When I think about it now, 3 years later, I can still see the lights of all the on-coming traffic on the beltway, and it scares me, knowing how close I came to losing my own life and perhaps causing the deaths of other people. 487 Solid metal signposts have been replaced by versions which break into pieces upon impact. Craig Hinners, a project manager for Midasco Inc., which under contract with the SHA took care of signs on Maryland's portion of the Beltway between 1997 and 200 I, describes the "breakaway coupler" called "Breaksafe," used by the state in 2001 : 486 Myron Becker, "Call Boxes on Beltway Slated for Use by July," Evening Star, 19 June 1967: B-3; Paul Hodge, "Their Own Troubles May Quiet Beltway's Trouble Call Boxes," Washington Post, 26 November 1967: DI ; Dickson, "Capital Beltway," 19. In 1987, a private company set up ten emergency cellular phone~ at five sites in both states for a 90-day test, but neither state elected to follow throu~h with.a mor~ comprehensive cellular system· by the 1990s, the need for call boxes declmed with the mcreasing use of personal cell phones. See John L~caster, "Cellular Phones to Get 90-Day Test on Beltway," Washington Post, 9 Apnl 1987: D5. 487 Beltway Survey # 138. 299 They're what we caII two feet on either side of the beam. We pour the foundation; there's a threaded insert that we put into the concrete foundation which after it's cured we come along and put in the, screw in a special type ;f bolt which sticks through the holes that you see there. And the bolt--it isn't like a normal bolt, it tapers down to a very thin point. And that's the point at which it's gonna snap if somebody hits the post. Halfway up the post, nonnaIIy the bottom of the sign would be justified in that splice right there. If you look at those splices holding the top of the post or the bottom, there's also a groove in there and that's where it will break away, the theory being that the car wiII knock ' away the bottom section of the post, drive right underneath the sign, before the sign has time to fall down on top of it. That's why the regulations in Maryland, there's a minimum height, 7 foot 6, the sign has to be off the ground, so the car dr. . h d th . 488 can 1ve ng t un ernea 1t. Even snow now serves as a traffic control device; savvy highway officials recognize that packed snow (atop salt)--unlike ice or a light layer ofrain-wiII induce drivers to slow down for caution while still providing adequate traction in most cases. 489 In addition to adjustments in smaller objects along the Beltway, Maryland and Virginia both made ongoing changes to the road's structure itself between 1964 and 2001 to improve safety and traffic efficiency. As vehicle counts climbed repeatedly beyond planners' projections, Maryland expanded most of its portion from six lanes to eight (1972) and in some areas ten (1993); Virginia followed by expanding from four and six lanes to eight (1977 with a final segment in 1992).490 Maryland reconstructed its 488 Interview with Craig Hinners, 27 February 200 I. 489 Interview with Larry Kidwell. 49° For M 1 d e "Maryland is Widening 32 Miles of Beltway," Evening Star, 15 ary an ' se d w·d B 1 " E . December 1970: A-15; Martha Angle, "Marylan to I en e tway, venmg S~~· 20 December 1971 : A-1; Lisa Leff, "2-Mile Stretch of Md. Be~twa~ to be 10 Lanes, .Washington Post, 4 September 1990: Al; St~~hen C: Fehr, Amid Money Crunch, Belt p . t Ar Modest Improvements, Washington Post, 5 September 1990: CI· way roJec s e w ·d · "w hi ' Stephen C. Fehr, "Md. Starts New Phase of Beltway 1 emng, as ngton Post, 13 March 1992: Bl. 300 aging bridges in Montgomery County, beginning in 2000 and stretching beyond 2001, and causing unprecedented backups on Colesville Road and Georgia A venue leading up to the entrance ramps fronting on the portions under construction. 491 Each state improved certain interchanges notorious for bottlenecks (in particular, Maryland's I- 95/I-495 junction) and added additional interchanges, including the Eisenhower Avenue Connector in Virginia and the Greenbelt Metro station in Maryland. 492 The interchange drawing the loudest outcry for improvement immediately after the Beltway's opening was the same Pooks Hill junction-linking Wisconsin Avenue, I- 270, and the Beltway-which had almost been built on a misplaced abutment. There, certain spurs of the interchange seemed absent for no reason: drivers heading north on For Virginia, see "Beltway Widening Approved," Fairfax City Times, 4 September 1964: 7; "3 rd Beltway Lane Studied in Virginia," Evening Star, 10 January 1970: A-11; Jane Sims, "Beltway Widening Planned This Fall," Fairfax Journal, 26 April 1970: 1; "Urges Wider Beltway," Fairfax Herald, 26 February 1971: 8; Martin Weil, "Widening of Beltway Planned," Washington Post, 7 May 1972: CIO; "Agreement Reached on Widening Capital Beltway to Eight Lanes," Fairfax Herald, 12 May 1972: I; Joe Bergantino, "Delay in Beltway Widening," Fairfax Journal, 29 November 1973: I; "Beltway Widening Begun in Virginia," Washington Post, 18 April 1974: C2; "Capital Beltway is Open House Topic," [Fairfax] Globe? 2 May 1974: 5; Judy Nichol, "Va. Beltway Being Widened; Traffic Worse," Washmgton Post, 11 May 1974: D4; Christy Hudgins, "Va. Widening of Beltway Finished After 3-1/2 Years," Washington Post, 31 July 1977: Cl; Judy Valente and Eugene L. Meyer, "Beltway Blues: An Expressway to Frustration," Washington Post, 11 November 1977: Al. 491 Alan Sipress "Beltway Jam to Worsen in Maryland," Washington Post, 30 December 1999: Bl· David Fishlowitz, "Backups Now Occur Off the Beltway," Rockville Gazette 13 June 2001: A-20; Katherine Shaver, "Bridge Work on Beltway in Md. Hits Raw N~rve," Washington Post, 19 J~e 2001: Bl; Katherine Shaver, "A Crucial Merge Onto Beltway Being Restored," Washington Post, 16 December 2001: C 1. 492 John Lancaster, "Beltway project at I-95 Nearly Complete," Washington Post, 8 March 1987: DI. Stephen C. Fehr, "Constructive Confusion on Beltway," Washington Post, 9 Decemb;r 1990: BI; Lena H. Sun, "Va. Road Officials Change Stand, Back Beltway Interchange," Washington Post, 22 November 1983: Bl; Lena H. Sun, "Cameron Run Beltway Access Backed," Washington Post, 21 January 1984: D2. 301 Wisconsin A venue could not exit on the Beltway eastward, nor could westbound Beltway traffic exit onto Wisconsin A venue south. State Roads Commission officials justified the omissions as early as 1960 by claiming that traffic projections for movements in those particular directions did not justify the expense to build the exit ramps. Summing up the frustrations of the many drivers who did need to use the missing ramps, Montgomery County Planning Board Chairman Newton Brewer Jr. noted, one month after the Beltway opened, "How the Federal Bureau of Public Roads could approve an interchange like that one is beyond me. A freshman in engineering school couldn't design such an interchange. It looks as if it were done by somebody in kindergarten." Using federal funds as well as state funds specially granted for the purpose, Maryland added one ramp and modified another in 1968 to partially alleviate the problem, though the unusual configuration remained confusing to drivers unfamiliar with it, with repercussions discussed in the next section. 493 While the Pooks Hill interchange continued to stymie drivers for years, other aspects of the Beltway confused drivers even more, and this general confusion-and the failure of objects placed along the Beltway to alleviate it sufficiently-has in itself created a danger in some cases as potent as the physical obstacles named earlier. Locals 493 George Beveridge, "Two Pooks Hill Turns Omitted as Unjustified," ~vening Star, 13 January 1960: B-3; Anne Christmas, "Montgomery Asks U.S. Help to Fmd Two Exits Missing From Beltway," Evening Star, 16 Sept~mber 1964: B-5; Martha Angle, "Pooks Hill Interchange Getting 2 More Ramps," Everung Star, 9 March 1966: B-1; "State to Seek Pooks Hill Bids II Evening Star, 7 April 1966: B-4; "Funds Sought for 2 Ramps as Pook's Hill [sic]", Ev~ning Star, 25 ~ay 1967: B-2; "A~ew ~l~ots Spe~ial Fund for Pook's Hill [sic] Interchange," _Everung Star, 2 June 1967. C-1 ,. U.S. ~~Jects Pooks Hill Ramps Bid," Evening Star, 19 September 1967: B-1; Anne.Chri~~as, Be~tway Ramps Due at Pooks Hill in June," Everung Star, 12 October 1967. B-3, Pooks Hill Ramp to Beltway Opens," Evening Star, 3 November 1968: F-6. 302 and long-distance travelers alike have trouble making sense of a road which is a loop, as journalist Joel Achenbach explains: Aimlessness is not a huge issue, given that by design it is a road that goes nowhere. It has no beginning and no end, no primary direction or orientation. The integrity of words such as "southbound" and "westbound" collapses on the Beltway. The closest thing you get to guidance is when you see a sign saying "Inner Loop," which means that you are heading either west, north, south, or east. ... Sometimes you go right, sometimes you go left, sometimes you seem to be going right and left simultaneously, sometimes you aren't going anywhere; at all times you seem on the verge of catastrophe, and although you are definitely in the loop you're never quite sure which loop.494 Drivers accustomed to orienting themselves by the compass are baffled by "the damn signage ... with respect to compass directions and exit numbers. Are we really going North to Baltimore in Oxon Hill when my car is pointed due East?"495 A Beltsville resident writes that "the frustration of learning to navigate a circle while trying to discern east, west, north and south causes my wife and [me] to express ourselves like we shouldn't. 11496 "I know many people," echoes a driver from Alexandria, "who have trouble figuring out directions on the Beltway. As one of my friends has said, 'How am J d th · · 1 ?f"'497 supposed to deal with North and South on a roa at goes m a cue e .. Signs are supposed to be the antidote for this situation; with clear and definitive signage, highway engineers can pre-empt confusion before it happens. But the 494 Joel Achenbach, "A Loopy Birthday to the Beltway at 30," Washington Post, 17 August 1994: BI. 49s B eltway Survey #260. 496 B l e tway Survey #500. 497 Beltway Survey #382. See also Kevin Flynn, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 15 May 198l: AlS; John F. Zugschwert, "Banned on the Beltway: Any Semblance of Logic," Washington Post, l O September 1989: CS. 303 Beltway's signs have proved problematic since the very day it opened. Letters to the Evening Star in the first two weeks after August 16, 1964, pointed out that Beltway signs were hard to read against the sun, hard to read at night, too small, inconsistently marked between signs at exits and signs preceding them, missing the word "Beltway" (in Virginia), and garbled. "The Maryland signs," a District resident wrote, must surely have been planned by a schizophrenic who couldn't decide whether he never wanted people to find the beltway or never to leave it. The streets that everyone knows by name are referred to by route number. At the points where there is an exit in only one direction from the beltway it isn't marked. The signs that point out the entrances to the beltway are right at the entrances. Why not give people a chance?498 Particularly confusing to many drivers are the Beltway's control cities, the destinations listed on exit signs. Fairfax business leaders had complained well before the Beltway opened that the signs in its jurisdiction were misleading and inaccurate, particularly the repeated appearance of Annapolis (which is far from Fairfax and where the Beltway does not even go) and the regular use of small communities ( e.g., Franconia) in favor of larger ones (e.g., Springfield).499 Drivers have run into particular trouble with the use of distant sites as control cities: "One thing I really hate about the Beltway is the way it uses the confusing signs, 'to Richmond' or 'to Baltimore' when trying to get onto it," an Arlington resident writes.500 Drivers looking for Falls Church, Rockville, or Lanham find themselves guessing when signs onto the Beltway point 498 Seth Beckerman, letter to the editor, Evening Star, 23 August 1964: A-10. See also Anonymous and R.H. Dean, letters to the editor, Evening Star, 30 August 1964: B-1; and "Motorists' Confusion on Beltway Filmed," Evening Star, 14 July 1968: B-4. 499 "Hiway Signs Get Review After Query," Fairfax City Times, 29 August 1963: l; "Fairfax C. of C. Protests Highway Signs," Fairfax Herald, 10 October 1963: 10. soo Beltway Survey #274. 304 them toward Baltimore, Richmond, and Andrews Air Force Base. And drivers looking for Washington are misled entirely, by signs which list Washington as a destination but never mention explicitly that the Beltway does not go there. (Exit signs for other roads crossing the Beltway, including Georgia Avenue, further direct drivers toward Washington.)501 The numbering schemes on the Beltway have only made things worse. In 1964, the original Beltway exit numbers ran simply and consecutively, clockwise from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, from 1 to 3 8. In 1980, Maryland changed its numbers to reflect mileage from the bridge running counterclockwise, from exit 2 to 41, while Virginia kept its numbering with 1 to 14 running clockwise. In 1981, Virginia renumbered its exits 1 through 4 (between 1-395 and the bridge) as 58 through 61 to be consistent with the rest oflnterstate 95. This "atrocity," as Washington Post editors called it, resulted in "two unrelated sets of Virginia Beltway exit numbers, going in opposite directions," and "two unrelated sets of exit numbers [between Maryland and Virginia], going in opposite directions," for a total of three unrelated numbering schemes on a single road. 502 Virginia later reduced the schemes to two, first by reverting exits 58 through 61 to their original 1 through 4 (making all Virginia exits consistent), then in 2000 by renumbering exits 4A through 14 as 43 through 57 to become consistent with Maryland, and renumbering exits 1 through 4 as 170 through 177 to 501 In 1996, Maryland altered its signage on 1-270 south, which previously had directed Washington-bound traffic to head east on the Beltway (and then south on Georgia Avenue), to point those drivers toward the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia. See Manuel Perez-Rivas, "Md. to Tell 1-270 Drivers to Take Scenic Route to D.C.," Washington Post, 11 October 1996: B8. 502 "Beltway Bandits" [ editorial], Washington Post, 29 April 1981: A24. 305 once again become consistent with Interstate 95. By 2001, then, most of the Beltway was marked by exit numbers running from 2 through 57, with the Virginia segment between 1-395 and U.S. I marked separately with numbers running from 170 through 177.503 Local and out-of-town drivers were, of course, expected to follow all of this. If the control cities and exit numbers were not enough, the Beltway's route number itself compounded the confusion further. Originally the Beltway was Interstate 495 alone. But after the portion of Interstate 95 slated to pass through Washington was cancelled in 1973, area officials in 1975 renamed the eastern half of the Beltway as I-95 to maintain that highway's continuity, and removed the 1-495 designation from that portion of the Beltway to reduce confusion. Instead, even motorists familiar with the road had trouble negotiating a single highway with different numbers in different places, a nightmare for giving directions or staying on track. Virginia and Maryland officials agreed in 1987 to mount on Beltway signs a new Capital Beltway logo in red, white, and blue, with an image of the U.S. Capitol surrounded by a circle. But these logos were inconsistently placed and in any case were not available to out-of-town drivers trying to make sense of the 95/495 conundrum on a map or on a set of written directions.504 Finally, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which oversees Interstate numbering schemes, 503 Ron Shaffer, "New Beltway Exit Numbers Won't Have You Scratching Your Head," Washington Post, 16 October 2000: Bl. 504 John Lancaster, "New Signs to Put Beltway on Road to Easier Travel," Washington Post, 8 October I 987: Bl. 306 approved a request from both states and the District in 1991 to renumber the entire Beltway as I-495 while keeping the eastern portion as I-95.505 As it turns out, the Beltway's signs were not only confusing from the start, but physically threatening as well. William Shook recalls an aspect of the original signs in Maryland which was never publicized: they were potential guillotines. We had a design problem with the big sheets of aluminum that go on each side . . . . They were supposed to be attached to the framework with stud bolts studs welded to the back of the sheet of aluminum. And I received a call one.Sunday at home, that a couple of sheets had dropped off a sign on Connecticut A venue at Jones Bridge Road. And had fallen. It appeared to be a problem. So I immediately got hold of the consultant who was doing the work there and our construction people that afternoon, and the contractor. In the afternoon we had an emer~ency meeting about it, what's going on, and got to looking and inspecting other signs, and found on a number of them .. . these stud bolt weldings had failed. We had a real problem, cause one of these sheets of aluminum could come down, it could cut a car in two or a person in two. We had, immediately, the contractor, the next morning ... had another meeting and came back in with a proposal to drill through and put bolts in all of these signs and using a round-headed bolt head, with the same color as the sheet. ... That [original] design was very quickly abandoned, in the name of safety.506 As Shook suggests, highway officials in both states struggled from day one to make ongoing improvements to the Beltway's signs. Maj Shakib, in 2001 the SRA's assistant district engineer for traffic in the area including the Beltway, points to continuous adjustments in making signs more reflective (new materials), more readable at night (new lights), more easily readable in general (larger signs, revised wording). State officials, Shakib notes, repeatedly evaluate existing signs, in an attempt to "place [them] sos Ron Shaffer "Amtrak Guard Leaves Metro Riders Out in the Cold," Washington Post, 8 Febru~ 1991: El ; Howard Schneider,. "Beltway Heads Toward a Unified Designation: I-495 11 Washington Post, 18 Apnl 1991: Cl; Stephen C. Fehr, "Vote on Numbering Will Mean a Less Loopy Beltway," Washington Post, 11 June 1991: El. 506 Interview with William Shook. 307 strategically so that it would give you enough time to read and comprehend and react to the particular situation on the highway." By 2001, signs in both states had accounted for some of the worst problems raised in 1964, but the many concerns raised by the responses to my survey suggest that they have farther to go. Why does it matter? Confusion, which can be fueled or quelled by signs, has serious consequences. At best, Beltway confusion generates a waste of time, both for the dozens of people who wrote in their surveys that they had accidentally circumnavigated the Beltway, and for the police officers and maintenance workers who (as several told me) cannot count the number of times frustrated drivers have stopped to ask for directions. At worst, confusion sparks danger, as Washington Post editors suggested in 1974: Most of the regulars have become expert Beltway navigators. Truck drivers, however, seem both bewildered and in an awful hurry. The heavy skidmarks attest to that. For tourists, who are strangers to our complex geography, the Beltway is a nightmare, full of hair-raising surprises, and demanding of them sudden and unexpected decisions as to which route to take. 507 The confusion also places a drain on public resources. Although both states have placed intermittent "Inner Loop" and "Outer Loop" signs on alternate sides of the roadway, many drivers cannot identify which side they are on or in which direction they are driving at any given moment. As a result, emergency crews responding to accidents must err on the side of caution and cover all possibilities. Patrick Stanton of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department explains: A party to an accident, they pick up ~eir phone. First of all, they take the~r eyes off the road, and pick up the phone, dial 911, pound. And then the first thmg the 507 "The Beltway (II): Signs of Danger" [editorial], Washington Post, 28 March 1974: A22. 308 dispatcher asks them is, Where are you? And they look around and they go I don't know. So, that's the worst problem. As a matter of fact, when they~ an accident in this county, they--normally when you run an auto accident, they send an engine, a rescue squad, and an ambulance. In this county it's so bad that when they run 270 and when they run 495, they send an ambulance to the opposite side on that section, because so many people confuse the Inner Loop with the Outer Loop that that at least puts one piece on the scene. Because you can't always see all parts of the other side of the road when you're going around. Especially when you're dodging citizens. Stanton's colleague Loren Hudziak adds: Typically the calls will come in, and it'll just say on the printout sheet, "There's a collision. Unknown number of people involved, patients or victims." And it'll say between Connecticut A venue and Rockville Pike. And they don't know whether it's Inner Loop or Outer Loop, so the~'ll just send units going each stretch, each direction, looking for anything. 5 8 Bill McKinney of the Virginia State Police notes that Northern Virginia rescue crews similarly dispatch companies "from both directions. "509 This informal practice of sending crews to both sides of the Beltway for single incidents, which requires twice as much expense and twice as many resources as necessary for emergency responses, was routine in both states as early as 1972 and was still in place in 2001.510 Effective solutions, then, could alleviate drivers' frustrations and save money at the same time. Several survey responses suggested that "pictures would be better than words" in explaining clearly to drivers where they are and where they are heading. 511 An Arlington resident believes "it would be easier if there were a picture of a circle with sos Interview with members of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department. 509 Interview with Bill McKinney. 510 Nancy Scannell "Beltway Accident Locations Confusing," Washington Post, 3 April 1972: Cl. See alsd "Beltway Locations Should Specify 'Inner' or 'Outer,'" Fairfax Herald, 31 March 1972: I. SIi B 1 e tway Survey #88. 309 like some sort of an 'X' showing you where you were, so you could judge if you needed to go 'north' or 'south' ( or 'east' or 'west'). This would be MUCH more helpful. 11512 Takoma Park resident Rachel Miller describes an idea which "would be especially helpful to visitors": I recommend additional signs posted around the Beltway which place where you are on a clock face. And, of course in one direction it might say "You are at two o'clock heading counterclockwise." Then you could look at a map and figure out that your destination is roughly 10 o'clock, and know that since you are at 2 o'clock and heading counterclockwise, you are heading in the right direction and get at least a general idea of how far you have to go. North/ south/ east/west doesn't work all that well on a big, squiggly circle. 513 The Inner Loop/Outer Loop or clockwise/counterclockwise distinction remains confusing even within these recommendations. A more prominent and distinct identifier for each side of the Beltway could help here: For instance, if one side were marked at very short intervals by a red star and the other side by a blue square, drivers could become attuned to, and could give directions by, whether they are on the "red" or "star" side or on the "blue" or "square" side. Solutions like these are unorthodox, but perhaps necessary in light of decades of wmecessary expense and resources resulting from continued confusion. Those improvements, and in fact every physical addition and alteration to the Beltway discussed in this section to this point, are for the benefit of drivers and passengers. Almost none of the objects placed on, along, or above the Beltway work to the immediate benefit of people living near the Beltway, or to those who have nothing to do with it (whom I discuss at the end of this chapter). The one artifact the Beltway's 512B eltway Survey #274. 513 B eltway Survey #586. 310 neighbors have working in their favor are sound walls, and even these are problematic, as indicated earlier by Lisa Loflin's family's experience. In what amounted to an acknowledgement that the Beltway is a multisensory phenomenon, as per the cultural landscape fieldwork model's first operation, Virginia began mounting sound barriers in 1975. Highway officials and residents alike were confident that the concrete, metal, and wooden walls would block much of the Beltway's noise from people living immediately adjacent. In 1975, neighbors hailed the barriers as a "godsend" and "great." By 1979, as one Franconia resident put it, nearby residents thought the $875,000-per-mile barriers were "not worth two cents": "The blue metal barrier has ruined my view. We've still got the noise but nothing to look at. We had no idea it would be like this. 11514 A Fairfax resident wrote that A friend recently visited from North Carolina, and on his way couldn't help noticing the misproportioned metallic walls lining the Capital Beltway in Fairfax County. His first question was whether they were erected to hide a vast expanse of ghettos or scrapped autos. When I replied that they were "sound walls" for local residents, he chuckled. When I informed him that they had proven totally ineffective, he laughed aloud. And when I told him the project was costing $8.5 million, he simply shook his head-just like the rest ofus.515 Maryland officials similarly erected intermittent sound barriers in the 1970s and 1980s, With mixed reactions; even given the walls' deficiencies, some residents near Cabin John were so desperate to reduce noise from the Beltway that they offered to pay 514 Sharon Conway, "Beltway Noise Pers~sts," Washington,;ost, 4_ May 1979: BI; Douglas c. Lyons "Noise Barriers to Rruse Beltway Cost, Washington Post, 5 June 1975: Bl· David i. Adams letter to the editor, Washington Post, 21 June 1975: AI3; Douglas C. Lyons, "Dirt B~ers to Smother Beltway Din," Washington Post, 21 August 1975: C3. 515 Thomas F. Qualey, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 30 July 1979: A12. 311 special increased taxes if only they could get sound barriers. 516 The state revised its policies in 1997 to make it easier for residents to petition successfully for barriers, but the multiple criteria for qualification-an average 66 decibels of noise, reduction of sound in a community by at least ten decibels, sufficient pre-existing right-of-way, residential community predating the 1964 construction of the Beltway, houses close enough together that the wall's cost will not exceed $50,000 per house protected-still keeps them out ofreach for some.517 Among the artifacts along the Beltway, sound walls stand out overwhelmingly as the ugliest aspect of the highway, in the results ofmy survey. While some respondents acknowledged the need for the barriers to benefit abutting landowners, many more complained that the walls blocked their view of the world beyond and created a dangerous sense of tunnel vision. The barriers, in that sense, join the other objects on and above the road as potential safety hazards. While highway officials focus primarily on safety and danger and only secondarily on aesthetics in dealing with the Beltway's vegetation and weather, they do the same to a more pronounced degree in creating and altering the Beltway's built environment. For the individuals who are charged with preventing and responding to hazardous situations on the Beltway, aesthetics drops out of the picture entirely. Signs, 516 Jo-Ann Annao, "Montgomery Group Offering to Pay Higher Taxes to Lower Beltway Noise," Washington Post, 15 January 1991: Bl. 517 Charles Babington "Glendening Answers Call for More Sound Barriers," Washington Post, 17 June 1997: Bl;. Hal Piper, "M~ 1 ffl.ing Belrn:ay Noise," Baltimore Sun, 18 December 2000: IA; Virgirua Beauch~p, City Council Gets an Earful on Nonstop Beltway Noise, 11 Greenbelt News Review, 29. November 2001: 1. See also Karl Vick, "Project Has Family Living on the Edge," Washington Post, 19 July 1995: Al. 312 add"· itwnal lanes, overhead lights, low-cut grass, and carefully designed drainage syStems can diminish the Beltway's dangers (though not necessarily the public's perception of those dangers, as I will discuss in Chapter 8), but cannot eliminate them altogether. Engineers and environmental planners design the safest, most efficient, and In some cases most pleasant-looking highway they can; a different group of professionals then inherit the results. The next section focuses on how traffic controllers, police officers and emergency rescue workers approach the Beltway and deal with its dangers (which in most cases they did not create) and their repercussions. Living on/with the Beltway Residents of neighborhoods bordering on the Beltway, as described in previous chapters, consider the road to play a more central role in their daily lives than in those of other commuters, who only need negotiate it briefly each day. Other groups too, including traffic controllers, maintenance workers, construction crews, police officers, and emergency response teams, integrate the Beltway as a focal point in their own lives. 518 "Of the eleven, almost twelve years I've spent as a trooper, it's my office," says 518 In this section, r focus on members of three of those groups. For descriptions of construction crews and the challenges they face on the Beltway, see Janis Johnson, "The lronworkers' Two-Hour Beltway Ballet," Washington Post, 19 October 1977: Cl; Tim Larimer, "Road Warriors," Washington Post Magazine, 22 August 1993: 21-23, 33-35; Steve Vogel, "For Overnight Road Crews, Job is Paved with !)anger," Washington Post, 19 September 1995: Bl; and Frank J. Murray, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 18 November 1976: A18. For a dated discussion of the bridge tenders on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, see Paul Hodge, "When. a ~ridge ~ender's Ship Comes In, It Can Mean Some Angry Motorist is Gunning for Him, Washington Post, 7 October 1976: D.C. Weekly, p. IO. For an overview of Virginia police efforts to track speeders from 313 Maryland state police officer Russell Newell. "Some people will use it to and from but never really see it as intimately as I would 'cause that's where I worked." In this section I draw on interviews with police officers and emergency response teams and describe my observations of a team of traffic controllers to see how they approach and respond to their "office," in Newell's terms.519 I begin in a darkened room on a hillside overlooking the Pentagon. 3: 08 p.m., Tuesday, January 23, 2001. Tyrone Young and I are sitting behind the control panel for the 22-mile Virginia portion of the Beltway, as well as the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and part of the commuter Dulles Toll Road. To our right is a second workstation, also a collection of four monitors, two keyboards, and several phones, where Nakia Faison sits monitoring traffic on Interstates 95 and 395, the major highways heading south from Washington, D.C., into Virginia. Next to her, Clarence Williams sits at a third station, keeping track oflnterstate 66 to the District's west. At a separate island in front of Young and Faison, Harvey Ingram quietly speaks into the airplanes, see Josh White, "In Va., a High-Flying Crackdown," Washington Post, 28 February 2001: B5. 519 Citations in this section following the ethnographic vignette draw on interviews with Loren Hudziak, Murray Hunt Jr., Robert Spence, Margo Stanton, Patrick Stanton, and *Leslie Treistman of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department, 29 January 2001; veteran officer *Ethan Gould of the Greenbelt municipal police, 2 February 2001; Timothy Bell, Rick Blandford, Drew Knight, and Kenneth Plunkett of the Chevy Chase Fire Department, 9 February 2001; Sgt. Russell Newell of the Maryland State Police, 15 March 2001; Cpl. Lorenzo Miller ofthe.M~land State .Police, 16 ~arch 2001; and Master Trooper Bill McKinney of the. Vrrgirua State Po!ice, ~4 Ap?l 2001. Following ethnographic convention, I cite these informants extensively m their own words in an effort to understand, through the words they use, how they make sense of their experiences dealing with the Beltway. 314 ' - -- . --=--=- ·-- - -==c...======~~~-aml!!l!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!I! ______ _ phone, taking calls from drivers and other Northern Virginia residents anxious to report on road-related concerns. A final station next to Ingram is vacant. Dim overhead lights provide the only illumination beyond a movable-neck desk lamp at each of the five workstations and the glow of dozens of monitors. While the front wall of the room, about 25 feet long by 10 feet high, is covered by video images of the highways being monitored, there are no windows and no indication of the time except for an LED readout over the central panel. With only the murmur of soft phone conversations and the hum of computer equipment to break the silence, this hardly seems like a high-energy place. But Young has assured me that it is. 3: 11 p.m. VDOT supervisor Carlene Mc Whirt enters the room-fast-from her glass-enclosed alcove to the right. "Tyrone, one, two, three, four, seven, accident on 1- 95 south, all lanes blocked." Next to me, at the rear left of the room, Young quickly opens a binder of highway codes and procedures as Mc Whirt crosses the room, behind the workstations, walking towards us. Mc Whirt's message needs to be mounted, immediately, on VDOT's variable message signs, numbers one, two, three, four, and seven, and at this moment, Young is solely responsible for making that happen; otherwise, within minutes, thousands of drivers will hit a dead stop on their commute with no advance warning. "Is that southbound?" he confirms, working on the codes. A phone rings. "Here they come!" Young shouts. "Is anyone responding?" McWhirt asks, now standing behind Nakia Faison at the rear center of the room. 315 "Number 16 is on the way," Clarence Williams calls from her right. All three technicians, including the ones monitoring the other interstates, have quickly shifted their attention to this incident on Interstate 95 immediately adjacent to the Beltway. Carlene leans forward toward a two-way radio microphone. "STC 9017," she says, using the abbreviation for the Smart Traffic Center, the facility from which the team assembled around me and their colleagues monitor and control traffic on the highways of Northern Virginia. "Sixteen, where's your location?" crackles a voice on the radio. "Okay, I'm at the 495/95 entrance ramp. It's backed up all the way here," a second voice says. Tyrone is frantically trying to copy down information, craning toward Faison's radio on his right while cradling a phone in his left ear. Mc Whirt speaks calmly. "All right, at this time they have all the mainline lanes blocked and are routing people around. It involves a tractor-trailer and a bus. Several tractor-trailers, I believe, and a bus." "How many lanes blocked?" Harvey Ingram asks from the front of the room. "All." "All the lanes blocked," Harvey repeats. He enters a few keystrokes and a dot- matrix printer behind Mc Whirt begins to buzz and print. As I listen and watch, the room still fairly quiet despite the rising intensity, I realize that there is an enormous tie-up in progress at the Capital Beltway and Interstate 95 in Springfield, not too far south of where I'm sitting next to the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, and that these five people speaking softly to each other next to me hold in their hands the difference between a short backup and hours of 316 standing still for thousands of drivers over the next few hours. How many drivers have had their afternoon and evening plans disrupted in just the last five minutes, I wonder. "Major, major," McWhirt says. "It's got a bus and a truck and I don't know what else." She turns to a higher-ranking VDOT staff member who has entered the room. "All southbound lanes are blocked." "Will we have to lift HOV?" he asks, referring to the high occupancy vehicle restrictions requiring vehicles in certain lanes to carry a minimum number of people during peak commute hours. Mc Whirt suggests routing all traffic onto the HOV lanes because the main highway lanes are blocked by the accident. "Anyone notified the media?" Ingram asks. "Yeah," Williams says from across the room. "All of them?" Next to me, Young is furiously combining and editing pre-recorded messages to mount on variable message signs. A monitor in front of him reads ACCIDENT I-95 S AT SPRINGFIELD ALL LANES BLKD "It's back to the Beltway now," McWhirt says, referring to the stopped traffic. "That's not far," her supervisor says. "No, but it just happened." 3:18 p.m. Young gets up and starts typing on a computer at the back of the room. The Virginia Operating Information System will notify VDOT's central office in Richmond, across the state to the south, what is happening at the incident site. Everyone 317 else's eyes are on the projection wall at the front, which is divided into three large panels. The left panel (in front of Young) is split into four images, showing flowing traffic from cameras around the Beltway; the right panel (in front of Williams) is split sixteen ways. But the central panel shows a single, huge image of two jackknifed tractor-trailers under a bridge, with a parking lot of cars trailing off behind them into the distance. The action is now centering around Nakia Faison's workstation at the rear center of the room, where Mc Whirt and her supervisor already stand. Jimmy Chu, director of the Smart Traffic Center, has joined them, and two other VDOT staffers have quietly come in and have sat down at the back of the room to watch the show. Mc Whirt speaks into the radio: "At your earliest, can you advise the duration of this incident and also what's involved?" Chu says, "Maybe not major, maybe--" "It's got to be," McWhirt says. "That's two tractor-trailers involved." The supervisor walks to the front of the room and squints at the oversized image of the accident. "What's that?" he asks, pointing to a blob in the middle. Mc Whirt takes over the controls at Faison's workstation and zooms in. "It's two tractor-trailers and a single vehicle. One tractor-trailer has jackknifed." "It must have been traveling 70 miles an hour," Chu offers. "They're working on the scene," Mc Whirt announces. She and three others confer, and decide not to lift the HOV restrictions-yet. 3 :26 p.m. Three more men have entered the room and now everyone has an opinion to offer. On the radio, a crackling voice asks Mc Whirt how the HOV lanes are 318 doing; still okay. She is speaking constantly to a stream of people on the two-way radio and one of Faison's phones; beside her, Faison works a pair of keyboards. "Who's working on the Beltway? See if we can send traffic to Van Dom Street " ' Chu says to no one in particular. At the monitor in front of me, Young enters USE 1-95 NORTH TO VANDORN TO A VOID DELAY and sends it out to the appropriate variable message signs. The dot-matrix printer clicks into action, keeping a verifiable record of every action taken. The situation seems to be worsening. "Still totally closed!" Chu shouts. "Okay, send 'em," McWhirt says. One visitor says, "It's only gonna get worse in half an hour." "Someone call Metro Traffic," says a second visitor. "Call State Police," says a third. 3:34 p.m. On the phone to the Virginia State Police, McWhirt says, "We're going to lift the HOV restrictions on 95/395 because we have an accident. Okay." She turns to the rest of the room. "They don't have a problem with it." Chu picks up a phone and makes several calls. The visitors are on their way out. I wouldn't otherwise know it, but the exciting part must be over; the incident must be under control. McWhirt is back on the phone. "Just wanted to let you know we've lifted HOV lane restrictions. There will be major, major delays." 319 "I already called State Police, Fairfax, and Arlington about lifting restrictions, 11 Chu says. The other supervisor sighs. "Okay, that's fine. That's all we can do." 3 :43 p.m. The room is as quiet as it was a half hour ago. The Smart Traffic Center has done its job; now it's up to the crew on scene to deal with the situation. On the radio, police on the scene are talking to each other: "We're stretched awfully thin here." One trooper moves up on the scene to help another. Young says, "All those signs are up, Carlene." The radio crackles. "It should take us no longer than 40 minutes for us to clear this scene. It's two tractor-trailers and a truck." "Ten-four," McWhirt confirms. 3:47 p.m. On the radio, we hear an announcement to the public that there is a separate, major accident at Gallows Road and the Beltway to our west. Then a voice cuts in from the tractor-trailer scene: "They're going to have one of the lanes open in five or ten minutes, I think." I look next to me at Young for any signs of satisfaction, but he's kneeling on the floor with the phone cord stretched to the limit behind him, trying to spell correctly someone's name who has called to request a tow and who apparently is speaking too softly. The cord knocks his reference binder to the floor and I pick it up. Above us, Young's monitor is flashing the special variable message sign announcements he's mounted near the Wilson Bridge. Another phone rings, and now he has a phone in each ear as he takes a report of a downed stop sign: "Thank you, sir." Clearly Young's responsibilities stretch beyond the Beltway and the Wilson Bridge. 320 3:54 p.m. The radio comes on. "I need you guys to stay near the radio. We're going to open this road back up." 3 :59 p.m. Young had joked earlier with me about how when it rains, it pours: the room will be unbelievably hectic, then dead silent. "See, now it's all quiet!" he exclaims. I tell him, "I was waiting for the third phone to ring, when you already had one in each ear." 4:01 p.m. "It's okay to reopen the road," the radio announces. "Ten-four," Faison confirms. "It's all clear," she repeats to the rest of the room. "All clear," Young echoes. He walks over to the Virginia Operating Information System to notify Richmond and then Transcom, a regional traffic reporting service, before sitting back at his workstation. "Now I've got to take my signs back down," he says, as he reaches for his keyboards. "They're doing rolling roadblocks," McWhirt explains to Faison to our right. Police on the scene are opening traffic a few lanes at a time so all the drivers don't jam up at once. Mc Whirt and Young discuss what updated information to put on the variable message signs: announce a delay, congestion, or leave them blank? 4:07 p.m. "All lanes are open," the radio blares. "I called Metro, 1-800-TRAFFIC," Faison says. "I'll call Transcom," Williams says. young says, "I think it's been taken care of." 4:08 p.m., one minute exactly after the major incident has been cleared. The phone rings next to young. "Whoa! Oil spill. And that is where?" Mc Whirt quickly picks up a second receiver. "Oh, ma-an. I'll see what I can do for you," she says. "Where 321 are you, northbound or southbound?" She gets back on the radio: "I need a sand truck with a spreader for an oil spill on the scales." Before turning their full attention to the oil spill, Young and Mc Whirt take a last, quick look at the center panel of the projection wall, which is still showing the site of the tractor-trailer accident. "The delays are gone!" Mc Whirt shouts. Young adds, "Just like that, they've all gone away." I check my watch and the LCD time display over the central panel (with no windows, it's hard to mark the passage of time). The entire episode took one hour, on the dot. The visitors are gone, Chu has returned to his office, and beyond Mc Whirt's and Young's quiet dialogue about the oil spill, there is no sign of the excitement of the last sixty minutes; Ingram is back to taking calls, Faison is watching I-395, and Williams is checking out I-66. No excitement-and yet I wonder, in the last hour, how many thousands of drivers on the Beltway and on I-95 and I-395, and how many people sitting in their offices and homes listening to traffic reports, just had their day rearranged by what happened around me in this hidden room overlooking the Potomac River. The Smart Traffic Center team, I learned, plays a key role in keeping the Beltway operational; however, the team members generally do this from their bunker- like headquarters. In contrast, the police officers and fire and rescue personnel who service the highway spend much more time on the road itself. Timothy Bell of the Chevy Chase Fire Department (CCFD) explains that "we're just there all the time! It's so many times that it all runs together now. We're there almost every shift. Guaranteed. It's 322 a given." His colleague Rick Blandford agrees: "There's not one place on there we haven't walked. We've walked every part of it. ... Every day, one ofus [the local firehouse crews] is on that Beltway for something." "Something," in most cases, is one type of accident or another. It is the CCFD and Kensington Volunteer Fire Department (KVFD), along with similar teams stationed around the circumference and the assistance of state and local police officers, who deal with the results of the dangers posed by the many components of the Beltway. Not surprisingly, my conversations with the officers and rescue crews revolved heavily around safety, especially the hazards posed by dangerous engineering and poor driving behavior, and the danger to themselves. Underscoring its hazards, Blandford points out that the Beltway's number itself-495-correlates alphanumerically to the letters D, I, and E. Certain portions, however, are more dangerous than others. CCFD crews make daily appearances at two particular sites, Bell explains: We are . .. in that area, in that stretch, we'll be there-we'll be there at rush hour. Like clockwork. Sometimes during the mornings, but in the evenings it's a given. It's a given. We'll be on the Inner Loop between Connecticut Avenue and Georgia Avenue, or the Outer Loop between Connecticut A venue and Rockville Pike. And most likely it'll be the Outer Loop. On that Outer Loop stretch, the CCFD's "hot spot" is the split between the Beltway, J- 270, and RockviIIe Pike/Wisconsin Avenue-the same Pooks Hill interchange so problematic since before it opened. "People cannot freaking get it straight," Blandford says. He points directly to a confusing sign which alerts drivers that two right lanes will exit onto I-270, but the rightmost lane has a yellow "Exit Only" arrow and the adjacent lane does not. People just can't get it. Because it'~l say "This Lane Only" with ~e yellow arrow, but actually it's two lanes. They think they have to get over; thats when they 323 create the hazard .... The sign that says "This Lane" really freaks everyone out. Both sides of the junction itself present their own problems. On the Inner Loop on the east side, traffic joining the eastbound Beltway has to merge from the left into the leftmost lane before the extra lane created by the exit ramp disappears. This, Patrick Stanton of the KVFD explains, is a recipe for disaster: When 495 and 270 merge, it's ridiculous. Because you have to have one lane that people can merge into that runs about halfway to Connecticut A venue. Just as that lane ends, the road makes a sharp curve one way and curves back the other. So you have people zipping down that lane, who are supposed to be merging, but instead they're gonna run all the way to the end, and stop. So they can try to worm their way while these other cars are supposed to be driving at speed. While vehicles have to merge at high speeds on the east side of the interchange, they have to deal on the west side with what CCFD members call the "truckers' graveyard," the shoulder to the left of the exit ramp for Wisconsin A venue. At this point, the Beltway's mainline narrows to two lanes eastbound, with a third lane (the right lane) serving as an "Exit Only" ramp. Between drivers' confusion and the road's curvature, Blandford says, crashes occur there regularly, especially with trucks which have more difficulty negotiating the curve: Every time, when they come down through here, people have to get over because the lanes change a lot right here. It's between Old Georgetown and 355. Right before you get to that exit ramp at 355. The whole left side of the shoulder is a graveyard .... They take that guardrail out-that guardrail's shiny, they replace it like every month. The curves of the "Roller Coaster" section between Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues (the former "disappearing parkway") are particularly dangerous, CCFD and KVFD members point out, because drivers take them at unsafe speeds. But Greenbelt officer * Ethan Gould argues that straight road segments are equally dangerous because 324 they encourage drivers to believe erroneously that they can speed up without danger. It's "almost like a race track," Gould says, referring particularly to Prince George's County stretches outside the KVFD's and CCFD's jurisdiction. There are so many stretches of the Beltway that even though they're not perfectly flat, cause you've got little rises and stuff, they're fairly straight. I mean, from Kenilworth A venue down to 202. You kind of go downhill a little bit to the parkway, you come up the rise, you go back down, then you have a bigger rise past 450, and then from 450 straight down to 202 or 214. For the most part, even though it bends slightly, you don't have sharp curves or stuff. I think it's the physical layout of the Beltway that can allow people to drive at high speeds. But more than the relative curvature of the Beltway, KVFD members believe, its very composition as a paved highway carrying high-speed traffic contributes to its danger, because drivers do not understand how hazardous a basic rainfall is. Motorists do tend to slow down and compensate for downpours or heavy snow, but not for a light rain. Accidents result, the KVFD relates: Patrick Stanton: I mean, the problem with such a volume of traffic there, you end up with so much stuff on the road there, that as soon as it begins to rain, the first ten to fifteen minutes of rain, they literally, they oughta just put a big stop sign up to stop everybody. Because that's when the oil and all starts to come up out of the roadway. And some parts of the Beltway--! mean, I can remember getting out of the ambulance when it _was just a light, misty rain or whatever, and literally almost slipping and bustmg your butt. Because the road gets that slick in some spaces. Robert Spence: That oil is just coming up. P. Stanton: It's slick. Korr: Do you see a lot of incidents happen as a result? Margo Stanton: Oh, yes. Loren Hudziak: First 15 minutes. Spence: If it starts to rain lightly, you can hear the calls start to come in. 325 P. Stanton: You can track the rainstorm, if you know where the fire houses are because you start to hear the accidents come in in those areas. And it's literall ' you can picture it in your mind, coming across the county. Because that's the y, way the calls start. M. Stanton: And then when it hits us, then that's when we're so busy. The danger posed by rain on road surfaces is not limited to the Beltway, but it does compound an already hazardous situation fueled by other factors. Consequent accidents leave drivers and passengers in need of assistance, which the CCFD, KVFD, and other rescue teams must often struggle through heavy traffic to provide. The injuries they find range from negligible to severe, but both extremes leave indelible memories for the emergency teams. Patrick Stanton describes an incident drawing an emergency response, but where the damage to the motorcyclist involved was more humorous than life-threatening, as the funniest [call] I ever ran there [on the Beltway]. We had a guy who laid his motorcycle down in one of the [lanes]. We pulled up on the scene, myself and a friend of mine, Sean Green, who's a lieutenant downtown now. We got out of the ambulance and the guy was standing there talking to the police officer, and we were over on the fast lane side. And we asked him if he was okay, he said, yeah, I'm fine, I just laid my bike down, I feel so stupid. We're like, don't worry about it man, it happens down here all the time. He says, I gotta go over to check on his bike, and his bike was over on the other shoulder. So we're like, okay fine. So he turns around to walk away, and when he does, he's walking like on tiptoes. We look down; the butt of his jeans has been ripped out, and he has road rash all over his butt. So obviously he slid across the four lanes of the Beltway on his butt. So Sean and I immediately doubled over with laughter, as we watched this guy tiptoeing across 495 with his butt-cheeks hanging out with road rash all over them. In a more somber episode, Rick Blandford relates his experience with a man who stopped on the Inner Loop, approaching the Georgia A venue exit, to change a flat tire. Apparently he believed he was pulling onto the right-hand shoulder, but at that point, 326 what otherwise might be a shoulder serves as an actual lane for traffic. As he reached into his trunk for his spare tire, an elderly man, going 55 miles an hour, no brakes, hits the guy. Takes both legs off. I mean, it looked like Vietnam, like something you'd see in Vietnam. And it killed the guy. He was alive for a few hours. The person that prolonged his life enough for his family to say bye was, we had a doctor that was out of Navy Med. We run into those people a lot. And he put tourniquets on his leg which stopped it from bleeding out. We got him to the hospital to surgery, and I think he died later on that day. The rescue workers encounter even more gruesome injuries; Blandford and Patrick Stanton both recall instances of passengers in cars being decapitated and impaled after driving into stationery trucks. Severe injuries, CCFD members note, seem to occur disproportionately in the hours after midnight when drivers are more likely to be inebriated. At all times, though, the emergency response teams must block out their fears and graphic memories, even as they know how much danger they themselves are m. And they are very aware. "Trucks suck you on by; you can feel it, 11 the CCFD's Timothy Bell says. Blandford adds: 1170 miles an hour, and that wind tunnel it creates, it pulls you back in the highway. It's incredible." Despite their best attempts to bury their fright, the firefighters rediscover it when they stand amid traffic. Bell relates his experience assisting a woman whose radiator ran out of antifreeze, so I went on the side of the truck with a bucket to get some water out of the water tank, to get her enough to get to the service station and put some antifreeze in. Well, I pulled the lever and the water started coming out, and this tractor-trailer went by me. I knew he was doing 80 coming down the front of that hill. And the truck that I was riding in, the fire engine, I felt it rock from the wind. And I shoved it back in [laughs]. I said, You'll be ok, get to the service station. That did it for me right there. I mean, that was tight. Scared, you could hear it coming, see the headlights bouncing, you know. KVFD members explain more explicitly why they are frightened: 327 Spence: The first thing that always sticks in my mind is our own safety. Because the Beltway is tremendously dangerous. The only times that I've felt safe on the Beltway was when the Beltway was completely shut down, for a major accident. I'm also an ambulance driver, and whether responding driving or riding in the front seat, it's harrowing just getting to a call many times . ... It's harrowing getting there. Getting set up is extraordinarily dangerous, because you want to try to block traffic with your vehicle or one of the other vehicles if at all possible. If the police, the state police, are not on the scene yet, it's even more dangerous. So all ofthese-- M. Stanton: And usually, we're there before the state police. Spence: Yeah. Probably eight or nine times out often, we do beat the state police to the scene. So all of those parts of it are probably the most dangerous parts. Just getting out of the ambulance and determining what you have. You know, I've gotten out of an ambulance where cars have been two feet away from me going 70 miles an hour. *Leslie Treistrnan: So have I. Spence: And that [breaks a smile] scares the living crap out of you! The firefighters, Spence explains, will do whatever they can to help people involved in accidents, but their own safety is paramount: "The bottom line is, we're gonna be safe first." *Leslie Treistrnan adds that "you always have to be careful when you're on the Beltway to tell your crew-we tell our crew, anyway-which door they want to get out of, the side door or the back door, thinking about our personal safety." If emergency crews are injured themselves, both they and the people they are trying to help suffer. Police officers, who also assist at the scene of injuries, are subject to the same dangers. In addition, Maryland trooper Russell points to hazards faced in non- emergency situations, especially from "shoulder runners, the people that drive down the shoulders. They're dangerous. I've been hit by a guy driving down the shoulder." Greenbelt officer Gould agrees that "that's another big fear of mine, if I ever have to pull onto the shoulder for any reason. You know, having someone slam into the back of 328 me." The danger is even more apparent when officers leave the relative safety of their vehicles and step out into speeding traffic to halt all vehicles for one reason or another (often to assist in emergency situations). Police conquer this fear, Newell and Maryland officer Lorenzo Miller explain, by reducing the individual officer-vs.-countless vehicles relationship to a one-on-one personal encounter. Newell elaborates: It's not something you teach necessarily, but it's intuitive. You watch the traffic as it's coming up to you, and you see one that is slowing down because he sees the trooper standing there. And so as he came towards me, I was able to get out into the lane more and get him to stop. And then once he stopped, all the rest of the traffic, the majority of the rest of the traffic, slowed down. Because now we've got a trooper standing in the right lane, and the rest of the traffic is starting to slow down. And I just kept walking backwards and got all four lanes stopped. Miller describes how his comfort level performing this maneuver has grown over time: I fear, but I've grown comfortable with it. You have to stop one lane at a time. You've always got to wonder about that one person who's not paying attention to the traffic in front of him. And traffic is stopped, and he swerves to the right or to the left onto a shoulder, and that's where you're at. And you get hit. I know a couple of people who have gotten hit like that. ... You try to get eye contact with all the drivers, so they can see what you're doing. See, if I don't have eye contact, I won't try to stop that vehicle. I'll move to the next one. Maryland officers do this, Newell and Miller explain, particularly in cases where an ambulance or fire truck needs to enter or exit an accident scene. But in this and in other aspects of their work, drivers and passengers not directly involved in emergency situations :frequently make things difficult by acting in ways which, both the officers and the fire crews agree, show a marked lack of respect for all of those who are involved. KVFD members, while disheartened, expect this type of disrespect from drivers in general. "It's bad everywhere," Robert Spence says. "But I'd say it's worse on the Beltway. 11 Treistman adds: "My experience is that they are more aggressive on the 329 Beltway than they are around town. They beep their horns at us to get out of their way. I've had them yell out of their window and curse at me." People who assist by slowing down and moving out of the way of emergency vehicles, Spence says, seem to be the exception rather than the norm. For him, the difference between the Beltway and other roads was apparent immediately: "The first few times I ran the Beltway, I was just amazed at the lack of care, respect, anything else." Russell Newell explains how drivers vent their frustrations on police when, to him, it seems obvious that sympathy is more in order: It's always our fault. We had a lady walk across the Beltway, that was struck. And she was struck and struck and struck and struck. Actually, unfortunately her body was dragged a great distance. And it started-the lanes are one, two, three, and four, one is closest to the center median- and she was hit in lane two, hit again in lane three, and dragged all the way to the right-hand shoulder. At least a hundred yards. There was, unfortunately, a lot of body parts that had been stripped away, due to the abrasion with the road surface. And the people in the backup just could not understand why we had the entire Beltway shut down. "She's already dead!" Whatever. And they're yelling at me, "I've been sitting here for three hours!" The collision's only an hour and a half old. "I've been sitting here for three hours!" I don't think so, I got here when the first ambulance got here, and I've only been here an hour and a half. So there's the exaggeration. But that was one of those cases where there was nothing we could do. And we still take the brunt. A lot of what we do in the police business is either give somebody the answer they're looking for, or just ignore it. I'm not going to tell them the gory details about how some family has just lost a family member; all I would tell them is that we're investigating a serious collision, and keep on going . ... Yeah, always our fault. Drivers, CCFD member Timothy Bell adds, "scream and holler" at emergency crews even in the middle 0(a rescue operation. "We're holding them up," his crewmate Drew Knight acknowledges. "But this area, these people have to get where they're going .. .. And that is their main focus." VSP officer Bill McKinney agrees that "there are times when we are the cause of a traffic problem," but finds it frustrating to be yelled at 330 consistently whether the police have anything to do with poor traffic conditions or not. The key, the officers and firefighters agree, is to let the shouts and insults slide off. From their perspective, most drivers and passengers fail to consider the needs of the people involved in accidents and the professionals trying to assist. Maryland officer Lorenzo Miller explains what he sees as a one-sided view: I've stopped the Beltway many times. And let one lane or a shoulder go by, and seen the attitudes on people's faces, when they drive past. I feel sorry for them, but I've still got to do my job. I've been cursed out. We've had fatals where there's just stuff everywhere. But the people, they don't care. They just want to get to where they're going. Open up the road, I don't care if that person's dead or not. They sit there, they curse you out and use foul language against you. They blame it all on you. You're just doing your job, you're just doing what you have to do to preserve that accident scene. I just blow it off. I think, it's ignorant people, they just don't know. I would say, if it was one of their family members in the accident, and they needed to shut the Beltway down because they needed to form some type of life-saving, they needed to get the helicopter or something, they wouldn't be arguing about the Beltway being shut down. They'd be like, you can shut the Beltway for my mother, my father, to transport them out of there. They only see it on one side. But while drivers may have trouble seeing the situation from the perspective of police or EMTs, the officers and emergency personnel, who drive the Beltway themselves in their private lives, have no such difficulty in grasping both sides. KVFD member Loren Hudziak describes his split personality in this respect: I think ever since I joined, I've kind of come to the realization, not just about the Beltway but about every place: I end up being the people I hate. Like if I'm a pedestrian and I'm walking across the street, I'm, I had the right of way and this personjust about hit me. And then when I'~ dri~ing, thi~ pers~njus~ walked out in front of the car--the nerve of them, I cant belt eve they re domg this. I mean, that sort of extends to the Beltway. You could say all these times, well, these people are cutting people off, and it causes all this, and the rubberneckers cause the accidents. But when I'm that driver--inevitably I'm late for something and you're going a little faster, you cut someone off, and it really con~itions you .... Again, you end up being these people you hate. You end up shapmg yourself to fit the situation. 331 Patrick Stanton is able to point to the exact moment when he realized that he had switched identities from one of"us" (the driving public) to one of "them" (emergency professionals who make life so difficult for "us" by holding up traffic): My first call was particularly memorable not because it was so severe, but because it sort of relates back to what I was saying about the animosity that people have toward the accidents; it causes these mile-long backups and people get frustrated. The first one I was on, it was pretty minor. We were just transporting this woman, merely as a precaution . .. . We were then getting her out of the vehicle, and I was getting some equipment out of the vehicle, and so I turned around and I saw all these people, all these cars going real slow and everybody looking. That was the first time I got that realization that I was on the other side of this. 'Cause for years I used to travel on the Beltway and get stuck in these mile-long backups, hours and hours in the car and you get frustrated and irritated and by the time you get there, you're just at your wit's end. For the first time I realized, man, I'm actually part of the cause of this. This is the reason all of these people are stopping. And ever since then, you just have a certain degree of patience when stuff like that happens. It was really a pretty stark realization. The firefighters and officers do what they can to try to personalize themselves with the individuals around them expressing frustration-Newell describes giving his lunch to a stranded motorist and her child-but in the long run, they expect they will never be understood by most of the people they may at any time be called on to assist. What makes their jobs gratifying, in spite of the insults and lack of gratitude, is-at least in part- the satisfaction of helping people in need and the exhilaration that comes from what KVFD members call "good calls." In the following conversation excerpt, after Murray Head Jr. describes his personal "best call," he and his colleagues explain the contrast between "good" and "bad" calls: Head: I've had some interesting calls, but nothing-:~e best call I ran was actually, I was actually coming home from the [t:ammg] academy, and I had just gotten off--it was on the [I-270] spur. And I had Just gotten off at Old Georgetown to head home. And I was sttting 1 at 1?e traffic ~ight, and 1?ey put out the call, "One ejected and a van on fire. So Im like, I don t see anything. And I 332 looked up, and there was just this column of fire up in the air. So I was just like, I just blew through the intersection and just headed on down there. And I got behind one of the utilities and followed them in. And one was ejected. I mean, his face--1 got pictures if you want to see them. I mean, his face is basically all gone, and it's just this pool of blood. And there's two other guys that are in the back of the van. One of the other guys that was in my class was in front of the utility. He pulled them out. And then the lady that was in the car that actually hit the van, caused it to go into the Jersey wall or whatever, she got out of her car and just wandered down the road. And I had pulled my truck over, and she was laying on the side of the road. And I was like, hello! M. Stanton: That's our reaction a lot of times. Wah, whoops! Head: I mean, MDOT, they caught it all on camera and everything like that. That was probably one of the best calls I've ever run. Spence: You'll have to excuse us. We say "best calls," "good fire." That's in the fire and rescue community. M. Stanton: Well, we don't have bad calls. We have boring calls. Spence: Well, we have bad calls ifwe make 'em bad. M. Stanton: Right. Spence: A good call is-- M. Stanton: Something interesting. Spence: Interesting, challenging. M. Stanton: Challenging. Spence: It's probably not good for the victim. But in our-- Hudziak: Sick! Spence: --vemacular-- M. Stanton: Sick, sick way. Spence: --it is a little sick, but that's a good call. A bad call to me is when we screw up. 333 M. Stanton: Right. Which happens. P. Stanton: We don't specifically wish ill will on the [drivers]. But if it's gonna happen, we'd like to be there. M. Stanton and Spence: Exactly. Head: If it's gonna happen, we might as well be there when it happens. Spence: We are trained to mitigate it, so we might as well go. M. Stanton: There was a good call, you know, when the MARC train crashed [in a commuter rail accident]? That was a good call. Very interesting. But, I mean, ~t was devastatingly tragic. I was--that doesn't have to do with the Beltway, but Just an example. I had to take leave from the Fire Department for a week because I was devastated from that. And I still close my eyes and see everything from that day. That was a good call. I mean, you don't have those calls every day. Thank God. But, that was experience. That tractor-trailer, the first one I told you about, that was a good call. Spence: Ones you don't have everyday. Hudziak: Exactly. "Good" calls can result from, in addition to the challenging or interesting circumstances identified in the previous conversation, the senses of power or responsibility which emergency personnel feel. "The best time I've ever had on a call," Patrick Stanton recalls, was during a ride when his ambulance had to speed down the wrong side of the Beltway directly into opposing traffic. "Just driving with the lights and sirens on," Treistman adds, "is such a rush. Oh my God. It's also a very scary thought that you've got so many people's lives- you've got the people in the back of the ambulance." The age of the people involved in an accident can also determine whether it qualifies as a "good" call. KVFD members Robert Spence and Margo Stanton use an episode with an infant to describe how they respond differently when children enter the picture. "We were sitting at the station," Spence relates, 334 and get a call, a personal injury accident. We had the Inner Loop assignment ?etween Connecticut A venue, Georgia A venue, for an accident involving an mfant that has been ejected. And so we're thinking, holy crap, here we go, this is gonna be a big one. M. Stanton: And just to give you a little--any time it's a child, we are--you know, everything is more, your adrenaline is pumping ten times faster. Spence: These tend to be much more intense, and the situation is-- P. Stanton: You figure the adults get what they deserve. Spence: That's right. But when you think of it, the kid wasn't driving. So anyway, so we get there expecting the worst. We don't see a kid anywhere. But we see a guy. There's a man laying in the road. WeU, he has been ejected from one vehicle, and has slid on his chest about a hundred feet down the road. But amazingly enough, was not that badly hurt. He was drunk, as a skunk ... but he was not that bad .. . . He had some real serious road rash. But there was a child ejected from another vehicle. The child, an infant, had been ejected into a hi11side. Soft landing. Treistman: Oh my. Guardian angel. Spence: Yeah. Not a thing wrong with the kid. Of course, we don't--there's no kid! Where's this kid! And the squad, BCC [Bethesda-Chevy Chase] or somebody came up and, "Up here! On the hill! We're fine!" And so, we were pleased, that it turned out the way it did, cause sometimes you do expect the worst on that highway. Older victims-for example, the man whose legs Rick Blandford saw amputated- evoke sympathy, but not the same type of adrenaline rush as children. The police officers I spoke with do not offer the same "good call"/"bad call" breakdown as the fire crews, but do agree with the sense of exhilaration sparked by fast driving and pressing situations. Russell Newell finds satisfaction in being able to help drivers and passengers who need it. Like the fire crews, he experiences a rush from the immediacy and spontaneity of certain situations. One of his most positive memories is of an intervention with a suicide jumper whom he came upon through serendipity. NeweU improvised his way through the episode, with gratifying results: 335 Years ago I was on the Beltway in Montgomery County. And the interesting part of this whole story is, we were working radar. The guy that I get stopped decides that he's going to go all the way across the American Legion Bridge into Virginia, and there is a Jersey wall right at the end of the bridge to take the first ramp to take you onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. He stops on the left side of the Jersey wall and comes to a stop. Now I can't back up and go this way to go up my ramp to come back into Maryland. So now I have to go down to Little Falls Parkway to make my loop and come back. The beauty was- the divine intervention, if you will, was-had he stopped 30 feet before he did, or had he stopped on the other side of the wall, I'd have made the loop and I'd have missed this one. But in the time it took me to drive down, hit the loop and come back, this woman had stopped the car, and had walked out onto the American Legion Bridge. And I'm driving along, coming back into Maryland, and I see this woman walking. Now she had just started walking on the bridge, and I'm thinking, that's a long way to River Road. Doesn't this woman know the phone is four miles from here? What kind of silliness is this? So I pull over and I backed up. And as I start backing up, there's no woman! She's standing-there are little concrete things that stick out on the outside of the Jersey wall that hold up the lights. She has her feet on both sides of the pole; she's got one ann on the pole. She has, in other words, climbed over the Jersey wall, over the water, looking down. So I backed up, put my car in-between the traffic and her, and got out of the car. And like I'd known her for a hundred years. "Hey! Carol! I'm Russ! What's your name?" So we struck up a conversation. And I worked my way closer and closer and closer until I actually latched onto her ann. And I started talking to her, rubbing her back and this, that, and the next. And anyway, talked her down. She was at wit's end, and had lost everything, she thought, and she was done. She had left a note; left the car running. She was done. She had taken an overdose. She was actually finished. The note was on the seat of the car and she was going to do it. And I just happened to be there. And had this guy stopped anywhere else, I'd have never seen her because the timing would have been wrong. I'd have tried to come across and looped around, and ~e extra four or five minutes allowed her to park the car and get out on the bridge. So, I mean, another day at the office. ["Are you trained in that type of intervention," I asked, "or do you play it by ear?"] Play it by ear. I'm sure that there ~as something. that they had mentioned ab~ut that. In this case, it was just all fit mto her. In this case. I offered to take her m. "Com live with me. I live in a two-bedroom apartment by myself, my roo~ate's just moved out." I've got a wife and kids, come on! But what she 336 needed was to hear that there was some other option than what she was doing. And I was going to give her the option. I was going to give her everything she needed. Everything she needed, and it worked. I stalled her long enough to think about something else, then I started talking to her about next weekend. "Come on, come with me, we can get tickets to everything! I've got tickets to a wine festival in the Shenandoah! You like wine? I love wine!" I don't have tickets, come on. But it worked; she started talking about next weekend, and what she was going to do with me next weekend. And that allowed the next trooper to get there. And Tony Irons walks up and I say, "Carol, this is Tony. Tony, Carol." And Tony looked at me, and he just started talking to her, and walked up, and the next thing, whoop! Snagged her up off the far side, and that was it. That was just dumb luck, is what that was. That was just taking it as it came. For Newell and the other emergency personnel I spoke with, episodes like this one go a long way toward negating the frustrations of an ungrateful public, nasty and unskilled drivers, and a road seemingly designed for disaster. Even the dangers to themselves seem worthwhile when they are able to make a difference, or even a potential difference, in helping others live. It is the police and the emergency crews who inherit the results of the engineers' and planners' efforts described in earlier chapters and who must respond to how the Beltway plays out in real life; even as they express exasperation at some of those decisions (particularly engineering ones) which preceded them, they find some satisfaction and excitement in the experiences which the Beltway's danger provides them. Who's Missing The Beltway neither serves nor benefits everyone. This may seem obvious, but its reality is obscured by the road's ubiquity in daily discourse in the Washington area and beyond. On local radio stations, traffic reports every ten minutes provide Beltway 337 conditions to the entire listening audience; area newspapers similarly report on Beltway construction and accidents as matters of general interest. They are, but at the same time a significant chunk of the region's population does not have access to the Beltway the same way they do to, say, the Metro system or to municipal streets. As Takoma Park resident Rachel Miller writes, "the Beltway certainly doesn't help anyone who can't afford a car- in fact, because the Beltway has allowed businesses .. . to meander further and further from the city, the Beltway actually prevents certain people from having these opportunities. 11520 While the rest of this study focuses on what takes place on the Beltway, it is also important to recognize what doesn't. My cultural landscape fieldwork model defines a site in terms of its natural components, its artifacts, and its people, but it also emphasizes the importance ofrecognizing who and what does not appear there. Writing in 1974, sociologist Mayer Hillman noted that transportation planners in England operated under a number of simplified and distorted assumptions, among them the expectation of universal car ownership. This, Hillman argued, was inconceivable. Because the use of cars depends on a host of factors including age, income, and ability to hold a license and properly operate a vehicle, many if not most people would never have a car, and planners needed to provide for that segment of the population as well. 521 In the United States even at that time, transportation officials did not take such a one- sided view--Hillman likely exaggerated the British planners' stance as well--but then s20 8 eltway Survey #586. 521 Mayer Hillman, "Not a Carbome Democracy," in Transport Sociology: Social Aspects of Transport Planning, ed. Enne de Boer (Oxford: Pergammon Press, 1986), 160-162. 338 and more recently did devote far greater attention and resources to roads than to alternative forms of travel. Even the term "alternative" itself points to automobiles as the normative mode. In so doing, planners and political officials left those whom K.C. Koutsopolous and C.G. Schmidt call the "carless" with fewer and less appealing choices for moving around than those with access to cars. The "carless," they explain, comprise those groups who are entirely or almost entirely dependent on other people for transportation, and who do not have access to a car because of social, economic, and/or physical constraints. These include (and these categories may overlap) the elderly who cannot or choose not to drive, the young who are prohibited from driving, the poor who cannot afford to drive, and the disabled who do not have the physical or mental capability to operate a vehicle. 522 Highway planning and maintenance in Maryland and Virginia does not rule out concurrent governmental funding for other modes which serve the carless. Indeed, both states and their counties and municipalities have for decades put money into regional train and bus service as well as localized bus and van service, hiker-biker trails, and paratransit service for disabled residents. The large share of the pot traditionally allocated to roads does mean that alternative modes, which together serve both the car less and the "carred, 11 may receive less funding than they might if officials' priorities were different. 522 KC K t 1 d c G Schmidt "Mobility Constraints of the Carless," in . . ou sopo ous an · · ' · d d Trans rt s · I . Social Aspects of Transport Plannmg, e . Enne e Boer (Oxford: _ po oc10 ogy. "T rt s · 1 " · Per p 1986) 170 See also Enne de Boer, ranspo oc10 ogy, m gammon ress, , · · d E d Transport Sociology: Social Aspects of Transport Plannmg, e . nne e Boer (Oxford: Pergammon Press, 1986), 10. 339 Contrary to my expectations, however, the proportion of transportation ex d' · · pen 1tures m the Washington area used for highways has in recent years not been much higher than the proportion used for transit. In fiscal year 2001, for example, transportation funding programmed by the District, Maryland, and Northern Virginia favored highways over transit, but only by 56 percent to 41 percent (Table 3). Table 3.-Transportation Funding Programmed for Fiscal Year 2001 in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia (as of October 2000, in millions of dollars)523 Mode N Percent Highway 1,836.3 56.4% Transit* 1,333.2 41.0% Rideshare 47.0 1.4% Bicycle/Pedestrian 37.7 1.2% * Transit costs include capital and operating expenses, and include expenditures for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). In the future, transit expenses may in fact outpace highway expenses. The long-range regional forecast for the 2001-2025 period, developed in 2000 by transportation representatives from Washington, Maryland, and Virginia, projects a total expenditure over that time of $36,794,000,000 for highways and $40,007,000,000 for transit, or a 52. I to 47.9 percent split in favor oftransit. 524 523 Metropolitan Washington Counc~l of Governments, Transportation ~provement Program for the Metropolitan Washington Area. FY 2001-2006 (Washington: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 2001), 242. 524 Ibid., 34. 340 Even with a significant share of public funds allocated to transit, the imbalance of access remains in which transit serves as a viable resource for both the "carred" and the carless, while highways are more accessible only to those with access to motor vehicles. In their 1980 report to the U.S. Department of Transportation on the effects of beltways nationwide, Payne-Maxie Consultants explicitly link the development of beltways to a variety of negative impacts for the poor (and nonwhite, hidden behind the code word "inner-city"): As do all highways, Beltways primarily serve relatively affluent suburban residents. If expenditures for beltways are shown to hinder the development of efficient transit systems, they may actually decrease the potential mobility of transit-dependent inner-city residents. Further, by facilitating the suburbanization of housing, employment, and shopping opportunities, they serve to lessen their accessibility to the inhabitants of the central city, who are usually disproportionately elderly or members of lower-income groups or ethnic minorities. Suburbanization also reduces the revenue base available for the provision of services to inner-city populations. 525 The report adds that the decision to build and maintain a beltway is effectively a decision to help certain people and not others, when other options could help both: "Beltways provide nothing for distressed inner-city communities, which is not true of all transportation investments, an important consideration in this era of shrinking public resources. "526 Although Payne-Maxie does not make this point explicitly, other modes of transportation can similarly help certain groups disproportionately. For instance, by December 2001, Maryland's plans for the Purple Line, mentioned in the last chapter and 525 Payne-Maxie Consultants, The Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of Beltways: Executive Summary, 15. 526 Ibid. 341 intended to supplement the Beltway, had narrowed to two alternatives. Both proposed rail lines terminating in New Carrollton in Prince George's County and running westward into Montgomery County. But the so-called inner line (running inside the Beltway) would be a light rail system and would connect densely populated and poorer communities, while the outer line (running outside the Beltway) would be heavy rail and connect fast-growing business centers and communities. Governor Parris Glendening's decision to back the 32-mph inner line, with projected daily ridership of 34,000, over the 53-mph outer line, with projected ridership of 64,000, favored the poorer residents of inner-Beltway communities over the businesses of outer-Beltway suburbs. The state would contribute public funds to either project, but the favored inner line would be more helpful to the carless, as grateful Langley Park community leaders . d l d . , s21 pomte out after G en enmg s announcement. Payne-Maxie suggests that beltways are useless for certain groups who would benefit more from investments in other modes of transportation. But the carless are also excluded from drawing on the beltways as a transportation resource in a more straightforward way: They are legally prohibited from using the Beltway if they do not have access to a motor vehicle. Theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw has argued that laws or rules which appear to treat people equally may in fact promote inequalities. As an example, she cites a hypothetical restriction which prevents anyone from sleeping under bridges; the restriction has a disproportionate effect on poorer people who have l 'ttl h · h wealthier people who ostensibly are also subject to it, would 1 e c 01ce, w ereas , s21 See Matthew Mosk, "Purple Line Breeds More Confusion," Washington Post, 2 December 2001: Cl. 342 never consider sleeping under a bridge in the first place. 528 Similarly, laws which exclude pedestrians, cyclists, and equestrians from Interstate highways in theory apply to everybody, but in reality constrain the options only of those without access to motor vehicles. Thus, John Stilgoe writes, no bicyclist rides the interstate highway, and few motorists zooming up entrance ramps think long about the political message implicit in the No Bicycles signs. The interstate highway system is by law and use a limited- access system ... it emphasizes that the highway exists not for all citizens but only for those in vehicles suited to it, vehicles capable of the minimum speed of forty-five miles an hour. As the sign says, no bicyclists, no motor scooters, no self-propelled farm machinery, no horseback riders, no pedestrians, period. While all taxpayers contribute to its building and to its maintenance, although motorists pay even more through gasoline taxes, not all taxpayers are welcome in the special right-of-way. 529 Pedestrians and cyclists, excluded from the Beltway, have fewer choices for crossing the Potomac River to move between Maryland and Virginia, although the forthcoming new Wilson Bridge will include a barrier-separated pathway for bicycles and walkers. And residents of neighborhoods near the Beltway who want to walk quickly to adjacent communities across the road, as Lisa Loflin notes, are faced with the decision to go far out of their way or to dash, illegally, across the Beltway itself. Some do. Prohibitions against walking on the Beltway do not stop it from happening entirely, with sometimes tragic results. A Georgia resident, who grew up in Silver Spring near the future Holy Cross Hospital, recalls his friend having the s2s Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Color Blindness, History, ~d the Law," in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vmtage, 1998), 285. s29 Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic, 89-90. Stilgoe, a New England.resident, is apparently fth 1. y of some rural states to allow the use of bicycles on Interstate unaware o e po 1c b " · 1· p · h Id S &'. example Arizona Bicycle Clu , B1cyc mg on reeways m s ou ers. ee, 1or , · 1 Ari ,, 1. (21 February zona, on me, · · 2002). 343 "'distinction' of being the first pedestrian to be struck by a car (the fences were not up yet) on the Beltway," suffering a broken collar bone, in the early 1960s before the entire loop had even opened.530 On certain stretches of the Beltway, community residents routinely cross the Beltway as a shortcut despite the danger. On a one-mile portion in Oxon Hill, Md., near the St. Barnabas Road interchange, five pedestrians were killed between 1986 and 1992 alone; a Maryland State Police officer noted in 1992 that police issued more $55 tickets for pedestrian trespassing on that segment than anywhere else in Prince George's County. 531 Highway officials, familiar with the problem, have been challenged to develop safeguards which will keep pedestrians out. People intent on reaching the Beltway cut through fences and walk around walls, two solutions intended to discourage trespassing. SHA maintenance supervisor Lany Kidwell describes the difficulty of dissuading would-be pedestrians and the typical nonchalance of one girl even after being struck while crossing: I'm sure you probably knew years ago that a couple of kids got run over trying to cross the Beltway. Now they put up sound barriers down there, and a wall so they can't cross. But they're crossing right up the street where there is no wall, right on the other side of Saint Barnabas. I tell you, we we:e down there years ago doing a depatchingjob. We were on the southbound side. And I had a vehicle going on the northbound side that pulled over on the left shoulder, came over to me, and told me that a person was hit, right up in front of me. So first thing my instinct was to go up there and find out so that I could get on the radio and,get help, whatever we need. So I get up there, and a girl came out 530 Beltway Survey #259. 531 p 1 D an "Two Killed Crossing Beltway," Washington Post, 21 September 1990: au ugg , ,, W hi gt p 21 A D3 . p 1 D gan "Beltway Fatality Renews Outcry, as n on ost, ugust 1992:;l; ;;ul Duggan, Md. to Add Beltway Wall to Stop Pedestrian Deaths," Washington Post, 12 September 1992: Bl. 344 of, I think it's Marlo~ Heights Mews, or whatever those apartments are right there. And she made 1t to the second lane, and she hesitated. And a truck hit her. Knocked her from the second lane all the way into the median strip. And I seen her in the median strip and I went over to her. And all she wanted me to do was · get her up and get her back across the road. And I tried to talk to her, I was asking her was she hurt, and she was holding her side. And I tried to talk to her to keep her calm. Because as soon as the guy stopped and told me somebody was hit, I got on the radio and told 'em, get a trooper out here, and a trooper came up. We stood there and we talked to her and talked to her until the medical people got there. And they got her out of there. But the only thing she kept telling me was she needed to go home. And I said, why did ~ou try to cross the Beltway? And she said she was going over to see a friend. 5 2 Like the girl in Kidwell's story, the Beltway's pedestrians often ignore the danger they face. Silver Spring resident Charles Mercogliano explains that as a teenager (and a stupid one at that), I would sometimes cross the beltway rather than walk to the nearest exit. This exercise is not for the faint of heart or slow of foot. . .. [W]hen I crossed the beltway on foot, it was usually at night. ... I'm sure the drivers saw me, but I wasn't looking for their reactions. In looking back, it was probably the most foolish thing I have done in my life. But when you're a teenager, you feel indestructible. I stopped crossing the beltway after witnessing what can happen when a pedestrian doesn't make · 533 1t across. One solution would seem to be pedestrian overpasses. But former SHA district engineer William Shook, responding at a 1999 symposium to a question about "what thought was given to building pedestrian overpasses, or providing pedestrian facilities on automobile bridges on the Beltway," remembered "very little. We built very few. In fact, I can't think of any offhand on the Capital Beltway [though the Baltimore Beltway had several] ."534 Most likely, the original planning process which did not take abutters' 532 Interview with Larry Kidwell. 533 Beltway Survey #491 . 534 "Building the Beltway: The Montgomery Experience." 345 concerns into consideration also did not focus intently on pedestrians. But even in later years, when the need for overpasses became more acute, physical and social factors discouraged planners from adding them. SHA district engineer Charlie Watkins notes that overpasses are more expensive than they appear (often $1 million or more), require more space on adjacent land than they appear to need ( especially to be built ADA- compliant), and often act as crime magnets.535 While overpasses do work effectively in certain contexts, they are not a panacea for the pedestrian problem. Cyclists, too, are excluded from the Beltway, but do not try to trespass as frequently as pedestrians. One cyclist notes that the Beltway presents a double whammy: on one hand, bicycle riders cannot use it to move easily between the suburbs, as drivers do; on the other, they have trouble even crossing the barrier the Beltway creates: "I'm a bicyclist. It's very hard to get across the Beltway on a bicycle. There aren't a lot of places you can do it. Unless you're a very confident, comfortable in traffic, urban bicycle rider, you're not gonna-the Beltway's a posted barrier around a ten-mile square. 11536 Annandale resident Arthur McClinton concurs that "[t]he inability of anyone not already in a car to cross the beltway" makes it a serious physical boundary. "My office is just inside the beltway and my house is outside the beltway. I cannot bicycle from one to the other as the beltway and the lack of pedestrian crossing ak . -"" d 11537 m e 1t not srue to o so. 535 Interview with Charlie Watkins. 536 Interview with Douglas Feaver. 537 Beltway Survey #513. 346 While cyclists do not expect access to the Beltway itself, some argue for alternative considerations to compensate. In May 1999, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association developed and presented to VDOT five principles for a bicycle-friendly Beltway: preservation of every existing or planned low-traffic Beltway crossing, provision of bicycle and pedestrian facilities (e.g., sidewalks and on-road bike lanes) on all arteries crossing the Beltway, grade-separated overpasses or underpasses at locations "where crossing the Beltway at-grade is considered unsafe," bicycle routes parallel to the Beltway on trails and/or low-traffic streets, and interchange designs which are safe and not intimidating for cyclists and pedestrians to cross. 538 Even with these provisions, access to the Beltway itself would still be heavily off-limits to people without motor vehicles, although in the 1990s Metrobus initiated service across the Woodrow Wilson and American Legion Bridges. All area residents benefit in some ways from the Beltway's limited-access and its resulting (at least in theory) high speeds; for example, freight and mail trucks and ambulances can move more efficiently on such roads than they can on local streets. Still, as Payne-Maxie's 1980 report points out, other modes of transportation are open to a much broader spectrum of the population. "[I]fyou don't have a car or other means of transportation," one respondent writes, "you are limited in your ability to use the beltway to get around the w ashington DC area. 11539 The Beltway and other limited-access highways, and the m Virginia Department of Transportation, Capital Beltway Study: Summary Report, Citizen Workshops. June 8. 9. 10. 1999, vol. 3 of 3, comments #302 and #236. See also Bill Silverman, "Bike to Metro?" Washington Post, 19 June 1988: C8. 539 Beltway Survey #256. 347 prohibitions that attend them, draw on public funding without providing the same level of equal access as other modes. 348 CHAPTERS "THE BELTWAY ALONE WILL KEEP ME FROM RETURNING": THE CAPITAL BELTWAY AND/IN INDIVIDUAL LIVES I hate the entire beltway. There is no way to get around this area without having to go in circles. I would love nothing more than a few roads that go in a straight line. I do everything in my power to avoid the beltway and the craziness that accompanies it. -Bernadette Gallagher, Bladensburg, Md. 540 The significance of a cultural landscape depends as much on how it exists in people's minds as on how it appears in the physical world. The power of thought is the key here: Landscapes are both conceptual and physical. The ways in which people perceive and interpret a landscape--as "wilderness," "beautiful," "dangerous," "useless," and so forth--can have "tangible consequences for how that space is utilized, which in turn affects the behavior of those perceiving the landscape in that particular way."541 People often make decisions of public policy and personal choice based on their perceptions of a given site, even if they have had limited or no physical exposure to it. Highway engineers can do everything in their power to make a road as safe as possible, but if drivers continue to perceive it as dangerous, then for them it is dangerous even if the danger exists only within their mental construction of the highway. 540 Beltway Survey #173. 541 J. Edward Hood, "Social Relations and the C~tural ~and~cape," in Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting the Amencan ~~~to~~ L~dscf;' ed. Rebecca y amin and Karen Bescherer Metheny (Knoxv1 e: mvers1ty o ennessee Press, 1996), 122· 123. 349 In this chapter, I turn from the physical Beltway to the cognitive one to explore how the road exists in the minds of the people who use it ( or choose not to) and how the Beltway, both material and conceptual, has played an integral part in their individual lives. This discussion directly addresses the cultural landscape fieldwork model's suggestions, in its third operation, to examine the range, development, and implications of perceptions of a given site. The perceived Beltway, in contrast to its physical form, is significant because the ways people think about it determine how they respond to it and how they will or will not pressure political and highway officials to take action concerning it. Before drawing on my Web survey for insight into perceptions of the Beltway, I offer a breakdown of several demographic categories to set out who my respondents were. I then discuss how drivers' beliefs about the level of danger on the Beltway lead to their decisions for whether or not to use it, regardless of the statistical danger they face. After looking at how drivers respond to the frustrations they encounter on the Beltway and other ways in which the Beltway has entered their lives, I conclude the chapter by examining how drastically the road plays a role in major personal decisions. The Web Survey Respondents In Chapter 2, I explained that my Web survey of2000-200I, from which I have been quoting extensively in the chapters since, was conducted as an observational study h th trolled experiment Because participants were self-selected, and rat er an as a con · b f th dynanu·cs inherent to this type ofresearch tool as discussed earlier, the ecause o o er 350 results of that survey are not necessarily representative of any larger group(s); instead, they open a window into the minds and lives of the specific individuals who did respond. Even so, it is helpful to have some idea of who those individuals are. In all, the survey drew 607 usable responses, though in this study, I have referenced the surveys using a numbering scheme from 1 to 620. Among those 620, six surveys were submitted a second time by their respondents, often to add additional data; in these cases, I numbered both surveys but drew only from the more detailed response. Seven surveys were submitted in the form of single narrative anecdotes rather than answers to the specific questions; I numbered these as surveys, but did not include them in my demographic counts because the respondents provided no demographic information. 542 In keeping with anthropologist James Spradley's stance on ethical ethnographic research procedures, I provided each respondent with a range of options for how they wished to be identified. Spradley insists that ethnographers have the responsibility not just to consider but to actively safeguard the rights, interests, and sensitivities of their informants, whose lives they are invading. 543 Accordingly, each respondent was required to check one of these three options (I set the computer program to reject the response if no option was checked): "Use my name (or direct identifiers) as appropriate"; "Do not use my name or direct identifiers .. . instead, describe me in s42 The following Web survey responses were repetitious, with the prevailing response in parentheses: 60 (59), 143 (144), 166 (16.4), 209 (21 !), 237 (240), 456 (455). The following responses consisted solely ofa smgle narrative anecdote: 190,375,547,568, 593, 599, 608. 543 Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview, 35-36. 351 ---------- demographic terms (for example, a 27-year-old woman from Vienna)"; or "Do not use my name, direct identifiers, or demographic description. "544 In the table below, I refer to these three options as "Full identification," "Partial identification," and "No identification." Only a small percentage of respondents chose to completely safeguard their identities. Table 4.-Extent of Identification Disclosure for Web Survey (607 responses) Extent N Percent Full identification 231 38.1% Partial identification 355 58.9% No identification 21 3.5% One ofmy primary reasons for using a Web survey rather than a traditional paper survey was to cover further physical ground, to reach a more geographically dispersed set of respondents. Indeed, responses came from 22 states and one country in addition to Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., which provided the bulk of the replies. Interestingly, the respective shares of responses from Maryland and Virginia almost exactly mirrored their respective proportional shares of the Beltway's mileage. In miles, 65.6% of the Beltway is in Maryland and 34.4% in Virginia. Relative to the 530 total responses from residents of both states, I received 353, or 66.6%, of those replies from Maryland residents and 177, or 33.4%, from Virginians. 544 In addition in my face-to-face and phone interviews, I asked each informant to indicate which material they shared with me should remain "off the record." Several did take advantage of the opportunity; I have regretfully withheld those specific contributions from this study. 352 Table 5.-Residence of Respondents by State ( 604 responses) State of residence N Percent Maryland 353 58.4% Virginia 177 29.3% Washington, D.C. 16 2.6% Florida 6 1.0% Massachusetts 5 0.8% New York 5 0.8% Pennsylvania 5 0.8% Georgia 4 0.7% Germany 4 0.7% Texas 4 0.7% California 3 0.5% Michigan 3 0.5% Indiana 2 0.3% Missouri 2 0.3% New Jersey 2 0.3% South Carolina 2 0.3% Tennessee 2 0.3% Connecticut 1 0.2% Maine 1 0.2% Minnesota 1 0.2% North Carolina 1 0.2% Ohio 1 0.2% Rhode Island 1 0.2% Utah 1 0.2% Vermont 1 0.2% West Virginia 1 0.2% From a national context (or international, counting the responses from Germany), the Web survey thus succeeded in reaching out to many individuals who had had prior experiences with the Capital Beltway, but who I would not have reached with a paper survey. I faced a similar dynamic in the Washington area itself. Although the Beltway passes through just two counties in Maryland and one in Virginia (plus an autonomous city), its regular users include commuters from some two dozen counties 353 stretching far into northern Maryland, western and southern Virginia, and West Virginia. The Web survey was able to successfully draw on these outlying counties. Table 6.-Residence of Respondents by County or Autonomous City Note: Asterisk (*) indicates a county or city through which the Capital Beltway passes. ( 604 responses) County/City of residence N Percent *Mongomery Co., Md. 163 27.0% *Prince George's Co., Md. 92 15.2% *Fairfax Co., Va. 90 14.9% Non-Md., Va., D.C., W.V. 57 9.4% Howard Co., Md. 33 5.5% Arlington Co., Va. 27 4.5% Anne Arundel Co., Md. 24 4.0% *City of Alexandria, Va. 18 3.0% *City of Washington, D.C. 16 2.6% City of Baltimore, Md. 12 2.0% Loudoun Co., Va. 12 2.0% Prince William Co., Va. 9 1.5% City of Fairfax, Va. 8 1.3% Baltimore Co., Md. 7 1.2% Charles Co., Md. 6 1.0% Frederick Co., Md. 4 0.7% Calvert Co., Md. 3 0.5% Carroll Co., Md. 3 0.5% Harford Co., Md. 3 0.5% Stafford Co., Va. 3 0.5% City of Richmond, Va. 2 0.3% Spotsylvania Co., Va. 2 0.3% St. Mary's Co., Md. 2 0.3% City of Charlottesville, Va. 1 0.2% City of Falls Church, Va. 1 0.2% City of Radford, Va. 1 0.2% Grayson Co., Va. 1 0.2% Jefferson Co., W.V. 1 0.2% Prince Edward Co., Va. 1 0.2% Queen Anne Co., Md. 1 0.2% Rockbridge Co., Va. 1 0.2% 354 A further breakdown of respondents by city or town of residence indicates a geographic spread across the Washington region. In the table below, an asterisk(*) refers to cities or towns inside the Beltway, a caret("') refers to cities or towns which straddle the Beltway, and the absence of a symbol denotes a city or town outside the Beltway. I cluster together the cities and towns outside of Maryland, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia in the first entry listed. Table 7.-Residence of Respondents by City or Town (590 responses) City or town of residence N Percent Non-area cities/towns 56 9.5% "Silver Spring, Md. 46 7.8% * Alexandria, Va. 32 5.4% Rockville, Md. 29 4.9% * Arlington, Va. 24 4.1% *College Park, Md. 20 3.4% "Bethesda, Md. 18 3.1% *Washington, D.C. 16 2.7% Gaithersburg, Md. 14 2.4% Baltimore, Md. 13 2.2% "Springfield, Va. 13 2.2% "Greenbelt, Md. 12 2.0% Laurel, Md. 12 2.0% Columbia, Md. 11 1.9% Bowie, Md. 9 1.5% Fairfax, Va. 9 1.5% Germantown, Md. 9 1.5% *Hyattsville, Md. 9 1.5% Potomac, Md. 9 1.5% Beltsville, Md. 8 1.4% Burke, Va. 8 1.4% Ellicott City, Md. 8 1.4% *McLean, Va. 8 1.4% *Chevy Chase, Md. 7 1.2% *Falls Church, Va. 7 1.2% Herndon, Va. 6 1.0% Vienna, Va. 6 1.0% 355 /\ Annandale, Va. 5 0.8% Annapolis, Md. 5 0.8% Centreville, Va. 5 0.8% Reston, Va. 5 0.8% *Takoma Park, Md. 5 0.8% Waldorf, Md. 5 0.8% Wheaton, Md. 5 0.8% * Adelphi, Md. 4 0.7% Mt. Airy, Md. 4 0.7% Montgomery Village, Md. 4 0.7% Odenton, Md. 4 0.7% Olney, Md. 4 0.7% *Sterling, Va. 4 0.7% Upper Marlboro, Md. 4 0.7% Crofton, Md. 3 0.5% Elkridge, Md. 3 0.5% Leesburg, Va. 3 0.5% Woodbridge, Va. 3 0.5% Ashburn, Va. 2 0.3% *Bladensburg, Md. 2 0.3% Burtonsville, Md. 2 0.3% *Capitol Heights, Md. 2 0.3% Chantilly, Va. 2 0.3% Churchton, Md. 2 0.3% *District Heights, Md. 2 0.3% Edgewater, Md. 2 0.3% Fort Washington, Md. 2 0.3% Frederick, Md. 2 0.3% Fredericksburg, Va. 2 0.3% Halethorpe, Md. 2 0.3% Jessup, Md. 2 0.3% /\Kensington, Md. 2 0.3% Lake Ridge, Va. 2 0.3% Prince Frederick, Md. 2 0.3% Richmond, Va. 2 0.3% Stafford, Va. 2 0.3% *University Park, Md. 2 0.3% Accokeek, Md. 1 0.2% Andrews Air Fee. Base, Md. 1 0.2% Arnold, Md. 1 0.2% Bel Air, Md. 1 0.2% Belcamp, Md. 1 0.2% Brandywine, Md. 1 0.2% * Brentwood, Md. 1 0.2% Catonsville, Md. 1 0.2% Charles Town, W.V. 1 0.2% 356 Charlottesville, Va. 1 0.2% Cheltenham, Md. 1 0.2% Clarksburg, Md. 1 0.2% Clifton, Va. 1 0.2% Cockeysville, Md. 1 0.2% Colesville, Md. 1 0.2% Dale City, Va. 1 0.2% Derwood, Md. 1 0.2% Dumfries, Va. 1 0.2% Elk Creek, Va. 1 0.2% Fair Oaks, Va. 1 0.2% Fairfax Station, Va. 1 0.2% Fort Belvoir, Va. 1 0.2% Glen Burnie, Md. 1 0.2% Glenelg, Md. 1 0.2% Green Bay, Va. 1 0.2% Haymarket, Va. 1 0.2% Hollywood, Md. 1 0.2% Joppa, Md. 1 0.2% La Plata, Md. 1 0.2% "Landover, Md. 1 0.2% "Lanham, Md. 1 0.2% Leonardtown, Md. 1 0.2% Lexington, Va. 1 0.2% Lincolnia, Va. 1 0.2% Lorton, Va. 1 0.2% Lusby, Md. 1 0.2% Manassas, Va. 1 0.2% Middleburg, Va. 1 0.2% Millersville, Md. 1 0.2% Mineral, Va. 1 0.2% North Bethesda, Md. 1 0.2% North Hills, Md. 1 0.2% North Potomac, Md. 1 0.2% Oakton, Va. 1 0.2% Pikesville, Md. 1 0.2% Pine Orchard, Md. 1 0.2% Poolesville, Md. 1 0.2% Radford, Va. 1 0.2% *Riverdale Park, Md. 1 0.2% Round Hill, Va. 1 0.2% Severn, Md. 1 0.2% Sevema Park, Md. 1 0.2% South Riding, Va. 1 0.2% Stevensville, Md. 1 0.2% Sykesville, Md. 1 0.2% 357 Tracy's Landing, Md. Washington Grove, Md. Woodlawn, Md. 1 1 1 0.2% 0.2% 0.2% Earlier, I noted that my survey about the Beltway is only the most recent in a series of at least three, dating back to the 1960s. The AAA auto club conducted a survey of its members a few years after the Beltway opened, and the Virginia Department of Transportation another in the early 1990s. My survey expands on the geographical distribution of the Virginia effort, which was limited to 64 residents from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington. It also expands on the 1966 AAA survey, which drew nearly as many responses as mine (between 500 and 600) but was limited to AAA members. At least one-fourth of the respondents to my survey have never been members of AAA or any similar club. The relevant question on my survey asked: "Are you a member of an automobile, truck, motorcycle, or bus organization (for example, AAA)?" Table 8.-Status of Vehicle Club Membership ( 600 responses) Status of membership N Percent Current member 326 54.3% Former member 123 20.5% Never a member 151 25.2% Respondents to my survey ranged in age from 18 through 78. The highest cluster is from age 21 through 30, likely in part due to my circulating notice of the survey in progress to my graduate classmates and other friends of contemporary age. It is possible that the small number of responses above age 70 results in part from lack of access to or knowledge of the Internet among people in that age bracket. 358 Table 9.-Age of Respondents in 2000 or 2001 ( 603 responses) Age 18-20 21-25 26-30 31-35 36-40 41-45 46-50 51-55 56-60 61-65 66-70 71-75 76-80 N 30 86 120 57 63 56 64 62 29 20 12 1 3 Percent 5.0% 14.3% 19.9% 9.5% 10.4% 9.3% 10.6% 10.3% 4.8% 3.3% 2.0% 0.2% 0.5% More women than men completed the survey. For racial identification, I provided the same options as the 2000 census. Respondents were permitted to make a single choice among White, Black or African American, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race (with a space to write in an additional term). Figures follow also for levels of education, income and professional status; most respondents in the lowest two income brackets were students (indicated by the ".edu" in their email addresses and by explicit references in their replies). Table 10.-Gender of Respondents ( 606 responses) Gender N Female 343 359 Percent 56.6% Male 263 43.4% Table I I .-Race of Respondents (599 responses) Race N Percent White 528 88.1% Black or African American 36 6.0% American Indian 0 0.0% Asian 7 1.2% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Isl. 1 0.2% Some Other Race 27 4.5% Table 12.-Highest Level of Education Achieved ( 607 responses) Level N Did not graduate high school 0 High school degree 14 Technical school degree 8 Some college experience 111 College degree 248 Master's degree or equivalent 178 Doctorate or equivalent 48 Percent 0.0% 2.3% 1.3% 18.3% 40.1% 29.3% 7.9% Table 13.- Annual Household Income, in dollars (576 responses) Income N $1-19,999 22 20,000-34,999 39 35,000-49,999 90 50,000-74,999 130 75,000-99,999 110 100,000-149,999 128 150,000 or more 57 Table 14.- Employment Status ( 5 96 responses) 360 Percent 3.8% 6.8% 15.6% 22.6% 19.1% 22.2% 9.9% Status Full-time Part-time Not employed N 471 80 45 Percent 79.0% 13.4% 7.6% To gauge the transportation habits of the respondent set, I asked a series of questions relating to traveling on the Beltway and to traveling in general. After the question "For non-recreational purposes, I regularly use the following modes of transportation (check all that apply)," I listed ten modes, up to all of which could be selected. I understood the term "train" to include heavy and light rail transit, but several respondents noted in a comment section that they thought I should have specified "subway" or "Metro" in a separate category. I included the esoteric modes of "boat" and "helicopter" to allow, respectively, for commuters outside the Washington area (for instance, New York City) who use ferries, and for wealthier respondents or emergency medical technicians who may use helicopters. The percentages below total higher than 100% because more than one category could be checked. Table 15.-Modes of Transportation for Non-recreational Purposes (568 responses) Mode N Percent Car (other than taxi) 516 90.9% Walking 197 34.7% Train 184 32.4% Plane 87 15.3% Bus 76 13.4% Bicycle 52 9.2% Taxi 45 7.9% Truck 36 6.3% Roller blades or skates 10 1.8% 361 Van pool Boat Helicopter 10 3 2 1.8% 0.5% 0.4% The responses to questions about Beltway driving patterns indicate that over half of the respondents use the highway primarily for non-work purposes; for my survey set, at least, the Beltway is not just a commuter road for its local drivers. In the second table below, the figures indicating that a majority of respondents drive entirely or mostly on the ·Maryland side is consistent with the geographic breakdown favoring Maryland residents. Table 16.-Primary Purpose of Beltway Use (605 responses) Primary purpose N Percent Work-related traveling 128 21.2% Non-work related traveling 323 53.4% Work-related and non-work related travel equally 139 23.0% None of the above 15 2.5% Table 17.- Geographic Distribution of Beltway Use ("When driving on the Capital Beltway, you use:") ( 604 responses) Distribution Md. portion almost exclusively Va. portion almost exclusively . Portions in both states, but mostly m Md. Portions in both states, but mostly in Va. Md. and Va. portions equally None of the above N 133 47 240 93 88 3 Table 18.-Primary Distance of Beltway Travel 362 Percent 22.0% 7.8% 39.7% 15.4% 14.6% 0.5% ( 602 responses) Primary distance N Shorter-distance travel (3 or fewer exits) 3 7 Mediwn-distance travel (4 to 7 exits) 172 Longer-distance travel (8 or more exits) 140 Combination of the above 222 Rarely or never use the Capital Beltway 28 Other 3 Percent 6.1% 28.6% 23.3% 36.9% 4.7% 0.5% All but a few of the 607 respondents responded to all or most of the demographic questions. The full survey, including many questions asking for free responses (rather than multiple choice), is reproduced in Appendix A. While the demographic data summarized in this section show variations among the respondents, their free responses indicate what they have in common and what therefore defines the participant set in this survey: To a person (and as I had hoped), all 607 individuals have some familiarity with the Capital Beltway and personal experience riding on it. The remainder of this chapter explores how those experiences have contributed to shaping my respondents' thoughts regarding the Beltway, and how in turn their perceptions help guide their decisions and everyday lives with respect to the highway. Is the Beltway Safe? The Beltway opened in 1964. By 1965, some Washington-area residents refused to drive on it because they considered it too dangerous, supporting their claims with personal anecdotes and newspaper accounts of accidents. My survey respondents indicate that in 2001 safety remains a serious concern to people considering using the 363 Beltway. But despite the engineering hazards discussed earlier, it is not clear that the Beltway has statistically proved more dangerous than other roads to its drivers, either in 1965 or in 2001. Statistics, however, do not determine drivers' behavior; their perception of potential danger does. When discussing the Old Dominion Paradox, I explained how Virginia's transportation planning process can be considered either inclusive or exclusive of the public, depending on one's perspective. Similarly, the level of danger presented by the Beltway at any given time can be seen as high or low, depending on how the analysis is framed. Consider the following contrasting articles from Northern Virginia newspapers, both published within two years of the Beltway's opening. In December 1964, under the headline "2 Fatalities Per Month On Beltway," the Fairfax City Times claimed that "[I]n the short time it has been in existence, the new Capitol [sic] Beltway has chalked up a fatality rate that is exceedingly high. Six fatalities add up to 2 a month, and numerous accidents have occurred since the opening of the Beltway. 11545 Less than a year later, the Northern Virginia Sun ran a piece titled "Casualties on Capital Beltway Said Remarkably Low in Nwnber," quoting a VDH engineer who noted that the Beltway had a "remarkably low incidence of injury and death. "546 Both claims were accurate. Readers, however, may well have been confused, because the articles did not explain that the writers were unconsciously using different yardsticks for measuring danger. The Fairfax City Times author likely based his or her 545 "2 Fatalities Per Month on the Beltway," Fairfax City Times, 11 December 1964: 2. 546 Thomas Love, "Casualties on Capital Beltway Said Remarkably Low in Nwnber,1' Northern Virginia Sun, 23 November 1965: 1. 364 judgment on raw numbers: two fatalities a month plus many other accidents on a single road seemed extraordinarily high. But the Northern Virginia Sun journalist judged the Beltway's fatality and accident rates against other roads and found them relatively low. That writer followed the highway officials' convention of measuring accident rates in terms of VMT, or vehicle miles traveled. In 1965, the Beltway's first :full year of operation, Maryland's portion of the Beltway alone realized 738 accidents with 12 deaths. Both figures are large enough in and of themselves to potentially have made 1965 drivers think twice before heading onto the Beltway. But when viewed in context against other highways, the numbers no longer look so high. The 12 deaths in 1965 translate into 1.5 deaths per 100 million VMT, compared to 2.6 deaths per 100 million VMT on freeways nationally and 5.7 deaths per 100 million VMT on U.S. highways nationally in 1965. In Virginia too, the 1.4 deaths per 100 million VMT on the Beltway in 1965 holds up we11 against figures of 3.2 on other Virginia interstates and 7.1 on the state's primary and secondary highways. 547 This pattern has held steady in the years since 1965. Even as the Beltway's raw numbers in accidents and fatalities increased, its danger relative to other roads stayed low. By 1988, the Beltway experienced about six accidents a day, a seemingly high number for a 64-mile road but a much lower accident rate (100 accidents per 100 million VMT) than other major area roads. "That explains why," a reporter wrote, compared to the Beltway, you are seven times as likely to have an accident on Columbia Pike in Virginia; six times as likely on Lee Highway; five times as likely on Little River Turnpike; four times as likely on Rockville Pike or 547 Ibid. ; Martha Angle, "Road Built as D.C. Bypass Has Become a Main Street," Evening Star, 21 March 1966: A-1; Lee Flor, "Beltway Probe Includes Role of Park, Planning Agencies," Evening Star, 11 June 1967: D-2. 365 Leesburg Pike; three times as likely on Connecticut Avenue, Georgia Avenue, or Columbia Pike in Maryland and on Route 28 and Route 50 in Virginia; twice as likely on I-95 south of the Beltway; and 1.5 times as likely on Shirley Highway. Your chances for an accident on John Hanson Highway (Route 50) are about the same as on the Beltway, and you are 25 percent less likely to be in an accident on I-270, 1-95 north of the Beltway, I-66, and the Dulles Toll Road.548 In Maryland, the fatal accident rate statewide decreased from 4.0 fatalities per 100 million VMT in 1968 to 1.1 deaths per 100 million VMT in 1999, even as the actual vehicle miles traveled more than doubled from 18.8 billion to 49 .1 billion over the same period. The injury accident rate similarly declined from 174.7 injuries to 77.4 injuries per 100 million VMT-but the actual number of injured people increased from 54,325 in 1968 to 59,979 in 1999 (down from a high of 84,649 in 1986).549 Looking at the actual numbers of injuries gives the appearance that more people were hurt driving in Maryland in 1999 than thirty years earlier, which is true. And it is the appearance, not the published statistics, which have the stronger public effect. Motorists driving on the Beltway or on other busy roads think about the accidents and deaths they see on the road or on television; they do not think about SHA and VDOT statistics which suggest that the roads are in fact significantly safer than they have been in the past. This gap between statistics and perception helps explain the phenomenon of "Beltway phobia," for which Washington-area psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists began counseling in the 1970s. By 1980, two clinics-the Phobia Program of 548 Steven D. Kaye, "Mean Streets," Washingtonian, February 1988: 110. 549 Interview with Maj Shakib; Maryland State Highway Administration, Office of Traffic and Safety, Traffic Safety Analysis Division, "Maryland Traffic Accident Facts for State and Local Highways," (26 March 2001). 366 -- - Washington and the Phobia Treatment Center in Alexandria-ran programs specifically to deal with Beltway phobia. The director of the Washington program in 1980 described the phobia as common, crippling, and encompassing many fears: "the fear of being away from home, fear of bridges, fear of high speed trucks, fear of being trapped. "550 Beltway phobia was part of a greater framework of driving phobias, another specialist explained, in which "sufferers fall victim to panic attacks (heart palpitations, hyperventilation, feelings of faintness) when confronted with 495's multiple lanes of zooming cars and thundering trucks."551 An Alexandria psychiatrist treating patients with Beltway phobia described the highway as a "round-shaped Rorschach test," in which drivers all manage to find a way to see their concerns brought to life. 552 Phobia Center patients went through programs designed to nurse them to comfort on the Beltway; in 1980, for example, a 51-year-old Silver Spring resident drove on the Beltway for the first time in eight years after completing 25 weeks in the phobia program. 553 The net result of both Beltway phobia and the perceived sense of intense danger is drivers who decline to use the Beltway out of fear: "I fear for my life on the Beltway, 550 Stephanie Mansfield, "Fear & Loathing on the Beltway," Washington Post, 23 March 1980: Dl. 551 Lynne Cheney, "The Beltway: A Ring That Binds, A Line That Divides," Washingtonian, May 1985: 199. m Katherine Shaver and Leef Smith, "Beltway Fears Drive Some to Distraction," Washington Post, 1 July 2001: Al. 553 Mansfield, "Fear & Loathing." 367 quite literally," a Sterling resident writes. 554 This stance was evident as early as 1966, when an Oxon Hill resident rejected the Beltway despite its time savings: "I've tried getting on it and no thanks. It's hell getting on and it's hell getting off. I had an accident at one of the interchanges a few months ago and that did it for me as far as I'm concerned. The beltway's just a speed trap for crazy drivers. "555 Through 2001, many commuters went out of their way to find alternate routes besides the Beltway not just to escape heavy traffic, but out of concern for their personal safety. A Rockville resident explained in 1995 that "everything about it terrifies me. If I can't get there on a back road, I just won't go at all. It takes me twice as long [to visit my sister in Bowie], but I will not take the Beltway. People ask me why. I tell them it's fear."556 A Washington architect similarly described waking up 45 minutes early to prepare himself psychologically for drives on "the biggest hazard out there. "557 Perceived terror keeps some drivers off the Beltway even when they have not actually tested the road to see how dangerous it feels to them. After moving from Kansas, Alexandria resident Peggy Brown waited ten years to drive on the Beltway "out of great fear;" University Park resident Jo Paoletti recalls that her mother, who moved to the Washington area in her early sixties, "NEVER drove on the Beltway, because she 554 B l S e tway urvey #289. 555 Qtd. in Martha Angle, "Road Built as D.C. Bypass Has Become a Main Street," Evening Star, 21 March 1966: A-18. 556 Qtd. in Leef Smith, "Beltway Phobia Drives Some to Take the Long Way Home," Washington Post, 12 February 1995: Al. 557 Ibid. 368 was terrified of it. "558 Even experienced Beltway drivers find themselves scared off: A Centreville resident relates having "a panic attack on the Beltway [in 1990]. I had never experienced such a thing before, anywhere. I had to get off the Beltway and did not go back on the Beltway until 1998. "559 Often with only hearsay to guide them, out-of-town drivers regularly call Washington AAA offices to ask for routings around the city which would steer clear of the Beltway.560 And all of this for a highway which has in fact been statistically safer than many of the alternative routes to which frightened motorists turned. But that is not the point, Gerson Alexander, a driving behavior consultant, explained in 1995: "Whether the Beltway is more dangerous than other roadways is not more relevant when you deal with people's personal beliefs. To them, it's more risky."561 Still, even if the Beltway is safer than other roads, it is not entirely without danger; the accident and fatality rates have always been well above zero. And as discussed in Chapter 7, certain aspects of the Beltway, notably its early engineering designs, have rendered it more hazardous than it has needed to be.562 Highway officials in both states have worked continuously to minimize the Beltway's dangers, but it is 558 Beltway Surveys #198 and #17. 559 Beltway Survey #402. 560 Smith, "Beltway Phobia." 561 Ibid. 562 For a selection of critiques of the Beltway's safety at different times, see "The Beltway (I): Speed and Safety" [editorial], Washington Post, 27 March 1974: Al8; Raleigh Burroughs, "Survival Guide for Beltway Rookies," Washington Post, 25 February 1978: A15; "Your Deadliest Drag Strip" [editorial], Washington Post, 16 February 1984: Al8; "Beltway Killers: What to Do" [editorial], Washington Post, 15 September 1988: A24; and Steve Bates, "Va. to Curb Some Cargo on Beltway," Washington Post, 16 December 1988: Bl. 369 unlikely that those dangers can be eliminated entirely. In comparison with the perceived dangers drivers tend to superimpose on the Beltway, what actually characterizes the accidents and fatalities on the road? In other words, where might safety-oriented motorists direct their attention while driving on the Beltway? The Preusser Research Group, working under contract for VDOT, analyzed more than 6,000 accidents on the Beltway between 1990 and 1992 in Maryland and Virginia. The group's findings run counter to some public perceptions of the Beltway's dangers, and offer guidance in understanding the actual causes of the road's accidents and fatalities. The peak time for crashes, Preusser found, coincided with rush-hour congestion. More crashes occurred on Fridays and in November and December than at other times, so drivers were not equally at risk at all times. 83 percent of drivers in Beltway crashes were local residents, so the confusion experienced by long-distance drivers (noted in Chapter 7) in that sense was not a critical hazard. However, 70 percent of tractor-trailer crashes occurred on the I-95 Oong-distance) portion of the Beltway, and only 34 percent of tractor-trailer drivers were locally based, so the unfamiliarity of out-of-town truck drivers with the Beltway may have contributed to their accident rate. Contrary to the perceptions I heard from fire and rescue personnel, alcohol involvement in Beltway crashes was minimal; only seven percent of accidents involved drinking drivers, below the typical interstate crash average (and within that seven percent, truck drivers appeared at half the rate of other vehicle drivers). 44 percent of crashes were rear-end collisions, caused mostly by following too closely or inattentive driving (in 73 percent of these cases, the lead vehicle had stopped or slowed due to traffic congestion). One-third of crashes occurred on wet, icy, or snow-covered 370 pavement, meaning that drivers had better reason to avoid the Beltway during times of precipitation than otherwise. And 26 percent of fatal crashes involved pedestrian victims (underscoring the danger of walking on the Beltway) and occurred mostly at night.563 Together, these observations suggest that drivers' fears of using the Beltway need not lead to an all-or-nothing proposition. If the accident patterns from 1990 to 1992 remain even somewhat consistent in later years, Preusser's findings amount to a checklist of how motorists can give themselves the best chance of staying safe on the Beltway. A driver who pays close attention to the checklist-who uses the Beltway during the day (or cautiously at night), avoids it when wet, travels mostly on the portion which is not signed as I-95, stays away on Fridays and in the late autumn, and maintains close attention and fair distances from the vehicles in front and behind-is not guaranteed a safe ride, but would compensate for many of the factors which have in the past put Beltway users at the highest risk. But that is not human nature, or at least not twenty-first-century culturally constructed Beltway driver human nature. Instead of thinking carefully along those lines, Beltway drivers instead seem to respond to congestion and to perceived danger by becoming ever more frustrated and frazzled. The ways in which drivers approach and deal with what they find on the Beltway, which I explore in the next section, causes their blood pressure to soar, even as Preusser's findings suggest that a cool demeanor and clear thinking are key to minimizing the Beltway's actual dangers. 563 Capital Beltway Safety Team, Capital Beltway Safety Team Update, September 29, 1994 (Virginia Department of Transportation, 1994), vi-viii; Ilona Orban, "The Safety Challenge," Public Roads 58.3 (Winter 1995): 32-34. 371 Coping with the Beltway "I resent the hell out of its dangerous volume of traffic," a Columbia, Md., resident writes, "because it dominates my visits to my grandchildren. "564 Like this indignant grandmother, many Washington-area residents express frustration-in my survey, in the media, and on the road-about how centrally traffic conditions and specifically the Capital Beltway factor into their short-term and long-term life decisions. Like many drivers, the grandmother explains that "[w]hat times I leave home and leave for home are both controlled by traffic avoidance." For others, the conditions they would face on the Beltway play a role in their choices of residence and employment. In both cases, drivers in 2001 treat the Beltway more as a nasty intrusion in their lives (a "necessary evil," many respondents write) than as the welcome salvation from terrible congestion it appeared to be in 1964. Traffic on the Beltway, as on other congested highways, frays nerves. Often drivers simply develop irritation or annoyance, as in the case of the self-described daily commuter from Arlington: "[M]ostly I just hate the Beltway because I face such godawful traffic on it every night. I get irritated at other drivers fairly easily on the Beltway."565 For some, the tension escalates until they approach a loss of control, as a Laurel resident with a daily 90-minute commute writes: "I've sat on the beltway for 2 564 Beltway Survey #577. 565 Beltway Survey #290. 372 sometimes 3 hours before and thought I was going to go insane. 11566 Actual loss of control manifests itself in aggressive behavior-a Belcamp, Md. resident admits, "Yes, I have road rage"-and a distinct lack of courtesy, judging from the following figures. 567 Respondents here answered the question, "Which of the following activities have you participated in at least once while driving or traveling as a passenger on the Capital Beltway?" Table 19.-Expressions of Displeasure on the Capital Beltway ( 607 responses) Expression N Percent Used the horn to honk at another driver 473 77.9% Made obscene gestures toward another driver 202 33.3% Swore at another driver loud enough for the driver to hear 94 15.5% Some drivers tum to a variety of strategies to cope with the Beltway's frustrations and even to tum them into positives. Extended time on the Beltway can in fact be sedative downtime: A College Park commuter admits that often, the time I have during my morning and evening commutes is the only time I will have alone to myself during the whole day. It is certainly the only time during the day that I will get to listen to music (a luxury!) or just sit in the quiet. I actually really need my commute at the end of the day-it's my only h d . d 568 c ance to e-stress and unwm . 566 Beltway Survey #579. 567 Beltway Survey #578. 568 Beltway Survey #485. 373 Lynn Bradley, a Vienna resident, similarly "rarely get[s] frustrated at slow-downs, that's 'free' time for musing and random thoughts. "569 Beltway drivers use their "free" time, as Bradley puts it, to read; Charlie Maiorana of Washington "usually [has] a book" on hand. "On occasion when traffic comes to a complete stop or is inching along because of an accident or whatever, I pick up the book and read. "570 Other respondents have played backgammon and poker while caught in traffic, and have initiated dates. The Beltway Singles Club, founded in 1984, provided drivers with individually coded bumper stickers; when a club member following closely behind a stickered car spotted "a cute bumper, he or she [could] call the club to get the first name and phone number of the automotive heart-throb."571 The figures below suggest that the Beltway is a veritable library, and that drivers and passengers use their time on the Beltway for multitasking in other ways as well. Table 20.-Personal Activities on the Capital Beltway ( 607 responses) Activity (for drivers or passengers) Used a cellular phone While driving, read from a newspaper, book, or other material Applied makeup Sent or received email Shaved a body part Brushed teeth 569 Beltway Survey #349. 570 Beltway Survey #63. N 370 139 71 9 9 5 Percent 61.0% 22.9% 11.7% 1.5% 1.5% 0.8% 571 Beltway Surveys #332, 338; Lee Michael Katz, "DC's Newest Singles Scene: Cruising Along the Beltway," Washingtonian, June 1984: 13. 374 Sent or received a fax 3 0.5% In addition to activities which fill the time added by congestion, some drivers purposefully adopt techniques aimed at alleviating their stress. A Gaithersburg commuter "used to swear at every driver for every minor offense ... However, I have since obtained a squeeze ball and noticed I pay less attention to the aggravations. "572 A Baltimore resident keeps her drumsticks in the front seat, "and when the traffic slows dead to a crawl, I turn up the tape and drum like hell on my steering wheel to relieve the tension!"573 The drumming "works great," but these methods do not always succeed so well. Kathy Kaplan, an Annapolis resident, writes that I decided I needed a 12-step commuting program to change my perspective (and therefore stress) on this drive. So I put a meditation book in the car so that when the traffic backed up I could read the thought for the day and then think about it. Five minutes after I read a page on "being patient" I was screaming at one of those aggressive drive[r]s who tail-gates, crosses three 1 . 1 . h 574 anes at once, etc. So I need to practice app ymg w at I read. Coping techniques such as the meditation, drumsticks, and squeeze ball allow committed drivers to integrate the Beltway into their daily lives with minimal mental strain. But for others, no palliative is sufficient. Repeatedly, my respondents write of the extent of their efforts to keep the Beltway at bay in their daily lives. Among the 607 people who replied, four referred to the "great lengths" to which they go to avoid the Beltway, four wrote of avoiding it "like the plague," six explained that they would do virtually anything to avoid it, and 572 Beltway Survey #364. 573 Beltway Survey #574. 574 Beltway Survey #584. 375 over a dozen used the same phrase in expressing how important it was for them to stay away (underscore added for emphases): I practically avoid the beltway at all costs. 575 I now stay off the Beltway at all costs ... 576 I avoid driving on the Beltway at all cost.577 Well, I try to avoid the Beltway at all costs. 578 I intentionally avoid it at all costs, commuting for a few years taught me to STAY AWAY.579 I avoid the Beltway at all costs, no matter how much time I would save by using it. 580 [W]henever I have to go somewhere, I try to avoid the beltway at all costs.581 I try to avoid the beltway at all costs because of the congestion and the aggressive driving.582 Try at all costs to avoid during rush hour.583 'd. all 584 I hate the beltway and try to av01 1t at costs. 575 Beltway Survey #504. 576 Beltway Survey #492. 577 Beltway Survey #486. 578 Beltway Survey #482. 579 Beltway Survey #427. 580 Beltway Survey #418. 581 Beltway Survey #366. 582 Beltway Survey #250. 583 Beltway Survey #236. 584 Beltway Survey #222. 376 We avoid the beltway at all costs, because it is just not efficient. 585 I avoid the Beltway now at all costs. 586 Alone among the respondents, Amy Sheppard of Falls Church, who considers the Beltway to be a "very useful tool" at nonpeak hours, "question[s] people who avoid it at all costs anytime of the day due to their fear of traffic or the speed of drivers. "587 But far more common among the responses is the decision to write off the Beltway as a viable transportation tool and to restructure personal lives as a result. On this phenomenon, Jennifer O'Keefe of Alexandria writes that I know many people-even those from this region who will not go anywhere which would require them to travel on the beltway-which I believe causes a sector-ization if you will. The intimidation factor of driving on it serves as an isolation factor for many. 588 Drivers find themselves rejecting potential activities because they would bring the Beltway into play. "As a local who has to use the beltway to shop, visit friends, etc.," a Greenbelt suburbanite writes, "it cramps my style and discourages me from doing things I need to do at certain times of day or night. 11589 Kirk Huddleston, a Baltimore resident, rejects driving south out of hand: "Anytime I think of something I'd like to do in DC, I immediately remember I'll have to travel the beltway, and usually decide not to do 585 B eltway Survey #195. 586 B eltway Survey #47. 587 B eltway Survey #238. 588 B I e tway Survey #216. 589 Beltway Survey #187. 377 whatever it was that I wanted to. 11590 Daily schedules are tweaked to conform to the Beltway's constraints: Janna Bialek, a Chevy Chase resident, has "planned virtually all my activities, and my children's activities, to avoid the Beltway."591 Even staying away from the road during the day does not always keep it at bay; 36 respondents (5.9 percent) write of dreaming about riding on the Beltway. On the scale of intensity of responses to the Beltway's frustrations, the next step up from adopting coping mechanisms and choosing daily avoidance is purposefully selecting residential or employment options out of the road's reach. Some area residents take only jobs which preclude Beltway driving, including the Greenbelt resident who "promised myself never to have to commute on the Beltway, i.e., take a job where I would have to drive there every day."592 "I won't even look at certainjobs," an Alexandria resident writes, "if it means extensive Beltway travel. 11593 Others have looked, but then turned away: Round Hill, Va.: "I have turned down several jobs for more pay over the years to avoid the beltway.11594 Prince Frederick, Md.: 11I have not taken jobs because a great part ofmy commute would take me on the beltway. The aggravation and unpredictability of the traffic flow is not worth it. 11595 590 Beltway Survey #583. 591 Beltway Survey #595. 592 Beltway Survey #51. 593 Beltway Survey #117. 594 Beltway Survey #441. 595 Beltway Survey #410. 378 Rockville, Md.: "In 1997 I was downsized; I had a mortgage to pay and no job. My severance would not last forever. I was offered a job in Vienna, VA . .. shortly after the lay-off; I turned it down because I did not want to spend such a large portion of my day commuting. 11596 Decisions where to live similarly hinge on the Beltway for some. "I purchased my house," a McLean resident writes, "specifically so that we don't have to go near the beltway, except on rare occasions. 11597 An Alexandria resident writes that " I picked my home in a location that would not require its use. "598 "When purchasing a home 5 years ago," a Waldorf resident echoes, "part of my decision was based on finding a location that would minimize beltway usage. "599 These and other respondents with similar stories cope with the Beltway by choosing homes and jobs which keep the highway within reach but beyond the scope ofregular necessity. Other choices which might otherwise be preferable are not worth the price of "destroying [ one's J soul," as another Al d · 'd · 600 exan na res1 ent puts 1t. The most drastic response to the Beltway, however, is to take one step further and sever ties with the Washington area entirely. A 2001 AAA poll of 451 drivers from Baltimore to Richmond (not all of whom were AAA members, unlike the 1966 survey discussed earlier), focusing on traffic conditions and lifestyle changes, found that approximately 15 percent of respondents considered leaving the area because of the 596 Beltway Survey #362. 597 Beltway Survey #385. 598 Beltway Survey #347. 599 Beltway Survey #112. 600 Beltway Survey #284. 379 traffic.601 Among my own respondents, a Baltimore resident "moved to Florida for a while partly because of the overcrowding manifested in Beltway traffic. 11602 John Osborne explains in detail how "the Beltway changed my life": I used to work on computers primarily in banks, which means I had to always go from bank to bank. Often, I would get these chest pains. At first, only when I was on the beltway. Later, almost any time or any road, if they were saturated. I mentioned this to my supervisor and he told me to go see a doctor. Well, I didn't and it just seemed to go on and on. On the job, I would take as long as I could at each bank in order to cut down on the driving that was required of me ( other people took up the slack). Socially, I was an asshole. Finally I said "FUGGET! ! ! I'm going to give up this bullcrunch and go into my first love .... plants." So, I quit my 'real' job and got into the plant business. That was in 1990. Things progressed, I got happy, got married and now own a small nursery, growing succulents and venus fly traps. I live and work on thirty acres of land out in the woods in Tracys Landing, Md. I work with an ear to ear grin every day. Why, because I fled the beltway. I watch the traffic reports on the morning news and feel...what's the word here .... freedom???. Why, because I don't have get onto that beltway until I want to . . . . . . . . . . . So, I would say the beltway has played a big part in my life and still does. It made me change my life and I love it for that. I say I hate it, but, since hate is a form of fear I assume it the dread of having to get on it is the reason that I hate it. As for my chest foains, not one since 1990. In fact, I don't even remember what they felt like. 03 For Osborne, "fleeing the beltway" meant moving to a more rural area of Maryland, closer to the Chesapeake Bay than to Washington. For others, more distance is 601 Sandra Fleishman, "Traffic May Cause Some to Leave Area," Washington Post, 23 June 2001: H9; AAA Mid-Atlantic, "Bad Traffic Leads Many Residents to Consider Leaving the Washington Area," . (25 June 2001). 602 Beltway Survey #553. 603 Beltway Survey #453. 380 necessary: Joshua Wolf "relocated to [Pennsylvania] for graduate school and the beltway alone will prevent me from returning to the Washington Area.11604 Across the spectrum of responses, from banging drumsticks on the steering wheel to moving to Florida, drivers within each category determine the extent to which they structure different parts of their lives around the Capital Beltway. In some ways their decisions are based on their own individual mental constructions of the Beltway, for instance in the case of residents who avoid it because of the dangers they perceive even if the Beltway is statistically safer than alternative roads. In other ways, they respond to less arguable factors of Beltway life, including its daily congestion and angry drivers (witness the 33% ofrespondents who report making obscene gestures toward other drivers). But in both of these respects, the Beltway enters their lives in ways more profound than do most roads. Not simply a piece of pavement, the Capital Beltway, Chevy Chase resident Mark Crouter emphasizes, "has a major influence on important life decisions. 11605 604 Beltway Survey #471. 605 Beltway Survey #303. 381 CHAPTER9 "SURRENDER DOROTHY": THE BELTWAY'S ROLES AND EFFECTS Beltway, the also Capital Beltway highway, part I-495 and part I-95, that circles Washington, D.C., at an average radius of c. 10 miles/16 km from the White House, in Maryland and Virginia. It has come to be regarded as symbolic of national government, which is said to view the nation and the world from a limited, "inside the Beltway" viewpoint.606 PENNSYLVANIA A VENUE [INTERCHANGE] This road leads to the White House. Pray for our Federal Government and any upcoming elections. Pray that as a country we might return to righteous standards (Prov. 14:34).607 While the Beltway contributes to structuring the lives and decisions of individuals around the Washington area, it also influences residents and other Americans collectively. In this chapter, I discuss several ways in which the Beltway plays a significant role in varied regional and national dynamics. Beyond its function as a facility for local and interstate traffic, the Beltway serves as a template on which people can promote their beliefs and values (as in the two examples in the headers above), as a venue of both community and conflict, as a site for negotiation between public and private space, and as an arena for mediation and compromise in inter- jurisdictional cooperation. In addition, I explain briefly how although research suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that beltways in general do not spur residential and commercial growth, the Capital Beltway has hastened economic development in some areas it passes through, particularly in its early years. 606 Archie Hobson, ed., The Cambridge Gazetteer of the United States and Canada: A Dictionary of Places (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 55. 607 Brentwood Foursquare Church, "Prayer Around the Beltway," brochure, n.d. 382 This chapter draws most directly on the fifth operation of the cultural landscape study model in analyzing the Beltway's significance in multiple contexts and in examining its representations in national and local discourse. It also addresses the second operation's distinction between social and political boundaries, and introduces a variety of ways in which the Beltway has over time come to serve as a cognitive boundary for people living both inside and outside it. The chapter's first section briefly discusses a local church's use of the Beltway for religious purposes, touching on the spiritual properties of cultural landscapes in the fieldwork model's first operation. In all, the chapter explores some of the many social, political, economic, and cultural effects of the Beltway on regional and national levels. In the loop: The Beltway as a pawn "Why is it," Bethesda businessman Earle Palmer Brown writes, "that 66 [sic] miles of concrete and a brace of river bridges have developed into a scapegoat for every scribe with an axe to grind about Washington?"608 As Brown and the firSt chapter header suggest, the Capital Beltway has entered the American vernacular as a f ti d l d' itics frequently use synecdochic figure for the national center o e era power; me ia er h. " "C " ti xarnple to express the term "Beltway" rather than "Was mgton or ongress, ore ' B l t the Beltway is more their frustrations about the federal bureaucracy. ut as a temp a e, 6os Earle Palmer Brown, "It Seems Everyone is Blaming the Beltway," Montgomery_ Gazette, 21 April 1995. 383 malleable than that. Reporters and politicians appropriate the highway as a vehicle for conveying their agendas, but they are not alone. Demonstrators on foot as well as motorbike and car used the Beltway for political purposes as early as 1966. In June of that year, a small group of fair housing activists, under the banner of the group ACCESS (Action Coordinating Committee to End Segregation in the Suburbs) spent several days in a protest march circumnavigating the Beltway. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, mindful of the shooting of civil rights activist James Meredith in Mississippi a week earlier that was the immediate prompt for the Beltway march, directed police to let the demonstrators walk on the left shoulder without interference despite laws prohibiting pedestrian travel. The march was overtly political: ACCESS chairman Charles Jones explained that the march took place "so that area civil rights sympathizers wouldn't 'run off, psychologically and physically, to Mississippi, because we do have problems in the North, too.111609 Demonstrations on the Beltway have tended otherwise to rely mostly on motor vehicles. An Arlington resident recalls using her motorcycle on the Beltway to push for agendas including farmers' needs, children's toys, and veterans' recognition: I've ridden in blockades (farmers to DC in the 80's), often done the Toys for Tots motorcycle rides, ridden in Rolling Thunder-and I can tell you, it's wild to ride your "bike" with hundreds of other people-the car traffic goes nuts, the adults are usually pretty irritated, but damn, the kids love it (includes the adults [who] can still dredge up the wonder of childhood). 610 One week after the death of auto racer Dale Earnhardt in February 2001, more than 100 vehicles took a 90-minute memorial lap around the Beltway, organized privately by 609 "Housing Group Enters 2nd Day of Beltway Hike," Evening Star, 9 June 1966: B-4. 610 Beltway Survey #596. 384 Elkridge resident Ronald Leizear but publicized through newspapers, radio, and television, and condoned by Maryland state troopers who ordered participants to stay below the speed limit. 611 Later that year, the Beltway and other highways nationwide served as showcases for displays of patriotism, as American flags and similar symbols were draped from overpasses in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. While the Beltway has at least several times been appropriated toward political and memorial ends, Maryland's Brentwood Foursquare Church has commandeered it as a religious tool. In a brochure titled "Prayer Around the Beltway," printed and privately distributed by the church around 2000, 38 listings of interchanges or nearby sites each list an object of prayer related in some way to the particular location; drivers can then use the brochure as a spiritual guide while driving the Beltway to pray for appropriate things at appropriate points. Some of the prayer suggestions cover themes not inherently religious: the brochure encourages drivers at the "Interstate 295/Washington" interchange to "pray against the stronghold of violence in the greater Washington, D.C. area," and at Lee Highway to "pray for the healing of our nations over racial issues," in addition to the prayer for government reprinted in the chapter's header. Many of the suggestions, however, emphasize deep-seated religious beliefs and proselytism. In "Bethesda/Rockville," drivers are prompted to "pray for Jewish evangelism so the · th · M "ah," and at "Georgia Jewish people will recognize Jesus Christ as err esSI · n1 ferred to as the Mormon Temple Avenue/Wheaton," near what 1s commo Y re 61 • A 'T k' c. r Race Fans' Tears," Washington Post, 26 February 1 David Nakamura, " rac 10 2001: Bl. 385 (discussed below), the brochure urges motorists to "pray against the spirits of religious deception that operate in Mormonism and in all other cults." 612 Other groups too use the Beltway to advance their beliefs and goals in other respects; later in this chapter, I offer a further example of how Smart Growth advocates have purposefully used the Beltway as a pawn in their larger struggle. However, the most ubiquitous context for the Beltway taking on connotations independent of its creators' original intentions is its framing as a barrier separating those "inside the Beltway" from those "outside the Beltway." The first of those terms, language maven and political pundit William Safire explains, "is not a place but a state of mind; used as a compound adjective, the prepositional phrase means 'having the conventional wisdom held by self-described political insiders."613 The term, planning historian Carl Abbott adds, uses isolation behind the Beltway's barrier "as a metaphor for insulation from popular values. It implies separation and deracination in a cynically negative valuation of Washington's nonregional role."614 Abbott dates the introduction of the term "inside the Beltway" to 1983, which is when it took on its political connotation; in fact, the term first appeared in print in a Washington Post story in the 1977 headline "Inside-the- Beltway Trout Fishing Nears." In its political sense, the phrase owes its origin to 612 Brentwood Foursquare Church. 613 William Safire, "Inside the Circumferential Highway," New York Times Magazine, 15 March 1992: 22. 614 Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C. From Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 128. See Abbott, 128-129, for a discussion of what specific criticisms of government and economy have been subsumed under the less illuminating banner of "inside the Beltway." 386 Washington Post reporter Mike Causey, who with a photographer was one of "the first [two] civilians to circumnavigate the Capital Beltway."615 My Web survey included a question asking respondents for their understanding, if any, of the terms "inside the Beltway" and "outside the Beltway." Most are familiar with the political association, though others offered alternative perceptions which I introduce in the next section. The terms indicate that the Beltway has "become a mythical boundary of reality, the Washington insiders versus the rest of the country,'' a Silver Spring resident writes.616 "Inside," an Ellicott City resident suggests, means "out of touch with the 'real' people, wealth, politically oriented.11617 "Mere residence in the city," a 1983 published analysis of Washington argues, " ... is commonly thought to impart special, privileged knowledge."618 People living outside the city-and the Beltway effectively expands the boundary of the city in this context-are both literally and figuratively out of the loop. For sound bites, this "inside/outside" distinction is useful as a quick signifier of ideas; as an accurate metaphor of real-life dynamics, it is riddled with problems. For one, clearly the distinction is an exaggeration, because not every Beltway insider 615 Abbott, 128, 214-215; Satire, 22, 24; Sussman, "The Best and Worst of the Beltway," 28; Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag," Al2; Bob Levey, "Hats Off to a Top Colleague: Mike Causey," Washington Post, 8 May 2000: C9; Mike Causey, "Today's the Day Diary Columnist Turns the Page," Washington Post, 8 May 2000: Bl. See also Hugh Sidey, "Life in the Capital Cocoon," Time, 4 March 1985: 20. 616 Beltway Survey #295. 617 Beltway Survey #560. 618 Alan K. Henrikson, "'A Small, Cozy Town, Global in Scope': Washington, DC," Ekistics 299 (March/April 1983): 132. 387 geographically is a Beltway insider politically. On this count, Paul Foer expresses his frustration: I like to joke about it: I am your quintessential just inside the Beltway person. I'm really at the edge of it, where I grew up, where I was raised. And so you wonder, well, if I happened to have moved half a mile away across the Beltway, would I be outside the Beltway, say, almost inside the Beltway? As it is now, I say I grew up almost outside the Beltway. Cause my brother and his family and other people I know and so forth are involved in the Washington scene and politics and what have you. It hits home how that term has come to mean something very, very negative, very pejorative. It's interesting that on my street, among my immediate neighbors and friends with whom I grew up, almost nobody had any direct involvement or career involvement in the federal government! Almost nobody!619 Beyond inaccurate, local residents find the term pejorative, as Foer notes. "When politicians or more often their lackies," a Rockville resident writes, "speak of 'outside the beltway' it gets the hair on the back of my neck to stand up--1 find it a bit insulting that their world is so insular that 'outside the beltway' is all other places in the world lumped together in a derogatory otherness. "620 Other respondents believe that the "inside/outside" distinction, in its political sense, is "sorta dumb," "inane," "stupid," "snide," "ridiculous," "condescending and sarcastic," "shortsighted and negative . 1 d ""d" . 11621 stereotyp1ca ," "derogatory," an 1 1ot1c. Furthermore, some respondents resent the political and derogatory use of "inside the Beltway" because they consider the politicians using it to be hypocrites. On the one hand, many of them live inside the Beltway themselves, as Olin Johnson of Baltimore notes: "The term ... is a lot [ of] crap. It's used by politicians when they try to associate 619 Interview with Paul Foer. 620 Beltway Survey #334. 621 Beltway Surveys #21, 66, 78, 189,332,352,408,447, 561. 388 themselves with 'regular' people. They make it seem as if being inside the beltway is on another planet. A planet, by the way, that they are a part of."622 Lynne Cheney, who would later reach the pinnacle of alleged "insiderness," wrote in 1985 that "'inside the Beltway' is, after all, a phrase used mainly by Washington insiders to denigrate the way other Washington insiders think. "623 On the other hand, many of the "Beltway insiders" privy to political inside information live geographically outside the Beltway, as Silver Spring resident Mike Colson writes: "'Inside the Beltway' to me is just another stupid thing political commentators say, since many people who live inside the beltway have no influence on the politics of the USA and a great many people who live outside of the beltway have a great deal of influence on politics in this country. 11624 In the terms introduced in the cultural landscape study model, the Beltway from this perspective constitutes a political boundary, because the definition of the group inside the borderline is developed and applied without the consent of members of that group. Most survey respondents express frustration at the insinuation that people "inside the Beltway" are not tuned into the rhythms and values of the rest of the country. But several turn the dynamic around and suggest, in the words of a Bethesda resident, that "those 'outside the Beltway' [are] out of touch with the priorities of our nation" [emphasis added].625 Christopher Moore of Odenton, Md., argues that he and other 622 Beltway Survey #451. 623 Cheney, "The Beltway: A Ring That Binds," 199. Reporter Larry Van Dyne makes the same point in Van Dyne, "Getting There," 203. 624 Beltway Survey #20. 625 Beltway Survey #429. 389 locals have appropriated and subverted the previously derogatory term: "Outsiders tend to think of 'inside the Beltway' as a bad thing, symbolizing politics and gridlock. I think of it almost as a symbol of pride and sophistication. "626 Outside the Beltway "is a far less enlightened constituency," a Derwood, Md., resident writes; "Thank GOD we live within the beltway," an Alexandria resident says, without elaboration.627 An Arlington resident offers a more nuanced explanation: To me, perhaps because I DO live inside the Beltway, I think of being inside the Beltway as a positive thing-because Washington to me is a dynamic, exciting, politically aware and intelligent city. I know many people think of Inside the Beltway as a negative term, but to me, I think of it as exciting. Outside the Beltway ... to me, is connotative of rednecks ... people who make political decisions based on stupid reasons ... dumb people.628 For these writers and for those who conversely use "inside the Beltway" negatively, the Beltway is equally effective as a line of demarcation between those in the know and those outside it. This happens frequently: Earle Palmer Brown notes over 3000 hits when typing "Beltway insider" into an Internet search engine, and cites examples from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Economist, Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, and Newsweek in demonstrating how [i]t has become standard operating procedure for the press to personify the Beltway as some amorphous monster and blame it for everything they think is wrong about Washington."629 In this way, politicians and reporters project their agendas through the Beltway, as the motorcyclists, 626 Beltway Survey #203. 627 Beltway Surveys #267, 117. 628 Beltway Survey #290. 629 Brown, "It Seems"; Brown, "Few Words in Defense of Capital Beltway," Rockville Gazette, 23 May 2001: A-17. 390 demonstrators, and church mentioned earlier do using other methods. As a physical device (a venue for demonstrating) and a rhetorical one, the Beltway thus serves on national and regional levels as a template for groups' objectives far beyond traffic mitigation. For residents of the Washington area, however, the political dimensions of the inside/outside the Beltway scheme are only one of at least ten ways in which the Beltway serves as a borderline. For instance, some perceive the Beltway as a racial boundary. "Blacks mostly inhabit the inner beltway communities," an African American resident of College Park writes, "[while] whites inhabit the outer beltway communities. "630 Demographic data supported this perception as early as 1971, when the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies published research indicating that "the Capital Beltway was the major boundary line for integration and that 87.5 percent of blacks who lived in Fairfax and Montgomery counties [both mostly outside the Beltway] were living in areas that were more than 80 percent white."631 But the Beltway's racial connotations have gone farther than that. Circumscribing the majority-black District, the highway quickly gained a derogatory nickname, described in a 1967 newspaper account: Though the 25-member House District Committee in recent years has had as many as 11 members from Southern or border states (the number is currently seven) it is only rarely that racial slurs surface. Thus some Hill observers recall with surprise that Rep. John Dowdy (D., Tex.), during hearings last year on the Federal City College, referred to the Capital Beltway as the "Congo Bypass."632 630 Beltway Survey #606. 631 Nan Netherton et al, Fairfax County, Virginia, 666. 632 Rice Odell, "Our City Government: The Tangled Web," Washington Daily News, 391 -· -~ --- ~- -~-,,..._, _.._ _ _ This appellation has survived through the intervening decades: a white Chantilly resident writes of the Beltway that "as a friend of mine once called it 'it's the ring around the Congo."'633 The term surfaced elsewhere in the course of my interviews, but with the request that its mention be kept off the record. A third way in which the Beltway serves as a cognitive boundary as well as a physical one is in terms of class. Unlike race, though, my survey respondents disagree on exactly who lives on each side of the border. Most who raised this point concur that "[i]nside the Beltway brings to mind a lower economic status versus 'outside the Beltway,"' and that "outside" suggests a "more affluent community."634 But some believe the reverse and argue that "outside" equals "less affluent."635 The contrasting views indicate that from this perspective, at least, the Beltway's role as a boundary is grounded more in perception than fact. This again is the case with the supposition that the Beltway is a key determining factor in housing costs, suggested by 22 survey respondents ( out of 607). Most of these run along the lines of the Howard County resident who writes that the Beltway "is definitely a 'boundary' as far as the amount of rent or the cost of a home is concerned (higher costs associated and charged to be inside the beltway)."636 Real estate agents, 7 November 1967: 5. 633 Beltway Survey #388. 634 Beltway Surveys #512 and 506. 635 See, for example, Beltway Survey #494. 636 Beltway Survey #473. 392 however, explain that the Beltway by itself does not divide generally lower-priced from generally higher-priced property. A Burtonsville agent writes: The Beltway can have a positive or negative effect on value. On an appraisal report the appraiser may make negative value adjustments for the noise from the Beltway. They might also make a negative sight adjustment if the property has a direct view of the road or if a sound barrier is in the backyard of the subject property. One the other hand, some people find it very appealing to live close to the Beltway and have quick access to work. This might lead someone to pay a higher amount for the house. This makes it hard to appraise sometimes because the house itself may be in average condition and it is just the great location that makes the customer willing to pay a higher price.637 From this description, it appears that the Beltway is not a decisive factor in determining the general cost of housing in communities, but can play a role in the cost of individual properties very close to it. Minka Goldstein, a longtime Bethesda real estate agent working for Long and Foster, notes that in her experience the Beltway has not been a key factor affecting the cost of properties inside it versus outside it. However, the road does create a "fatal flaw" for a small handful of properties immediately adjacent to it, "fatal" because the properties' locations, unlike their prices and conditions, cannot be changed and will always be subject to the nuisances created by the Beltway.638 As a result, the properties closest to the Beltway can be divided into what I will call proximity zones. In the inner proximity zone, closest to the Beltway and including the Eirich/Loflin house backing onto the highway as described in Chapter 5, daily life is significantly and adversely affected by the Beltway and property values are often lowered to compensate. The existence and negative connotations of the inner proximity 637 Beltway Survey #495. 638 Interviews with Minka Goldstein, 5 March and 17 May 2001. 393 zone are apparent in the wording of agents' summary listings of properties which prospective house buyers might fear lie in the undesirable zone. The following excerpts are from May 2001 listings on the Metropolitan Regional Information Systems service, used by real estate agents across the Washington area: 2307 Coleridge Drive, Silver Spring: *** Does not back to Beltway!!!*** 7612 Arrowood Road, Bethesda Beltway is not an issue with this home. 7807 Hamilton Spring Road, Bethesda ... fabulous deck with hot tub looking out on a beautiful private (not near the beltway) fenced lot with plenty of space for expansion. 7559 Pepperell Drive, Bethesda Backs to 495, but not directly. The outer proximity zone consists of properties close to the Beltway but far enough to avoid the negative effects detailed by Lisa Loflin. In this zone, proximity becomes a positive selling point rather than a negative one. These listings illustrate: 5023 Ontario Road, College Park Close to 495/in College Park, MD 9708 Belvedere Place, Silver Spring Terrific loc min from 495 8212 Lilly Stone Drive, Bethesda Conveniently located just mins to 495639 639 Listings are copyright Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc., and used with permission of Minka Goldstein, Long and Foster Realtors. I have cited listings MLS #MC2567024, MC3310122, MC3410280, MC2368641, MC2209585, MC2750369, and MC2327773, all accessed on 17 May 2001. 394 With its effects on the inner and outer proximity zones, the Beltway does play a role in determining certain property values, but in a more nuanced way than the simple inside/outside configuration suggested by survey respondents. Other respondents are equally confident that the Beltway is "certainly a boundary when it comes to car insurance rates!"640 Several argue that as a rule those rates run higher inside the Beltway. Here again the actual picture is somewhat more complex. A veteran insurance agent for Allstate, working in suburban Maryland, explains that until the 1980s most insurance companies did charge higher rates for communities inside the Beltway, because rates were determined by the frequency of accidents in given areas. Accidents were more common in more congested areas, which tended to be inside the Beltway. However, the industry later shifted its basic pricing model to charge higher rates in areas where the people causing the most accidents reside, regardless of where the accidents occur. In this way, using a hypothetical example, residents of Brentwood (inside the Beltway) would not suffer higher rates simply because residents of Bowie ( outside the Beltway) frequently caused accidents there. The agent explains: So what happened over a period of years, what's evolved over a period of years, is that the rates inside the Beltway and outside the Beltway are in many cases the same right now. Because the people inside the Beltway that are having the accidents actually live outside the Beltway. Now we're going out there and reaching out for those rates. We are no longer penalizing the people who live inside the Beltway with higher rates. We're actually rating where the person that had the accident lives. And we're not doing a geographical area; we're doing a ZIP code. Meaning that you could have a ZIP code inside the Beltway, and a ZIP code outside the Beltway, with the same rate, if the numbers of accidents are equal. 641 640 Beltway Survey #352. 64 1 Interview with *Doxey Tobocman, 28 February 2001. 395 Area residents who perceive the Beltway as a determining line for insurance rates may thus be unfamiliar with the industry shift in rate determination, or may simply conclude from a comparison of rates at single sites inside and outside the Beltway that the road must be the key dividing line. In addition to politics, race, class, and cost determinations, a sixth way in which the Beltway serves as a perceptive boundary is as a suburban demarcation line. "In downtown Silver Spring, Arlington, Falls Church, Alexandria, Bethesda, etc," a Silver Spring resident writes, "there is more of an urban, cosmopolitan feel. Just a few miles away, once you cross the beltway, there almost instantly becomes more of a suburban feel. "642 Other respondents repeat the suburban theme, but in most cases do not elaborate on what creates or defines the suburban "feel." This view suggests that for some, the inner-Beltway suburbs, including the ones cited by the respondent above, function more as an extension of the city of Washington than do the outer-Beltway suburbs. Another Silver Spring resident does characterize what for her differentiates the inner suburbs like hers from the outer ones: "I didn't want to live outside the Beltway as that seemed hopelessly suburban and Yuppie. The land of snort utes, screaming kids, overindulgent parents, and self-satisfied customers demanding special treatment from the Manager."643 This explanation of the contrast between suburbs leads to the seventh category of cognitive boundary, a cultural one. In this view, people living inside and outside the 642 Beltway Survey #483. 643 Beltway Survey #490. 396 Beltway think, act, and interact very differently from each other. An Alexandria resident living inside the border explains that "[m]ost people I've talked to who live 'outside the beltway' look at 'inside the beltway' as something scary. People outside don't like to travel in. It's a separate culture. "644 A District resident finds distinctly different cultural worlds on either side of the Beltway border: [The Beltway is] a cultural boundary. When I was single I wouldn't date anyone from outside the Beltway because it was like they had a totally different existence (I did give them a chance). They refused to come into the city- in fact hadn't been in in years - and constantly refused to do cultural events such as the Kennedy Center, the opera, museums and the like. They always wanted me to go out there, and to partake in things like bowling, the park, going to the mall (read - the mall, not the Mall), and so forth. They also had no clue about problems of race and poverty, or the urban experience, but were opinionated about it anyhow, and they also were overwhelmingly conservative. I have found the inside-the-Beltway crowd to be a much better fit for my personality. 645 This cultural contrast seems to be an issue of urban versus suburban preferences, but the Beltway serves as a convenient line for this respondent to draw a boundary between the two. Similarly, the Beltway is a social borderline; some inside make different decisions regarding their social lives than some outside. Respondents living in Arlington (inside) and fonnerly in Bowie (outside) explain: I've found it to be a boundary for social events -- my .friends and I ~ho live · 'd h b ltw e much more likely to go to DC to go out at mght; the ms1 e t e e ay ar tuff · · d b · al friends who live outside the beltway conside~ s I?5I e to e a spebc1 h . · Those of us inside consider gomg to Reston to e a c ore, occas10n exthpendence.although the same time to get there -- isn't. (Arlington)646 whereas Be es a -- 644 Beltway Survey #340. 645 Beltway Survey #337. 646 Beltway Survey #232. 397 I know that my friends who live in the District definitely feel the Beltway is a boundary. When I lived in Bowie, no one wanted to visit because it seemed so far, and was "Outside the Beltway," but it was only 20-30 minutes away. They would rather go across town, which could sometimes take longer than going to Bowie. As soon as I moved "inside," there was more of a willingness on their part to visit. (formerly Bowie)647 As in the previous case, the Beltway serves as a physical marker of distinctions between urban and suburban lifestyles. Finally, the Beltway is also a psychological boundary for those who, for various reasons, feel an emotional need to live on one side or the other. "There are those," Arlington resident Carol Holihan writes, "who are as horrified at living inside the beltway (implying an area that's too urbanized) as there are those who are horrified at living outside the beltway. "648 Yet again the urban/suburban distinction seems to be key here, this time as the parameters of an emotional tug-of-war, with the Beltway in the middle. A second Arlington resident explains that "I lived outside the Beltway in Gaithersburg for a while, and I hated it because I felt totally out of the loop. The physical distance was a part of it, but mostly it was just an emotional distance I felt. I love being 'inside."'649 This sense of "being inside," she suggests, is more than simple geographic location: for her, "being inside" means situating herself emotionally inside whatever she considers "the loop" (likely Washington's social urban sphere and/or political scene) as well as inside the Beltway's physical loop. 647 Beltway Survey #212. 648 Beltway Survey# 194. 649 Beltway Survey #290. 398 In the nine ways described above, the Beltway acts as a mental, or cognitive, boundary between one phenomenon outside and a contrasting one inside. In most of them, the root of the contrast appears to be distinctions between urban and suburban preferences and mindsets. Here, as before in the cases of the demonstrators and the Brentwood church, the Beltway has become a convenient pawn for individuals to use in expressing their positions on issues for which the highway itself is in most cases not directly responsible. At the same time, certain key lifestyle decisions, such as the ones made by the respondents who view the Beltway as a social or cultural boundary, are based solely on individuals' cognitive perceptions of the road, as was also the case in scenarios described in the previous chapter. The Beltway, then, works simultaneously as a template on which people can promote their beliefs and as a justification for decisions they make informed by those beliefs. Battleground and community The Beltway serves concurrently as a venue of conflict and consensus. While Virginia and Maryland use the Beltway as a focus for debating their respective political philosophies, other feuds run alongside: Local and long-distance drivers each expect the Beltway to cater to their needs, motorists and truckers have trouble accommodating one another, and car drivers themselves cannot stand each other. Yet the same highway which breeds, or at least intensifies, these clashes, also creates and enhances regional identity and a sense of community even as it fuels the sparring factions. 399 Among its many conflicts, the Beltway mediates between regional and national interests in terms of which drivers the road most directly serves every day. Here the conflict lies between the Beltway as 1-495, a commuter road for Washingtonians, and the Beltway as 1-95, the north-south transcontinental highway. This, writes Brian LeBlanc of North Carolina, is "[t]he main thing that distinguishes the Beltway from anything else ... the strange hybrid of interstate and inter-regional traffic that it must carry .. . Most freeways serve one purpose or the other (bypass or through route), but the Beltway serves both."650 1-495 is home to one community oflocal drivers; 1-95 is home to another composed of truckers and other long-distance drivers and linked through CB radio and the 1-95 Corridor Coalition, which provides traffic information for all segments of the highway up and down the East Coast.651 A similar dynamic exists on the partial circumferential around Boston, where Massachusetts Route 128 and Interstate 95 share the same highway. The Capital Beltway is, according to Maryland governor Parris Glendening, "our Main Street and our interstate, and the two simply aren't com pa ti ble. 11652 This duality was not supposed to happen. Robert Mannell, who worked for VDH as an engineer on the original development of the Beltway in Virginia, explains that the thing that surprised a lot of people was the usage of it by the local citizens. We [the original Virginia engineers] kind of felt that most of the travel would be 650 Beltway Survey #70. 651 See Randy Kennedy, "1-95, A River of Commerce Overflowing With Traffic," New York Times, 29 December 2000: Al; and 1-95 Corridor Coalition, (11 November 2001). 652 Qtd. in Stephen C. Fehr, "Beltway at 25: The Road Most Traveled," Washington Post, 17 August 1989: A 1. 400 interstate, not intrastate. As it turns out, as densities increased not only along the Beltway but inside the Beltway itself, the need to improve the existing streets with all the stores and everything, you get long lines of traffic and stoplights. So people then would find, hey, I can go and jump on the Beltway and bypass this, jump back off. And consequently, the Beltway was loaded with local traffic.653 The turnaround was apparent within two years of the Beltway's opening. By 1966, 60 percent of the highway's users were locals, and the Evening Star reported that ''[w]hat federal highway officials envisioned as a Washington bypass for interstate travelers has become in practice primarily a convenience for local drivers. 11654 By the mid- l 990s, around 90 percent of Beltway traffic was local; still, with roughly one million daily users by 2001, the raw number of non-local long-distance drivers, relatively unfamiliar with the road, was substantial.655 With the addition of I-95 through traffic, the Beltway's vehicle count increased well beyond original projections, and meant more wear and tear for the road's surface and the Wilson Bridge.656 Non-local drivers unfamiliar with the Beltway also introduce yet another safety hazard to the mix. Virginia Master Trooper Bill McKinney, who finds "a big difference" between local and non-local drivers, explains that motorists 653 Interview with Robert Mannell. 654 Angle, "Road Built as D.C. Bypass," A-1. 655 "Some Beltway and Congestion Statistics." Typescript document, [1994?], provided by Maj Shakib, Maryland State Highway Administration. 656 The 1997 construction in Landover of a stadium for the Washington Redskins added yet another ingredient to the traffic stew: Before and after home games, the Beltway henceforth had to accommodate thousands of additional vehicles in addition to regular local and long-distance traffic. See Stephen C. Fehr, "Traffic Problems Loom Over Landover Stadium Plan," Washington Post, 24 December 1995: B 1; and Alice Reid and Philip P. Pan, "Traffic Fears Become Reality in Beltway Jam," Washington Post, 15 Septem her 1997: A 1. 401 from out of town tend to drive more erratically while getting their bearings, often finding themselves in the far left lane and having to quickly merge four lanes to the right to exit.657 "Usually the long-distance travelers," Maryland officer Lorenzo Miller adds, they drive a lot faster than the local commuters. Cause the majority of the locals, they know where the bad spots are on 495 or 95. The out-of-towners don't. They're the ones, the majority of the times, in a crash or something like that, where there was a dangerous curve coming. And when you're driving at a high speed you might not make that curve. 658 When a tractor-trailer crashed into two cars and a tour bus on the Beltway in Virginia in March 2001, state police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell attributed the accident to the truck's New Jersey driver's unfamiliarity with the highway, where "traffic had slowed- as it always does at that point."659 Confusion at the notorious Mixing Bowl-the complicated intersection in Fairfax County of the Beltway with Interstates 95 and 395- has contributed to high accident rates there; VDOT began extensive reconstruction of the interchange in 1999 with completion projected by 2010. 660 657 Interview with Bill McKinney. 658 Interview with Lorenzo Miller. 659 Qtd. in Michael D. Shear and Martin Weil, "Truck, Two Cars, Tour Bus Crash on Beltway in Virginia; 17 Injured," Washington Post, 19 March 2001: Bl. 660 See, for example, Michael D. Shear and William Branigin, "Crash at Mixing Bowl Kills Five," Washington Post, 19 March 2000: Al, which notes that "[t]he Springfield interchange is considered one of the most dangerous in the country." For background on the Mixing Bowl, see Stephen C. Fehr, "Virginia's 21-Lane Solution," Washington Post, 20 February 1994: Al; Marylou Tousignant, "Slow Relief Ahead for 'Mixing Bowl,' Washington Post, 26 June 1997: Fairfax Weekly, 1; Eric L. Wee, "Greetings From ... the Mixing Bowl?" Washington Post, 30 April 1999: B 1; and Alan Si press and Alice Reid, "Drivers Face a Long Road as Va. Fixes Mixing Bowl," Washington Post, 3 January 1999: Al. 402 Safety problems are compounded by the absence along the Beltway of some of the services long-distance drivers expect. Unlike other portions ofl-95 and other long- distance Interstates, the eastern arc of the Beltway includes neither commercial trucker stops nor state-run rest areas. Long-haul truckers get tired, nonetheless. As a result, SHA engineer Maj Shakib explains, we have certain areas of the Beltway that the truckers actually just pull off on the shoulder and they sleep. And it's a tremendous problem in terms of safety. One point is around U.S. 50 and the Beltway, as you're coming off the Beltway either northbound or southbound, Inner Loop and Outer Loop of the Beltway to go east on US 50. Immediately between [the Route] 704 interchange and the Beltway, if you go there from time to time, maybe late at night, early mornings, you see some trucks that are actually lined up on the shoulder. It's really causing a headache to us and to the state police, because one of the most severe types of accidents is actually people running off the road and plowing into the back of a truck or another vehicle parked on the shoulder. Because the shoulder is there for the safety of the motoring public. And the truckers, they park there. We've provided parking restriction signing, but to no avail. They just continue to do that.661 For accounts of the Mixing Bowl reconstruction project through 2001, see Alan Sipress, "VDOT to Pay for 4 New Parking Lots," Washington Post, 12 January 1999: Bl; Alice Reid, "Springfield Interchange Work to Begin Tonight," Washington Post, 5 April 1999: B 1; Alice Reid and Alan Sipress, "Rigs Collide as Work on Interchange Gets Started," Washington Post, 7 April I 999: B 1; Alan Si press, "'Mixing Bowl' Finish Date Pushed Back," Washington Post, 26 October 1999: Al; Michael D. Shear, "Mixing Bowl Construction Going Smoothly," Washington Post, 17 November 2000: BIO; and William Branigin, "Mixing Bowl is Speedy and Costly," Washington Post, 25 April 2001: B3. Finally, for an example of the personal impact of the reconstruction project, see Kimberly Rose Johnson, "My Home is Over a Barrel," Washington Post, 7 January 2001: B8. Much more information appears on the website and in the intermittent newsletter VDOT Springfield Interchange Improvement Project, published beginning in the late 1990s by the Virginia Department of Transportation. 661 Interview with Maj Shakib. 403 This issue arises mostly at night. The lack of other services for long-distance travelers- notably rest rooms-causes problems at all hours, as I discuss later in this chapter. The Beltway's designation as I-95 has not had uniformly negative consequences. With Maryland and Virginia both electing not to erect official rest or service areas, gas stations and motels near the eastern arc have become the beneficiaries. 662 Jim Giese, formerly Greenbelt's city manager, points to the decision to run I-95 on the Beltway as the prime cause of the city's second economic boom (the first was when the Beltway first went through in 1964) and the "reason why we have the motels we have in the city here. 11663 Despite this economic boon, the increased traffic and danger created by the unanticipated addition of I-95 to the Beltway suggests that, as a Fairfax resident puts it, the road "can either be a bypass, or a through route. It does not have the capacity to be both."664 Exacerbating the tensions between local and long-distance motorists is the mix of private and commercial traffic. A greater percentage of the long-haul drivers are truckers; although they would use the Beltway in any case as a Washington bypass, they are much more likely to use it in its identity as I-95. In fact, truck drivers and commuters often each see the Beltway as their best option for moving around the area; when they try to do it on the same crowded highway, truckers become frustrated at the nonstop commuter flow, locals flare at the giant monsters flanking them on the 662 For a discussion of the analogous situation along rural Interstates, see Peter T. Kilborn, "In Rural Areas, Interstates Build Their Own Economy," New York Times, 14 July 2001: Al. 663 Interview with Jim Giese, 17 January 2001. 664 Beltway Survey #535. 404 congested road, and transportation officials find themselves constantly challenged to reach a fair balance. For their part, Beltway car drivers have long been concerned by the danger they perceive from trucks. A rash of serious accidents involving tractor-trailers in the mid- l 980s intensified these negative feelings; a 1986 AAA report studying 18 months' worth of recent crashes concluded that such trucks were involved in 19 percent of all Beltway accidents while comprising only 3.2 percent of Beltway traffic.665 However, Maryland State Highway Administration statistics from 1994 showed trucks to be involved in 11 percent of Beltway accidents while comprising eight to 11 percent of Maryland Beltway traffic, suggesting that by that year trucks were no more likely than cars to take part in accidents, although truck crashes were twice as likely as non-truck crashes to result in a fatality.666 Yet the perception of excessive danger lingers. "There is not a day that goes by," a resident wrote to The Washington Post in 1985, "when I am traveling on the Beltway to and from my job on Capitol Hill that I don't shudder when an 18- wheeler passes too closely or rides my bumper."667 Another letter complained of the daily sight of "a truck driver tailgating or cutting someone off or driving at an 665 Sue Ann Pressley, "The Beltway: Region's Main Street, Main Pain," Washington Post, 14 March 1986: Al2; Nell Henderson, "Many Beltway Accidents Stem From Volatile Mix of Trucks and Autos," Washington Post, 26 August 1988: Al2. 666 Maryland State Highway Administration, "Capital Beltway (I-495)," August l 994, 2, 3. Typescript document provided by Maj Shakib, State Highway Administration. 1992 truck counts conducted by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments confirm that trucks comprise approximately six to ten percent of Beltway traffic, varying according to specific location. See C. Patrick Zilliacus, 1992 Count of Heavy Truck Traffic on the Capital Beltway and Other Major Highways in the Washington Region (Washington: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 1993 ), 17. 667 Wrexie Bardaglio, letter to the editor, Washington Post, 13 October 1985: BS. 405 excessively high speed. They seem so belligerent-almost as if they're compelled to intimidate the other drivers on the road.11668 Auto drivers responding to my survey in 2000 and 2001 for the most part echo these concerns. Connie Lee, a Silver Spring resident, for example, writes that "there are too many trucks going too fast, or truck drivers going without sleep, maybe something could be done where trucks could be driven at night only or restricted off the Beltway during RUSH HOUR. Something has to be done.11669 Others, however, defend the truckers, by pointing out that the Beltway does keep much of the through commercial traffic off of other local roads, and that in fact the road was intended primarily for that type of travel in the first place.670 An Arlington resident "not crazy about being tailgated by 18-wheelers" points out that "in defense of truckers, the Beltway was built so they could go around the city instead of through it. Use by commuters is secondary to this purpose and it might help collective tempers if this point was made more often."671 Tractor-trailers even prove welcome to an Arnold, Md. motorist, who uses 672 them as guideposts during heavy downpours when lane markings are obscured. . b 1985· B8 See also 668 Dianna Sakacs letter to the editor, Washmgton Post, 13 Octo er · · . Joy Sharp, letter {0 the editor, Washington .Post, 12 April ~ 980: A 18; ~? ~~:1:gton Morella, "A Loophole So Big You Can Dnve a 35-Ton Rig Through It, Post, 26 July 1986: D8. 669 Beltway Survey #492. 670 Beltway Survey #343. 671 Beltway Survey #86. 672 Beltway Survey #210. 406 On the other side, some truck drivers throw their frustrations right back at the people driving cars next to them. In focus groups conducted by the Preusser Research Group for VDOT in 1994 (introduced in Chapter 2), all 13 Beltway truck drivers interviewed cited the behaviors of automobile drivers-particularly lack of common courtesy and respect for trucks-as their top safety concern and the primary cause of truck/car crashes. Most motorists, truck drivers agreed, "have no idea of trucks' capabilities; if they did, motorists would simply not do the things they do. "673 Still, regardless of whose behavior has been more to blame, Maryland's and Virginia's responses to improving safety, including left-lane truck bans (1984) and weigh stations (1988 in Virginia and late 1990s in Maryland) have been directed mostly at truckers, not motorists. 674 673 Preusser Research Group, "Drivers' Perception," 229. See also 216-217, 240-243. 674 This may be due in part to members of Congress who, when stuck themselves on the Beltway in backups resulting from truck/car crashes, are more likely to have been in a car and to blame the truck. On this point, see "Washbiz," Washington Post, 19 September 1988: Washington Business, 3; and Stephen C. Fehr, "Maryland Stretch of Beltway Most Dangerous, Truckers Say," Washington Post, 16 January 1991: Bl. On the states' efforts to improve safety on the Beltway by implementing restrictions on trucks, see R.H. Melton, "Beltway Truck Wrecks Rise," Washington Post, 14 February 1984: Al; Saundra Saperstein, "Md. Plans Truck Restrictions for Beltway," Washington Post, 21 February 1984: Bl; Rose Marie Donovan, "Hotline Snares Truckers," Fairfax Journal, 24 May 1984: Al; Paul Hodge, "Virginia Agrees to Restrict Beltway Truck Lanes," Washington Post, 25 October 1984: Al; "Trucks Restricted on Beltway," Washington Post, 27 November 1984: B3; "Trucks Obeying Ban on Beltway Lane," Washington Post, 3 June 1985: B7; John F. Harris, "No Quick Solution to Beltway Truck Safety Problems is in Sight," Washington Post, 25 September 1985: Cl; D'Vera Cohn, "Beltway Decree Extended," Washington Post, 22 February 1986: Bl; John Lancaster, "Confronting Beltway Truck Safety Head-On," Washington Post, 26 November 1987: Al; Steve Bates, "Beltway Crackdown Set on Speeding Truckers," Washington Post, 15 September 1988: DI; and Pierre Thomas, "I st Beltway Truck- Checking Station to Open," Washington Post, 30 September 1988: Cl. For an example of an effort by the trucking industry to educate its own, see American Trucking 407 But truckers direct greater frustration toward the overall situation in which they have little choice other than the Beltway.675 Kensington Volunteer Fire Department member Patrick Stanton, who deals with the resulting accidents, sympathizes with the truckers: [T]hose poor guys; anyone who would drive any large vehicle on 495 has my immediate sympathy. Because they have to deal with these people who are trying to drive at a thousand miles an hour because they're constantly late. But people don't realize, when they zip in front of a tractor-trailer and hit their brakes, that he can't just touch his brakes and slow down like they do. And the amount of commerce, just commercial traffic that travels 495, is just staggering. And you see-I always feel bad for the over-the-road drivers who have to come through any section of 495. Because there is no way to detour around it. There's no road, no cut-through, that they can use. They have to get stuck on there, the commercial traffic with the regular traffic. And I remember years ago when they had the tank truck that turned over and split, and it burned up a big section of 495. That type of thing, it always worries me that what happens one day when the guy carrying the tractor-trailer load of pool cleaner, when he gets cut off and can't correct going through those S-curves. Because people don't--if you make a mistake up there, there's nobody up there who's gonna forgive you for it.676 "There is no way to detour around it," Stanton notes. Cliff King, a Missouri trucker familiar with the Beltway, recalls his frustration with that scenario when he "missed the damned exit I was to get on and had to drive all the way back around. This is due to the fact that semi's [sic] aren't allowed to go any other way. 11677 Associations, "How to Drive on the Capital Beltway," brochure (Alexandria, Va.: American Trucking Associations, 1991 ). 675 See Clifford J. Harvison, "Don't Blame the Truckers," Washington Post, 18 September 1988: C8. 676 Interview with members of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department. 677 Beltway Survey #603. 408 For truckers, the Beltway is a "no-win choice," truck driver Cathy Clark argues: Driving fast to keep up with traffic entails speeding, which is dangerous and which angers car drivers, but obeying the speed limit means going slower than most of the traffic, which nets the same results.678 Truckers and motorists alike see no end to their conflict; their choices are then to adapt or to throw in the towel. Some truck drivers choose the latter; Jo Clair, a Wheaton-based trucker "gave up driving trucks locally in part because the traffic was too dangerous and frustrating to deal with daily, much less hourly. "679 But even the complete removal of all truck traffic from the Beltway would not clear the road of conflicts for the remaining motorists, because those car drivers find at least as much consternation with each other as they do with truckers. Beltway drivers detest other Beltway drivers. "With the exception of the [Pennsylvania] Turnpike," an Arlington resident writes, "I can't think of a single highway that attracts more inept, unskilled drivers who drive in a state of rage, day dreaming, distraction or just plain stupidity."680 And not just inept: Survey respondents consider their fellow drivers to be "bozos," "idiots," "morons," "inconsiderate, self- important pricks," "maniacs," "rude, discourteous, dangerous, and self-centered," and 678 Beltway Survey #399. For more on Washington-area truckers' perspectives, see Stephen C. Fehr, "Hazardous Duty on the Beltway," Washington Post, 21 May 1989: Dl; and Wells Tower, "The Long Haul," Washington Post Magazine, 5 August 2001: 8- 15, 21-23. 679 Beltway Survey #377. 680 Beltway Survey #596. 409 "hell bent for leather."681 Kensington firefighter Stanton documents the abysmal driving skills he observes on the Beltway: It's almost like a contest up there, to see who can be the most aggressive .... I used to joke with people all the time: what they taught us, I remember at driver's school, was if someone cuts in front of you and you can't maintain your distance, you know, one car length for every ten miles an hour, you would just slow down a little bit. Well, I used to tell people, if you try to do that on the Beltway, you might as well get on in reverse. Because that's the only way you're going to get anywhere .... Actually, the worst thing though, and some of the worst accidents I've seen, is people go to the end of the merge lanes, and they stop. And the guy behind them, who's looking over his shoulder, trying to pick his hole that he's going to drive into, drives right into the back of that person.682 What sets drivers off? High speeds, aggressive behavior, and inattention rank high on the list. 683 Maryland state trooper Lorenzo Miller expresses frustration at "all these incidents where people are getting killed for no reason. Cars crashing. I've been in .:-. 1 d . . t "d 11684 so many iata s that when you fin out why they crashed, you're like, this 1s s up1 · Miller and other police and firefighters are especially irritated by rubberneckers, described by a reporter in 1975 as a special species, the "Gawkus Accidenti. This strange bird jams on his brakes the minute he spots any activity-like an accident or flat tire. He creeps by the source of excitement, even if it's on the opposite side of the 681 Beltway Surveys #42, 63, 123, 239, 357, 446, 570. 682 Interview with members of Kensington Volunteer Fire Department. 683 See Alice Reid, "Drivers Call Aggression Top Danger on Beltway," Washington Post, 27 April I 998: Al. Other regions of the country also claim from time to time to have the rudest and most aggressive drivers; see, for example, John-Thor Dahlburg, "Fla. Drivers Merge Into the Rude Lane," Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2001: A20. 684 Interview with Lorenzo Miller. 410 Beltway, then wonders why traffic is slowed down."685 Kensington firefighter Murray Head Jr. recalls a firsthand example of the consequences of rubbernecking: We ran a call for [a vehicle] that flipped over. And it was an S.U.V., and they had come around a tum probably doing 80 miles an hour. And they came around, mother and daughter, flipped the car a couple times, wearing their seatbelts, and they were flying. Well, we pulled up on the scene and we blocked-to check up on them-and this guy, I mean, I turn around to just give the first-aid bag. He looks right at me. And slams right into the Jersey wall. It was right where it turns, and he just went right into it watching what was going on. And I was like, you-it was so dumb! You just pay attention to the road. He just slammed over the wall.686 Even drivers who follow the letter of the law sometimes earn the ire of those around them. After Arlington doctor John 0. Nestor wrote to the Washington Post in 1984 that he drove 55 miles per hour in the Beltway's left lane in a personal attempt to slow down speeders, area drivers skewered him in print for months for interfering with traffic, and "Nestoring" entered the Washington vernacular as a term for driving excessively slowly in the passing lane. 687 Drivers have difficulty responding to each other effectively because, as many responding to my survey acknowledge, they become different people, unfamiliar even to themselves, when on the road. "For the most part," Bethesda resident Megan Michael writes, "it seems that when people drive it, they lose their inhibitions and almost everyone becomes a crazy, rude driver, not caring or considerate of their fellow drivers. 685 John H. Corcoran Jr., "Commuter's Survival Guide," Washingtonian, October 1975: 113. 686 Interview with members of the Kensington Volunteer Fire Department. 687 See Lisa Rein, "Va. Bill Would Limit Driving in Left Lane," Washington Post, 11 February 2001: Cl. 411 At times, I too am guilty of a little road rage or indiscreet actions. "688 "I really believe .. . it has made us into kind of nasty people," an Alexandria resident adds. A Waldorf resident agrees that "many people become changed by this road into disrespectful, dangerous, and rude drivers." Several survey respondents apologize in their replies for what they consider to be shameful behavior, explaining that "[i]t is difficult at times to keep cool and calm while driving on the Beltway."689 Despite these frustrations, interpersonal tensions between motorists, like the local/long-distance and car/truck conflicts, have no obvious solutions for appeasement of all parties involved. Given these multiple and coincident conflicts, it seems almost paradoxical that the Beltway concurrently serves as a major unifying device for the Washington region and that it in fact engenders a sense of community among the same drivers who hate both the road and each other. Historian Zachary Schrag writes that the Metro system has done the same: Both a commuter rail service for the suburbs and a subway for the city, Metro was truly a metropolitan system. And looking at [graphic designer Lance] Wyman's map, riders could see that they were no longer just suburbanites or city dwellers, but citizens of a region .... The promise of metropolitan harmony is displayed everyday, as hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians, Marylanders, and Virginians gladly share one enormous machine.690 They do not share the Beltway quite so gladly; still, as a Gaithersburg resident writes, the road "has integrated and unified 3 distinct areas, Northern Virginia, Maryland, and 688 Beltway Survey #507. 689 Beltway Survey #207. 690 Schrag, "Mapping Metro," 23. 412 DC, into one great metropolitan area."691 The Beltway, other respondents write, creates a "regional unity," a "cohesive whole," "one large metropolitan community," "almost one state, affectionately known as the Area. "692 The same closely-spaced interchanges which exacerbate traffic, a College Park resident argues, increase "the feeling of community. On something like the New Jersey Turnpike ... you definitely know that you are not traveling within the same community. Often it is 20 minutes between exits."693 Increased geographic proximity created by the Beltway contributes to this regional cohesion. But in a social sense, the community is forged by the common experiences and language the Beltway provides. "I've found," a Greenbelt resident explains, " ... there are certain terms and references that locals are privy to. It's like you are instantly judged by the vocabulary you choose to use in talking about the beltway. There's a certain amount of pride that goes along with learning with lingo, conquering the beltway, etc."694 Despite its annoyances, Odenton resident Christopher Moore adds, the Beltway is part of the fabric that makes us Washingtonians and Marylanders. It is a rite of passage for teenagers after they get their licenses to be able to navigate the Beltway. It is a common link between two strangers. For example, I can have a conversation about the beltway with someone from the area and another person not from the area wouldn't be able to follow it. Plus? ~e can laugh at that same person who got lost in the area and wound up driving 691 Beltway Survey #514. 692 Beltway Surveys #220, 490,485,203. 693 Beltway Survey #485. 694 Beltway Survey #607. 413 in circles for hours! 695 As in other social settings, regular participants become acclimatized to the omnipresence of certain characters; the regular appearances (on radio, television, and the Beltway itself) of traffic reporters and emergency response personnel remind drivers that normal routines prevail and that their world is functioning. 696 The Beltway's sense of community is enhanced by its appearance in a variety of popular culture productions, for which only people in the know understand the full meaning. While the New Jersey Turnpike may have inspired a large collection of songs, fiction, poetry, painting, sculptures, and films, the Beltway has generated its own small set as well.697 Thus these inside jokes from a 2001 Washington Post readers' contest: What's the difference between the Mixing Bowl and a D.C. manhole cover? The manhole cover has been known to be the site of rapid acceleration. (Ben F. Noviello, Fairfax) 695 B l e tway Survey #203. 696 On the sense of community among and engendered by Washington's traffic reporters, see Nellie Oberholtzer, "Radio Trio of Traffic Flyboys," Washington Post, 2 March 1983 : D.C. Weekly, 1; and Stephen C. Fehr, "Angels of the Rush Hour," Washington Post, 26 July 1993: Al. For background on a variety of response teams which have appeared on the Beltway since 1964, see the following: for the AAA Beltway Patrol, see Brian Kelly, "Special Patrol Aids 5,000," Evening Star, 29 May 1967: B-2; for the Maryland citizens' Beltway Patrol, see Ivan G. Goldman, "Help on Way for Stranded Beltway Motorists," Washington Post, 14 August 1972: Cl; for the Virginia Highway Courtesy Patrol, see "Beltway Patrol Extended," Northern Virginia Sun, 28 March 1973: 7; for Maryland's Coordinated Highways Action Response Team (CHART) program, see Melinda Deslatte, "Computer System Helps Cure the Beltway Blues," Diamondback, 1 February 1999: 11, and Alan Sipress, "Incredible Journeys," Washington Post, 4 February 2000: A23; and for Virginia's Safety Service Patrol, see Alice Reid, "Roadside Help Program Gets Lift From Gilmore," Washington Post, 29 May 1998: Dl. 697 For an extensive discussion of the New Jersey Turnpike in popular culture, see Gillespie and Rockland, Looking for America, 155-171. 414 What's the difference between the Beltway and Lorton? More traffic flows through Lorton. (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg)698 Several pieces of Washington familiarity are necessary to correctly interpret the jokes: The first refers to recurring manhole explosions around Georgetown in the late 1990s and early 2000s due to underground electrical problems; the second plays on the overcrowded penitentiary in Lorton, Va., through 2001, and possibly on alleged drug traffic there as well. Several Beltway poems have appeared in print. These haiku, which all play off of themes discussed earlier in this study, were published in 1990: City and car, like Man and woman wedded with A ring forever. (Ira Gitlin, New Carrollton) Moving at sixty Traffic passes me quickly Like I'm standing still. (Eugene W. Berkhoff, Alexandria) If there is a way That will avoid the Beltway You better take it! (Chris Schmitz, Fairfax) Bewildered driver Left, now right, now left again Ah, out-of-state tags. (Diane Mularz, Silver Spring) Accident ahead Long line of rubberneckers Beltway blues again. (Troy Whitfield Jr., Centreville) Around and around If only I had more time ... and an Excedrin! (Elizabeth Freeland, Lanham)699 698 "Style Invitational, Report from Week LIV," Washington Post, 4 March 2001: F2. 699 "Bob Levey's Washington," Washington Post, 17 May 1990: Cl4; "Bob Levey's Washington," Washington Post, 30 May 1990: D13. 415 A poem published in the literary journal Potomac Review contrasts the natural and artifactual aspects of the Beltway: Stuck on the Beltway, 5 p.m. by Jean Johnson grumbling along with the mutter of the automobiles that kidnap us, I look up and see hundreds of nightjars darting swooping in and over the highway snatching at full speed invisible bugs. Is it the metal's heat or the mephitic breath of gasoline that has brought this aerial circus to perform just overhead of the stalled cars? No one looks up to see the nightjars h • 700 untmg. Music invoking the Beltway ranges from wordless melodies, such as Bethesda resident and pianist Liz Donaldson's reel "Beyond the Beltway" (Fig. 10), to complex songs. In her recorded song titled "Beltway," singer-songwriter Eileen Joyner invokes the Beltway's traffic, its consistent place in her life, and in the sixth line of the last stanza, the sense of community she feels a part of by driving on it: 700 Jean Johnson, "Stuck on the Beltway, 5 p.m.," Potomac Review 30 (Spring 2001): 20. Reprinted by permission. 416 Beltway By Eileen Joyner It's 95 degrees outside I'm startin' now to sweat Humidity is rising My clothes they're getting wet So I'm looking for the Beltway That's where I want to be With my air conditioner blowing I'm as happy as can be Well I'm stuck out here in Northeast Washington DC I got a date in Rockville and He's waiting there for me So help me find the Beltway I've got to get there fast I've been driving down Wisconsin I don't know if I can last When I was just a little gal My momma said to me "The quickest way Between two points in Washington DC It ain't no straight line It's got circularity Go out and find the Beltway and Let the Beltway set you free" Well I drive it in the springtime I drive it in the fall Don't look for me at five o'clock Don't even try to call 'Cuz I'm out there on the Beltway With all my friends I'm on the highway out to nowhere Th 701 e Beltway never ends 701 Eileen Joyner, "Beltway." From the album "Always Wear Underwear," copyright Underwear Music, 1991. Reprinted by permission. For more information, contact Eileen Joyner (703-569-8584, eileenjoyner@hotmail.com). 417 In Joyner's lyrics, the Beltway itself is the device which sets the narrator's mind at ease: "That's where I want to be ... I'm as happy as can be." Singer Richard Schuman's song titled "Beyond the Beltway," in contrast, focuses on the Beltway's role as a dividing line. For Schuman's narrator, peace of mind, freedom, and dreams all lie outside the "hectic city" contained within the Beltway. The phrase in parentheses is a refrain sung by the audience. Beyond the Beltway By Richard Schuman When first I saw D.C., city life was it for me, Like so many others, seduced by its allure, But as my hair grows thin, a little voice within, Says "Fly away to where the air is pure." I got to be ("Beyond the Beltway") Where I'm free ("Beyond the Beltway") Where a man can expand to be all that he can be With ne'er a care ("Beyond the Beltway") In air so rare ("Beyond the Beltway") That only when I'm there can I dare to be me. Each mom I feel like cryin', when I board the old Red line, And Dupont Circle looms above the ground, At the end of another day, as I head the other way, I know that's where my dreams can all be found. I got to be ("Beyond the Beltway") Where I'm free ("Beyond the Beltway") And leave the hectic city far behind When I go home ("Beyond the Beltway") My life's my own ("Beyond the Beltway") I go to sleep each night with peace of mind. Sometimes as I drive, along 495, I can see an angel in the sky, As he plays his golden horn, I can feel myself reborn, I know my exit's comin' by and by. I got to be Where I'm free ("Beyond the Beltway") ("Beyond the Beltway") 418 ' l • I " ' , •, / ' , " 'I , , ,, , , ,, ,, ' , . . Like a little fish that swims the deep blue sea Now I don't shirk ("Beyond the Beltway") A little take-home work ("Beyond the Beltway") But I know that my soul belongs to me. They say some other men, live their three score and ten, In places where the trees outnumber cars, Where upon a mountain's peak, one can almost hear God speak, But I doubt their salaries are as good as ours. I got to be ("Beyond the Beltway") Relatively free ("Beyond the Beltway") I'm pretty happy I guess in my own way Our condo's nice ("Beyond the Beltway") It's gone up in price ("Beyond the Beltway") I'll be a GS-7 soon they say. I got to be ("Beyond the Beltway") Where I'm free ("Beyond the Beltway") Where a man can expand to be all that he can be My folks live there ("Beyond the Beltway") In Grosvenor Square ("Beyond the Beltway") And only home with them can I be "M" "E" me.702 - Greenbelt resident Dorothy Sucher's song "Moon Over the Beltway," performed and recorded as part of a musical comedy revue in 1976, tells of a melodrama set against the Capital Beltway, with additional local references (Giant supermarkets, federal government terminology) thrown in for good measure: Moon Over the Beltway By Dorothy Sucher (Tango with traffic noises) I lost my lover on the Beltway 'Twas in a carpool that we met- That magic day I felt his hand stray, Why didn't I play hard to get? I knew that he was out of line Beneath the Mormon shrine 702 Richard Schuman, "Beyond the Beltway." Reprinted by permission. 419 A I wasn't very smart; I felt my pulse accelerate, He asked me for a date And it was Rush Hour in my heart! REFRAIN: And there was a- New Moon over the Beltway when we met Full Moon over the Beltway when we kissed Blue Moon over the Beltway when we parted My Beltway lover left me broken-hearted. I gave the green light, I was pliant, And for a while we were in heaven I was a checkout girl at Giant, He was a suave G.S. Eleven. I guess I should have used the brake For he was on the make But I was unobservant- I learned his love was temporary And he was just a very Uncivil civil servant! (Refrain) Day by day, his love grew colder At last he dropped me-on the shoulder. I was too hurt to make a fuss I told him I would take the bus. The Air Pollution Index was high I didn't cry But smog got in my eye. He shifted into overdrive- Oh, how will I survive?- He vanished up I-95! (Refrain) Yes, now without a question There'll always be con~estion Deep within my heart! 03 In the first verse of her song and in the third verse of his (referring to the angel), Sucher and Schuman invoke the most prominent visible icon in the Beltway landscape, 703 Dorothy Sucher, "Moon Over the Beltway," written for the Hexagon Revue "Barbs and Snipes Forever," 1976, reprinted by permission. 420 the Washington Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (actually in Kensington, Md.), which she refers to as the Mormon Shrine. More than any other single physical element, the temple characterizes the experience of driving on the Beltway, cited repeatedly by my survey respondents as their favorite part of the highway. Dozens of respondents liken the white temple, illuminated at night, to Oz and/or the Emerald City, though several compare it instead to Cinderella's castle at Disney Land and Walt Disney World. Before it was erased, the phrase "Surrender Dorothy" was spray-painted several times on a railroad bridge crossing the Beltway approaching the temple; many respondents cite this as their "absolute favorite part of the Beltway" or "the best graffiti I've ever seen," wishing that it would reappear.704 The temple and graffiti provide the backdrop for this haiku and joke: Hit in a crash- thought I saw heaven ahead. No ... The Mormon Temple. (Mary M. Stolzenbach, Vienna)705 How long does it take to drive from Georgia to Connecticut? About five minutes, if you don't wait for Dorothy to surrender. (Andrea Kelly, Brookville, Md.)7°6 For all of Maryland's and Virginia1s efforts to create a safe and visually pleasant highway, it is this religious structure which has become the most loved aspect of the Capital Beltway and which provides the most positive association and memories for many who drive on it. 704 Beltway Surveys #379, 569. 705 "Bob Levey's Washington/' Washington Post, 17 May 1990: C 14. 706 "Style Invitational, Report from Week LIV," Washington Post, 4 March 2001: F2. 421 The Beltway serves as a community site in other ways as well. As on other highways, for instance, broken-down motorists are regularly surprised to find strangers st0PPing to assist and refusing any compensation. 707 But the strongest sense of community is created by the Beltway's presence as both a common denominator, a social reference point, in the lives of Washington-area residents, and as a physical unifier which shrinks portions of two states and the District into a single 257-square mile "Beltland. "10s Public or private space? What people do within their homes is clearly a private concern; what they do in a public venue is not. But activities within a private vehicle on a public road fall somewhere between. A driver on the Beltway is secluded from other drivers by the confines of a vehicle (though less so if riding in a convertible), but still shares the larger space of the highway with thousands of other people. Like other roads, the Beltway is a liminal space in which drivers and passengers negotiate between public and private nonns of behavior. Surveillance cameras have put this tension to the test. Maryland and Virginia highway personnel monitor cameras along the Beltway 24 hours a day, as described in the prologue, to watch for and respond to traffic problems. Those cameras are strong 707 Beltway Surveys #239, 307, 322, 368, 436, 477, 604. On the flip side, respondents Write of "tow sharks" who have taken advantage of them by quoting and charging exorbitant prices on the Beltway; see Beltway Surveys #12, 505, 517. 708 The figure appears in Sidey, 20. 422 enough to zoom in on what is happening in any particular vehicle or house. Highway officials in both states acknowledge that the cameras could be used in this way, but because doing so would constitute an inappropriate (and possibly illegal) invasion of privacy, they direct their employees not to focus directly on vehicles, homes, or offices in that level of detail. VDOT's Carlene Mc Whirt explains: Yeah, we zoom in. We have full zoom capabilities. Our cameras can zoom in quite up close and personal. Our traffic controllers are real responsible ... when you see something on the Interstate, you have to zoom in and see what's going on. Our controllers often are trained and instructed that they need to back off from the situation once they determine what's needed, what's going on, what's there. So that they can view the overall view of the incident, so they can see what's going on around the incident, be it a vehicle just stopped on the side of the road, or nature called. We don't know what they're doing until we zoom in. Well, then you zoom back out. It's not something we want to keep track of. And of course, when we turn our cameras, we tend to keep them on the highway so that we don't encroach apartment buildings along the Interstate, or office ' buildings or parking lots, because we're dealing with stuff on the Interstate so And th , d thi 709 ' that's what we want to concentrate on. at s a goo ng. But exactly where to draw the line is hard to define. In 2000, despite the privacy policy, Maryland authorities used traffic cameras on I-95 north of the Beltway to identify 26,500 Maryland drivers and mail them letters as part of a mass transit survey, d 710 generating criticism from many of those contacte · Drivers may prefer that authorities not spy on their activities on the road; at the same time, some drivers take advantage of the semiprivate space to engage in illegal activities. A Silver Spring resident, for example, recalls that "a friend who grew up here 709 Interview with Carlene McWhirt, January 23, 2001. 710 M.J. Zuckerman, "Chances Are, Somebody's Watching You," USA Today, 30 November 2000: IA. 423 said when it was new, they used to drive all the way around it smoking pot."111 This story is corroborated by a Kensington resident who not only smoked pot on the Beltway but grew it there in the road's early years: I actually tried growing pot inside of the big curve of the cloverleaf at Kensington Parkway. And they grew, and I'd go and visit them once in a while, and then one time I visited and they weren't there. I don't know what happened to 'em .... But when you're 12 and 13, well, actually more like 14 and 15, and you're smoking pot a lot of times, believe me, you smoke wherever you can. And to a certain extent the Beltway provided us with , , d , 712 opportunities to o 1t. In fact, the Beltway is a venue for both drugs and sex. Andrew Gillespie and Michael Rockland cite several examples in discussing how "there is something about th . I d . ,.113 p h e [New Jersey] Turnpike that seems to excite sexua es1re. er aps the same "something" holds true for highways in general, or at least Interstates, given the first set of figures below from the Web survey: Table 21.- Additional Personal Activities on the Capital Beltway ( 607 responses) 111a Activity (for drivers or passengers) Had a sexual and/or romantic experience Urinated or defecated eltway Survey #78. 712 Interview with *Chris Parker. 713 Gillespie and Rockland, 147. 424 N 61 14 Percent 10.0% 2.3% Truckers on the Beltway, who have a clear view from above of what happens in the cars below, report "quite a bit of sexual activity from passing motorists. "714 Most of the survey respondents who claim to have had a sexual and/or romantic experience on the Beltway shy away from details with "no comment," "enough said," or "leave it at that." "I'm a grandmother," an Arlington resident writes, "and I don't want to draw that picture for you, it would embarrass both ofus-tra Ia."715 Those who do provide details suggest that Beltway sexual activity skews toward romantic kissing and oral sex. "This is very personal," writes a Falls Church resident ' "but [I experienced] performing oral sex on the driver in a convertible with the top down-maybe not too unusual, but the top down part might be."716 Others write of giving, receiving, or witnessing oral sex.717 New Jersey resident Sharon Ran.file offers this bizarre experience of one man's attempt to find sexual gratification on the Beltway: [O]ne time I was following a friend home to New Jersey, and she broke down. While waiting on the side of the road, a man pulled up. He had a camera, and he claimed to be from the Baltimore sun. He told us he was researching people who had broken down on the beltway, and how fast assistance came. He asked a few questions, and then requested a picture. 714 Beltway Survey #603. In February 2001, I appeared on a live news program on Maryland Public Television to share the results in progress of my research and to answer viewers' calls. There was only time for one call, a general question about the need for better inter-suburban access. When the program ended, the red-faced producer told me that the first call he took-which he could not put on the air-was from, as he later wrote, a trucker who said that "from high up he has seen men and women playing with themselves." 7B B l e tway Survey #596. 716 Beltway Survey #238. 717 Beltway Surveys #83, 546,614,615. 425 After a picture of our faces, he pointed to my friend's feet. "You have beaut· ful feet", he said. "I'm also a recruit for foot models. Can I take a picture of yo i feet as well?" My friend complied. A few moments later, he'd convinced m:to take ~y shoes off and photograph ~y feet as well. We were beginning to realize t~at this man was not from the Baltimore Sun, because a) his camera was disposable b) he'd neglected to interview us about Beltway breakdowns and c) he was getting overly excited about our feet. After .the firs.t couple of pic~es! he beg~ to try to touch our feet, to arrange them m specific photos for his pictures. First, he touched my friend's feet and then he tried to touch mine. I was scared, so I told him to go away, no mdre photos and especially no more touching. I was afraid as to how he would react, what ifhe Jost control and was no longer "nice" to us because we weren't cooperating? However, he did get back into his car. Before he pulled away, he lifted his camera to take a few more shots of us. He pulled in front of us one more time. "Please?" he said. "Please let me take just one more picture of your feet, please!" His sexual enjoyment over this fiasco was now obvious. "No!" We both yelled. Within a couple of moments, he was gone, and my friend and I were both aghast and disgusted over the experience. However, we now had a crazy story to tell. 718 Except in Ranftle's case, every sexual episode described by respondents was a conscious choice to engage in otherwise private activity in a semipublic venue. This is not the case with drivers and passengers who find that they need to urinate or defecate. As noted above, even though it is in part a through highway, the Beltway does not have rest areas or other sanitary facilities. Drivers can exit and find gas stations or other retail establishments, but out-of-town drivers are uncomfortable about doing this and traffic jams often make it impossible in any case. "Hey, sometimes you can't hold it " a Greenbelt resident explains; a Hyattsville resident adds that "the ' severity of a traffic jam can be measured by the # of men one sees 'standing' on the 11s B eltway Survey #619. 426 shoulder." 719 Both adults and children consequently find themselves forced to Participate publicly in what under almost any other circumstances would be a very private activity. To mask their actions and embarrassment, those in need resort to at least six different strategies. A Burke resident describes the nonchalant approach after being stuck behind an accident for over two hours: Two hours later, I was still there, and the "need" had increased to monumental proportions. "Pain" would be an accurate word. I realized that the shoulder lane was beginning to move slowly, due to folks getting off at the next exit, so, with a little cooperation from other drivers I was finally able to move over to the right shoulder to join several other cars that had overheated engines or perhaps similar problems to mine. Due to the proximity of other drivers, male and female, and my natural shyness, I devised a process that included opening both the front and back doors on the passenger side of my car, and sitting very nonchalantly looking around as if I were just resting and enjoying the pleasant scenery, while taking care of my problem. I arrived home about 6 hours later than usual that . h d'd th dri 720 mg t as 1 many o er vers. A University Park resident describes his application of the false breakdown strategy: I had left work on my motorcycle and realized I needed to urinate. I'm not big on doing this in public, but it was urgent. I pulled over around georgetown pike, ( outer loop) and was going to go over the bank. J~st as I moved ~ound the bike, a cop pulled up and wanted to know what was go~ng on. I told him the bike was overheating I needed to let it cool down for ten mmutes. He was satisfied and ' d 1 ft 721 left. I took care of busmess an e · Two respondents write of using "pee bottles" within their vehicles; a third has used a large blanket as a shield while standing on the shoulder, and another drives his large van 719 Beltway Survey #212, 476. See also Sussman, "Best and Worst of the Beltway," 29. 120 8 eltway Survey #524. n1 B l e tway Survey #517. 427 off the road and "after angling the vehicle for maximum concealment, I let 'er rip. 11722 In all cases, the people urinating and defecating experience a sense of shame which they do not feel when engaging in sex, shaving, makeup application, or any other private activity mentioned in the survey responses. Drivers and passengers eagerly use the Beltway as private space, it seems, only when they freely choose to do so; when faced with no choice other than to engage in a normally private activity, they become more conscious of how public a space the highway actually is. 723 Stirring the jurisdictional soup In addition to its other roles, the Beltway also serves as an arena for mediation and compromise in inter-jurisdictional cooperation. Philosophical clashes between Maryland and Virginia, discussed earlier, are only the tip of the iceberg in considering limited regional cohesiveness at a policymaking level: Differing transportation priorities, economic competition, battles between developers and environmentalists, and pride have kept the Washington area's many jurisdictions at arm's length from each other. When regional authorities have been proposed, political leaders in individual jurisdictions ( cities, counties, states, and the District) have generally been unwilling to place transportation decisions in the hands of a body which would not answer directly to their respective constituents. And even if jurisdictions agreed to cede their local 722 Beltway Surveys #339, 86, 102, 453. 723 A similar tension between public and private space occurs within the Metrorail system. See Lyndsey Layton, "Public Primping Raises Eyebrows," Washington Post, 3 March 2002: Al. 428 autonomy to such an authority, its creation would come too late for many road projects which might have been appropriate at an earlier time. 724 But the Beltway exists, and the Metro system does too. The regional jurisdictions thus are forced to cooperate in order to maintain and plan for these transportation facilities which cross multiple political boundaries. 725 Who, though, is responsible for mediating these efforts to ensure that decisions make sense on a regional level, when each jurisdiction is most concerned about itself? Because there is no one overriding authority, several types of groups have stepped into the fray to speak on behalf of the region; these include the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, interest groups usually classified as "pro-developer" and "Smart Growth," and the media. COG, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, was created in 1957 as the Washington Metropolitan Regional Conference, to provide an apparatus for representatives of 18 local governments to work together on common issues. 726 In 1966, COG became associated with the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board (TPB)-the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for Washington and several surrounding counties and cities-with hopes of forming a more powerful force 724 Peter Behr "Area Leaders Hit Traffic Roadblock," Washington Post, 28 September 1997: Al; John Lancaster, "Coordinated Road Plans Collide With Jurisdictional Squabbles," Washington Post, 5 June 1988: A20. See also Douglas B. Feaver, "Commuters Caught in Squeeze," Washington Post, 14 July 1975: Al. 725 Efforts to work cooperatively over Metro are addressed in Zachary Schrag, "America's Subway: The Washington Metro. as Vision and Vehicle, 1955-2001," Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, forthcommg. 726 Melder, City of Magnificent Intentions, 576-577. 429 "with the authority and will power to do what was best for the region."727 Even though its staff are COG employees, the TPB is an entity that is independent of COG's Board of Directors, and TPB decisions are not subject to review or revision by the COG Board. But the new body's authority was lacking; COG has no independent trucing power or ability to enforce its recommendations, and representatives to COG remained focused on their own constituents' interests. Moreover, because COG is funded heavily from federal sources with smaller matching contributions from participating jurisdictions, any jurisdiction which decided to withdraw would take away its own contribution to COG's funding plus the larger, corresponding share of federal funds; COG members thus had to be careful not to upset one another or advocate non-unanimous proposals. 728 TPB's key weakness, though, has been its inability to enforce the decisions its members agree upon. "The Council of Governments," former Fairfax County Planning Board member Anne Wilkins said in 1974, "had no power- it still doesn't. 11729 Robert Grow, staff director for the Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade's Transportation and Environment Committee, points to TPB's benefits and weaknesses (while he refers directly to COG, he actually speaks ofTPB's responsibilities and accomplishments): 121 K COG is a tremendous resource in plannin~. They've done excellent planning work. They have excellent ability to coordmate, for example, ~orecasts and develop data for the region, and run ~e traffic ~odels. W!1en. 1t comes to implementing, though, they're not an unplement1~g or~an1zat10n. The states provide the inputs to the long-range plan. COG, given its role a~ a metropolitan planning organization, makes sure ~at these are funde?, are al,1 m the same package. They do confonnity analysis, make sure that 1t doesn t exceed the air aye, "Traffic Terror," 118. 72e Ib. . . B 1 ,, 49 id.; Gner, "Washmgton: A e tway, · 729 II w·1k• 11 23 An Interview with Mrs. Anne 1 ms, · 430 "H quality limits for the region. So in tenns of implementing, they don't have powers to implement. They have powers to provide for regional thinking and hopefully coordination. 730 opefully" is the key word, because of the lack of enforcement powers. "This organization is never going to have 'teeth' in the sense of being able to overrule local jurisdictions," COG transportation planning director Ronald Kirby acknowledged in l988. "We can only act as a forum for them to thrash out their particular interests."731 Like virtually every other Metropolitan Planning Organization in the country ( except for Portland, Ore.), the TPB and COG are not empowered to require that their member jurisdictions enact specific land use plans. What can the TPB do? It can provide quantitative data, such as vehicle counts on roadways and forecasts of future traffic volumes and transit ridership, to local jurisdictions to help them in making decisions. It can bring key regional transportation issues to the forefront, as it did in 1988 by including the widening of the Wilson Bridge in its regional long-range transportation plan. 732 And TPB can bring squabbling jurisdictions together in one place, as in 1986 when itjoined the Board of Trade in sponsoring a conference titled "Solving the Problem of Greater Washington's Main Street," attended by 250 political and business leaders and transportation planners intent on improving the Beltway. But even though attendees agreed strongly that the Beltway was an urgent problem, TPB's lack of enforcement power rendered the conference "a 730 Interview with Robert Grow, January lO, 200I. 731 Qtd , . m Kaye, 49. 732 See John Lancaster, "Beltway Rush-Hour Commuters Find the Going Getting Slower," Washington Post, 21 April 1988: DI. 431 giant work session, where the participants acknowledged and studied the problem and possible solutions while stopping short of making decisions. "733 In May 1998, a National Capital Region Congestion and Mobility Summit was held in Washington, co- sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Maryland and Virginia Departments of Transportation, the D.C. Department of Public Works, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and the TPB. Participants discussed a variety of transportation issues, including financing and Beltway congestion relief. 734 Special-interest groups have joined the fray, advocating specific transportation Policies for the benefit of the region. One major faction, including business groups (led by the Greater Washington Board of Trade) and highway-user organizations (particularly AAA), pushes for an expanded transportation network including more transit but especially additional and widened highways and bridges. 735 Although the Board of Trade-with 1200 constituent members including major corporations, nonprofit organizations, and universities-works toward improved transportation for the area, its primary responsibility is to the commercial sector. Robert Grow explains: [Our advocating specific projects is] to the benefit of the ~ho~e community .... We get enough input so that we can understand everybody s view and what the needs of the general community are. But our m~mbers c~me first, and they provide us with the general direction. And we give a reality check on that 733 Sue Anne Pressley, "Officials Tackle Beltway Problems," Washington Post, 15 March 1986: GI. 734 See Alice Reid, "Summit Explores Way Out on Roads," Washington Post, 29 May 1998: DI. 735 Van Dyne, "As Far as the Eye can See," 101; Step?en ~· Fehr: "Officials Have Dropped Plans for 13 Highways Since 1961, Study Fmds, Washmgton Post, 25 February 1997: B4. 432 by getting input from others. 736 The Board of Trade and its business constituents have tried to help shape regional transportation decisions by offering strong support for eastern and western bypasses to th e Beltway and by sponsoring organizations reaching out to drivers concerned about congestion. Among these have been the DO IT Coalition (formed in 1987, an acronym for Develop Outer Interstate Throughways), which in 1988 published a "Capital Beltway Owner's Manual" with driving tips and proposed improvements including byPasses; and endgridlock.org (formed in 1999, formerly the Coalition for Better Mobility), encouraging public participation via the Internet. 737 736 I nterview with Robert Grow. 737 On the DO IT Coalition, see Kaye, 112; Steve Bates, "Beltway 'Owner's Manual' Ou~," ~ashington Post, 29 December 1988: B7; Ed Bruske, "Snowstorm Spurs Plan for Rehevmg Beltway Congestion, 11 Washington Post, 17 November 1987: B3; and DO IT Coalition, "The Capital Beltway Owner's Manual" (n.p.: DO IT Coalition, Winter 1988- l ~89). On endgridlock.org, see (15 November 2001); Alan Sipress, "Environmentalists Question Origin of New Road Group," Washington Post 9 March 2000: B2; and "AAA Fights Congestion with endgridlock.org," AAA World, ' November/December 2001: 40. On the Eastern Bypass and the Western Transportation Corridor-two bypasses Promoted by the Board of Trade, the DO IT Coalition, and others in the 1980s and 1990s-see Van Dyne, "As Far as the Eye~~ See," 1?~; v;:n Dyn~, "Getting There," 208-210; Mike Barnes, "The Beltway, in Cntical Condition, Washington Post, 20 August 1989: B8; Stephen c. Fehr, "An Ambitious Gridlock Remedy," Washington ~ , 13 May 1990: Al. Stephen C. Fehr, "Bypass Could Become the Battle of the Decade," Washington Post, 14 May 1990: Al; Leo Schefer, "Virginia's Dream," ~hington Post 10 November 1996: C3; Douglas M. Duncan, "Our Nightmare" ~hington Post' 10 November 1996: C3; Katharine Carlon, "Road to Nowhere?" ~~ax Journal, 9 February 1997: Al; Spencer S. H~u, "Al.len Push~s I-95 Bypass in N. yirginia," Washington Post, 18 March 199?: Bl; Abee Reid and Michael D. Shear, Road War Brews for Growth Foes," Washington Post, 19 May 1997: Bl; Ann O'fianlon, "Multimillion-Dollar Study is Approved for Western Bypass," Washington ~' 19 September 1997: Bl; Spencer S. Hsu, "Va. Senate yotes to Halt Action on Bypass Plan," Washington Post, 27 February 1998: Bl; Justm Blum, "Backers of Bypass Tum to Va. House for Support," Washington Post, 28 February 1998: B5; 433 A second faction includes groups with environmental and social concerns ' Whose members argue against accepting continued low-density development and highway expansion and for a shift toward mass transit and other alternatives along with new planning models (such as transit-oriented development). 738 In Maryland, this faction incorporated the state's political leadership in the 1990s, especially through Gov. PclITis Glendening's Smart Growth policies. In Virginia, like-minded residents chose the Beltway as a springboard to push their broader views from this approach. In the ongoing Virginia Beltway improvement study, covered in Chapter 6, the Coalition for Smarter Growth has repeatedly rallied Northern Virginia residents to fight VDOT's proposals for additional lanes (and other proposals), in favor of other alternatives. Paul Hughes, the coalition's cofounder, explains that the Beltway, while lin.portant, is not his group's overriding concern; he and other local Sierra Club members found the Beltway useful as a vehicle for taking a stand against sprawl. We looked at how we would move or motivate people in Fairfax County on that issue, since [the sprawl is] out there about 50 miles from here, 40, something like that. We kind of came to the conclusion after meeting with groups from Loudoun Prince William, and Fauquier ... we couldn't move people here locally o~ that issue. There would just be no traction for it. ... So, looking at that, it's a worthwhile battle ~d e:eryth~ng else, but how to relate it to our folks? so we had to back away, and 1t kmd of Just came to us, frankly, "ByPassing Reality in Richmond" [editorial], Washington Post, 2 March 1998: Al6; Alan Sipress, "Federal Officials Pass on N. Virginia Bypass," Washington Post, 22 August 1998: DI ; Dan Eggen, "TransitWishListforN. Va. !~creases," Washington ~ ' 15 December 1999· Bl. R.H. Melton, "Va. Lawmaker Aims to Block Western ByPass," Washington Po~t, s'February 2001: Bl; R.H. Melton, "Va. Senate Moves to ~lock Western Bypass," Washington Post, 9 FebrwtJ?' 20?1: Bl; and Katy 1 ;ohnson, Why Won't Virginia Take No For an Answer on This Misbegotten Road? Washington ~ ' 10 June 2001 : B8. 7Js V "102 an Dyne, "As Far as the Eye Can See, · 434 just t~i~g about what would resonate here, and what was timely in terms of ?ur still bemg able to affect it. And that turned out to be the project that was mvolved with the widening of the Beltway .... The idea [was] to take what is essentially, the Beltway, which is essentially Northern Virginia's Main Street, such as it is, that everybody travels, you know generally once or twice a day, probably, but at least it's probably the most ' ?"equently traveled road in Northern Virginia. High visibility in terms of it was Just taking off. VDOT was coming in like gangbusters, saying, you know it's all but a given that we're gonna widen this thing to 12 lanes. And we though; why not, with the beginning of these public hearings and everything, use this~ a b~sis for starting to jump on VDOT for just such a pro-highway, widen, more bridges, pro-highway type of position, as the sole solution, apparently, to traffic congestion in Northern Virginia. And we thought by doing that, yes, we'd have a lot ofNIMBYs along the Beltway. But, we could begin to gradually educate them as to what is Smart Growth, why it's necessary to be thinking of transit alternatives instead of just a knee-jerk "Let's widen two more lanes, that'll solve the problem" attitude .... So that was what we settled on as our reason for being, if you will. ... [W]e gradually used this as a vehicle to educate people about why you should have transit-oriented development rather than highway widening and everything else. We stimulated activism in neighborhoods that never even thought twice about this kind of stuff in the past, and essentially started with that Beltway project, and since then have gotten involved in several other major transportation projects. 739 Hughes's group used the Beltway, in his words, as a vehicle toward greater ends, similar to the political and religious appropriations of the highway discussed earlier in this chapter. The link between the group's broader goal (alternative planning policies) and tool for reaching it (Beltway protests) is apparent in the names of the group itself and its Website- the Coalition for Smarter Growth and www.smartergrowth.org-and the newsletter it published beginning in 1998, "Beltway Alert." Finally, the Washington media also mediate among the Beltway's jurisdictions. In this study, I have been drawing extensively from the print media, especially the 739 Interview with Paul Hughes, 21 January 2oo1. 435 ~hington Post and Evening Star, in examining the Beltway's conflicts and comm ·. unities, because few other sources offer the same breadth of coverage. But those newspapers are players themselves, not disinterested observers. The Star (which ceased PubJicaf · 19 · ion m 81) and Post have long been highway advocates-though the Post has also be en a strong supporter of Metro and other modes of transportation-and other local media outlets have similarly backed, or fought against (in the case of some smaller comznuruty newspapers) highway projects. Like COG, the Board of Trade, and the Coalition for Smarter Growth, editors at ~Washington Post have tried to compensate for the absence of a regional transportation authority by working toward what they consider to be the entire area's best interests. *Pat Boyer, a longtime member of the Post's editorial staff, explains that the paper's editors hope in their editorials to benefit the wide body of readers. Almost all of our editorials, we hope we're speaking for people and not for corporations or for our purposes as an entity here. But for moving people around, for the quality of life. The quality of life is a vezy important factor to us in Washington. The Graham family [who owns the Post], and Eugene Meyer before that, have always thought of the Post as a local paper. If you ask [Washington Post Company chainnan] Don Graham or [publisher] Bo Jones right now, they would say the same thing. We conside~ ourself a local paper; we don't distribute in the same manner as the New York Times or the Wall Street k>umal or USA Today. There's a certain purpose to that. And although, again, Ihe Washington Post is known globally, and t!1at's no ba~ thing, it's still thought of, we think of the people here, and of pr~motmg the re~10n. And we tzy to editorially avoid intra-regional partisanship because agam we want to speak for the entire region. 740 But like the Board of Trade, regional interests sometimes conflict with the newspapers' 0Wn concerns. Through the l 980s and 1990s, the Post repeatedly ran editorials advocating a new or radically altered Wilson Bridge which would still include a --- 740 I --------- nterview with *Pat Boyer, 3 JanuaIY 2001. 436 drawbrid . ge, an aspect of the bndge anathema to commuters who saw few ships passing thr ough. However, as the editorials often noted, and as fonner Post writer Douglas Feaver points out, "[w]e all know the Post has a vested interest in the newsprint delivery to a pier in Alexandria [Robinson Tenninal] which requires raising the Wilson Bridge 11741 s· ·1 1 al hi h . . · 1m1 ar y, the paper's gener pro- g way stance 1s consistent with its "underlying economic interest in a functioning transportation system ... The Post does have to distribute newspapers, and a good road network helps you distribute your newspapers. " 742 Why does the Post's stance matter? For one thing, the way in which it and other Print and nonprint media present the Beltway and other transportation issues over time normalizes certain expectations and understandings. "In the long run, of course, a beltway bypass has got to be built," the Post editorialized in 1989, and a "Potomac crossing must also be built," it added in 2001, but in reality there was no "of course" or "must" about it unless readers chose to accept and internalize the paper's assumptions. 743 Since at least the 1980s, the paper's coverage of the Beltway has regularly followed a formula implying that the road is a problem requiring certain solutions. Articles usually focus on a specific problem ( e.g., an accident), quote one or two frustrated dr' t AAA or Board of Trade spokesperson explaining why 1vers, quo ea ------------- 741 Interview with Douglas Feaver, 26 January 2ool. 742 Ib'd 1 . 743 "Belt II d' rial] Washington Post, 26 February 1989: C6; "R. d way Progress .. · · f e. 1~? . '-:al] Washington Post, 30 November 2001: A39. oa s-and Campaign Trails [ editon , ..!!..!~~=-"'-"--- 437 Beltway d" · con 1tions are so bad and what can be done, and cite a study (often from AAA ' th e Texas Transportation Institute, or the American Highway Users Alliance) indicating th at the Beltway and/or Washington area traffic is among the worst in the country. If space allows, articles add a quote from a nationally recognized transportation expert (often Alan Pisarski) and/or a quote from a Smart Growth-oriented group offering alternative solutions. 744 By structuring articles in this way-or in any other way-the ~ reporters decide whose voices and which ideas get public exposure. Paul Hughes describes his exasperation at trying to have his group's ideas heard: Just the sheer constant, what do you want to say, strain of trying to get visibility for your position in the media. You know, they'll quote the Board of Trade, the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, they'll quote the Fairfax Chamber of Commerce. And oh, by the way, I guess we need to get a quote from somebody; they'll either go to Stewart Schwartz or go to us, and they'll end up with maybe a little paragraph or blurb down near the bottom .... And it's like they have to- any dutiful reporter is supposed to give both sides, both opinions on both sides, and they kind of throw the perfunctory bone out there to those environmentalists or Smart Growthers. And that's it! 145 In addition to determining which ideas and voices are "normal" and deserve Prominence, the media also influence transportation policy by sensationalizing policy decisions and sometimes scaring them off the table in the process. Frustrated Maryland officials in 2001 found that the media had made the decision for them concerning one Potential Beltw . t SHA officials carefully considered testing ramp ay 1mprovemen . meters- already in use along Virginia's I-395 and I-66 and in Minnesota and ----~-------- 744 See ~ 1 J . St kwell "Minor Crash Leads to Rush-Hour Nightmare" W .' J.Or examp e, am1e oc , , ~ ' l8January200l:B3. 745 In terview with Paul Hughes. 438 elsewhere- in which special traffic signals along on-ramps detect gaps in traffic and allow a few vehicles at a time onto the highway. 746 Although the State Highway Administration was not at all convinced that ramp meters would work anywhere in Maryland, let alone on the Capital Beltway, newspaper accounts made it sound as if the meters were a done deal. Raymond McCaflrey's Post ' - article in January 2001 gave conflicting signs on whether the meters and their testing Were definite ( emphases added): The headline ("Stoplights Considered for Beltway On- Ramps") and first sentence ("Maryland may soon iurn to a new weapon) contradicted the subheading ("Md. to Test Device Designed to Reduce Traffic Congestion"). 747 From the ambiguity and from the article's discussion of why Minnesotans hate ramp meters, readers, including politicia,z:is, feared that ineffective ramp meters were imminent on the Beltway. The SHA quickly distributed an information sheet stressing that "Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) is currently investigating the use of ramp meters and has not made a commitment to install this traffic device along Maryland's highway system. 11748 But public outcry overrode SHA plans, to its staffers' frustration; District 3 engineer Charlie Watkins explains that 746 See "M" T . G . Wi"thout Highway Meters," Washington Post, 22 0 mnesota nes omg ctober 2000: Al9; and Kaye, 115. 747 Raymond M C ffr "Stoplights Considered for Beltway On-R~ps," Washington ~ ' 3 January c20~ 1: e; i. See also Tom Ramstack, "Beltway Stoplight Proposal Faces Test," Washington Times, 2 January 200l . 74s [Maryl d S H" h Administration J "Ramp Metering," typescript document J an tate 1g way ' ' anuary 2001. 439 what the media has done, they have a tendency to do this, they want some news. So they took what they heard, and what they did was, what the State Highway Was talking about, trying, talking about identifying locations that they might !r,y. And the next thing, you know, ramp metering is gonna happen tomorrow! And that's not the case at all. I mean, there's no decision been made, whatsoever, that We're going to be ramp metering anywhere in Maryland. It's something we're looking at, a possibility, whether it makes sense. And I don't particular1 think- I can't think of an interchange on the Beltway that would make sense. 74 Taking ramp meters off the table was likely not the media's intention in bringing the proposal to the public's attention. But in their efforts to cover issues of regional transportation, the media play important roles themselves in helping to determine the formation of policy and public opinion. Like other would-be regional coordinators, Illedia outlets operate with their own interests in mind as well as those of their constituents. With COG relatively powerless and the other groups mentioned motivated 1 n Part by self-serving objectives, the many Washington-area jurisdictions struggle to cooperate and even to coordinate on transportation issues, with the Beltway and other facT · 1 Ities hanging in the balance. A catalyst for development? B d h . hich it has structured individuals' lives and eyon t e many ways m w influenced . 1 1. . 1 d ocial dynamics the Beltway has also spurred reg10na po 1t1ca an s ' con-i-er · 1 d .d 'al d 1 ment near its path. This effect may seem self-··~u c1a an res1 ent1 eve op evident ~ W . M . Str t but in fact it runs counter to the way most 1or ashington's am ee , ----- 749 - ------- Interview with Charlie Watkins. 440 beltways have played out nationwide. In this sense, the Capital Beltway represents the exception, not the rule. Most studies of beltways have focused on economic and land-use impacts rather th an a broader spectrum of social, political, and cultural effects as I have done here. Christopher John Sutton, in a 1995 dissertation on Denver beltways, offers the most current literature review of works on circumferential highways, and concludes to his surprise that they do not generally have the economic effects often attributed to them. Below, I briefly summarize the studies Sutton mentions, in addition to one other and his own, to set up the framework for beltways' economic impacts which the Capital Beltway goes against. In the first study of an urban circumferential highway, A.J. Bone and Martin Wohl concluded in 1958 that Massachusetts Route 128 around Boston "influenced a shift in jobs from the central city, but effects on residential patterns were inconsistent. 11750 A 1968 study of the Virginia portion of the Capital Beltway itself, led by Julia Connally at the University of Virginia, found that development in that corridor "followed the classic suburban development pattern: radial expansion from the central city along major highways with clustering of new growth around existing communities. 11751 Although Connally attributed increases in land value directly to the 750 Sutton "Th S . nu·c Land Use and Land Value Impacts of Beltways," 43 · , e oc1oecono , , , A.J. Bone and Martin Wohl, Economic Impact Study of Massachusetts Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1958). 751 Sutton, 44. 441 Beltway, she argued that the highway itself did not cause growth; it only directed the pre-existing growth towards itself. 752 Focusing on the St. Louis beltway, Peter DeLeon and John Enns found in 1973 th at the road provided increased access which stimulated industrial employment density, but the short time span of their study (1965-1970) was not necessarily applicable to a long-range analysis. 753 Snehamy Khasnabis and Willard Babcock concluded in 1975 that the Raleigh, N.C. beltway had a positive impact on residential ' commercial, and industrial development. 754 But a 1978 study of Richmond, Virginia's beltway supported Connally's analysis of the Capital Beltway in arguing that the highway had very minimal influence on the form of the city and region because decentralization would have happened regardless of the beltway's presence.755 In 1983, Mark Cundiff found in his master's thesis research that Dayton, Ohio's noncorridor suburbs (through which its beltway did not pass) did not oppose a forthcoming beltway because their leaders believed that the road would create broader regional economic growth, even in communities not directly adjacent. However, Cundiff s work did not 752 • Ib~d:; Julia Connally, The Socio-Economic ~~a.ct of the Capital Bel~ay in Northern ~ (CharlottesviIIe, Va.: University ofVirguua, Bureau of Populat10n and conomic Research, 1968). 753 Sutton, 43; Peter DeLeon and John Enns, The Impact of Highways Upon ~politan Dispersion: St. Louis (Santa Monica, Cal.: Rand Institute, 1973). 754 Sutton, 43; Snehamy Khasnabis and Willard Babcock, I~pact of a Beltline Type of ~ay Upon a Medium-Sized Urban Area of North Carolina: A Case Study (Raleigh, N.c.: University of North Carolina, 1975). 755 Sutton, 44; Urban Institute, The Impact of Be1t':ays on Central Business Districts: A ~tudy of Richmond (Washington: Urban Institute, 1978). 442 account for actual economic effects, since at the time of his study Dayton's beltway was not scheduled to be completed for at least eight years. 756 "Perhaps the most comprehensive analysis of beltways," Sutton writes, was an exhaustive 1980 study, introduced earlier in Chapters 5 and 7, by Payne-Maxie Consultants for the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. 757 Payne-Maxie conducted a general analysis of 54 cities with population greater than 100,000 (27 with beltways and 27 without) and a more detailed analysis of eight, attempting to better understand beltways' effects on land use and development. 758 th e report concluded that "[iJmpacts on land use and regional growth are only marginal at best, with no statistically significant relation between beltway construction and distribuf f · · ·a1 "759 S tt t rtai' h · ion o population and res1dent1 patterns. u on no es ce n s ortconungs in the study, however: Payne-Maxie focused on inter-urban comparison of entire Illetropolitan areas where many external factors may have influenced growth but were not accounted for; the study analyzed data at the census tract or city level, so specific impacts in areas immediately surrounding beltways were not addressed; and Payne- 756 l\K M 1· 1v1ark Stephan Cundiff "The Impact of Beltways on etropo 1tan Areas: The Int~rstate 675-Dayton M;tropolitan Area Case Study," M.A. thesis, Wright State Dniversity, 1983, 79-80. 757 PaYne-Maxie Consultants The Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of ~ (Wa~hington, 1980); Payne-Maxie Consultants, The Land Use ~an Development Impacts of Beltways: Executive Summary (Washington, l 980)· Payne M · C ultants The Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of B , - ax1e ons , ~(Washington, 1980). 75s Sutton, 44-45. 759 PaYne-Maxie Consultants, The Land Use and Urban Development Impacts of ~ , 83. 443 Maxie did not fully consider the "effect of increased highway mileage (resulting from beltway construction) on growth and land-use changes within a metropolitan area."760 Although Payne-Maxie concluded confidently that beltways' impacts on land use and regional growth were marginal at best, the studies cited share no consensus ' although they agree that for most beltways the primacy use has shifted from inter-urban (as originally anticipated) to intra-urban. 761 In any case, Sutton points out, those studies contain too many serious flaws to be definitive.: For example, their levels of analysis are almost always too general (i.e. , data collected at the metropolitan level) or too detailed (e.g., individual lots) to gauge trends within beltway corridors, and their study periods are too short ( often five to ten years) to measure change, to recognize overall patterns of development, or to account for short-tenn development peaks and lags. Nor do many of the studies address the full variety of interdependent factors affecting beltway corridor development, including business cycles, dynamics of land ownership, planning and development initiatives, zoning, government philosophy, and environmental considerations. 762 Consequently, Sutton notes, even though beltways' effects on urban fonn have been debated since Massachusetts Route 128's construction in the 1950s, there is no clear focus regarding what specific_impacts be~tways ha~e, if any at all. It is not clear from the literature whether c1rcumferent1al routes md~ce growth d · t wth as urbanization overtakes the beltway I0cat10n, or ... , re Irec gro d . 763 merely accommodate the outward growth alrea Y occurnng. 760 Sutton, 45-46. 761 For th· th fi B h drni'm'stration tried to remove beltways from the 1s reason e 1rst us a . ,. Interstate t : 1990 11 ·ng that most beltways are technically not mterstates' b sys em m , argu1 47 ecause they primarily cany local traffic." See Sutton, . 762 Sutton, 12-13. 763 Ib·ct I ., 5. 444 Looking for more definitive answers, Sutton's 1995 research studied the effects of two Denver beltways on population and employment growth and densities, land-use types and intensities, and land values. 764 The study comprised three stages: first, Sutton examined population and employment densities within the I-225 corridor (Denver's older beltway) to see if they were higher than in other areas equally distant from the city's central business district; second, he looked at changes in land use (residential, office, and commercial) and land value in the I-225 corridor over a 30-year period (1 960-1990) relative to changes in the entire Denver metropolitan area; third, Sutton compared the results from the first two phases to the development within the C-4 70 corridor (Denver's newer beltway). 765 Sutton's results are consistent with Payne-Maxie's analysis that beltways were not the catalysts they appeared to be. Denver's beltways, he finds, had marginal influence on the locational decisions for commercial and office space; most commercial development was instead oriented along arterial roads. Office densities in fact increased With distance from the beltways. Residential development within the beltway corridors fit into ongoing decentralization patterns and did not represent fluctuations responding directly to the beltways. Nor were land values significantly influenced based on their Proximity to the circwnferentials. 766 765 lb' Id., 259-260. 766 lb' Id., 265-271. 445 Beltways, Sutton concludes, are not a major economic catalyst. Development within beltway corridors appeared to be influenced less by beltways and more by "fl . uctuat10ns in the economy of the metropolitan area as well as the general pattern of suburbanization." 767 Development did not occur along the Denver beltways well in advance of the city's decentralizing urban wave (this type of "leapfrog development" Would suggest that the beltways induced the new growth). "Thus, to label the metropolitan area's beltways as 'causes' or 'inducers' of growth is unwarranted. Such routes merely lie within the path of an outwardly expanding urban area and do not serve to 'pull' growth outward. 11768 Finally, Sutton argues, beltways alone were not reliable strategies for new growth: Thus, it seems improbable that construction of a beltway ... in the undeveloped urban periphe.ry will result in significant development without the presence of a guiding force, i.e., already expanding urban development reaches the route, or, in the case of Denver the siting of a growth catalyst-i.e., major international • ' 769 airport- beyond the route. Instead, he suggests, the larger significance of beltways is their effect on "the functions foUnd in suburban areas." As in the Washington area, inter-suburban movement of People, goods, and services previously had to move through the central city, until "[c]ircumferential highways significantly altered the ability of suburban locations to become functionally independent from central cities" and pennitted the decentralization of a r · . 110 c IVIttes traditionally located downtown. -----------767 lb' Id., 272. 768 lb' Id,, 276. 769 Ib'd I . 110 Ib ' Id., 278. 446 Sutton's primary arguments are well-founded-for Denver. While his case is comp 11 · e mg for beltways not causing growth by themselves, the Capital Beltway clearly did induce development in its immediate corridor. In fact, after its original national defense justification wore off, the Capital Beltway became explicitly a tool for Increased growth in the eyes of Washington-area planners. In the National Capital Transportation Agency's 1962 regional plan, Darwin Stolzenbach wrote that the "C . apital Beltway is the framework for future regional industrial and commercial as well as residential development." 771 Fairfax County planners Willard Smith and Veril Tielkmeier in 1964 predicted intensive commercial and residential growth close to the Beltway; in Maryland, M-NCPPC planner C. Warren Giauque expected "the Capital beltway . . . to pull people to it like a magnet." 772 Federal Highway Administration economist Martin Stein noted in 1972 that he and his colleagues were not surprised by the development itself they had seen around the Beltway, but rather by its speed: "We knew that people were going to do this, but we didn't know they were going to do it so fast. "773 Even in 1984, some 25 years after the initial construction boom around the nascent Beltway's right-of-way, the $290.6 million worth of construction initiated along the highway would have ranked it alongside the totals for commercial construction in 771 N · ' th N f al C ·ta1 R ational Capital Transportation Agency, Jransportat10n I~ . e a 10n apt . ~Finance and Organization (Washington: General Pnntmg Office, 1962), 43. 772 Dani 1 p 1 'gh E pected to Be Spur to Development of Outer S e oo e, "New H1 way x Ubt1rbia," Evening Star, 16 August I 964: E-S. 773 Qtd . 8 . Problem II B5. See also Jack Eisen, "New Road to · m oldt "Beltway· Plannmg ' 3 Bring Vital Are~ Changes,'" Washington Post, 16 August 1964: Bl . 447 Milwaukee B · · h · , mnmg am, and Honolulu, 1f the Beltway were considered an independent city. 774 During the Beltway's construction and in its early years of operation, many communities alongside rezoned adjacent land for commercial use, figuring that commercial development would expand their tax bases (unlike new residences, which carry additional needs for public services). Real estate developers jwnped at the 0PP0 rtunity to buy the land for new projects because it was cheaper than alternatives in doWntown Washington. 775 However, the Beltway had significantly different effects on different areas depending on the extent of previous development in each area. 776 For example, the Fairfax County portion of the Beltway had been mostly open countryside, as described in Chapter 4. As con~truction began in the late 1950s, approximately 57 percent of the land within two miles on either side of the Beltway's right-of-way was vacant, with another 41 percent residential. County planners rezoned hundreds of vacant acres for high-density use, and developers came running. Within that Beltway corridor, 450 apartment units existed as construction began in 1958; more than 3500 new ones were built by 1965. 777 The director of the Fairfax County Industrial Authority said in 1964 that "beltway land is being sought by industry more than any ----- 774 I( - ------- • s II w hi enneth Bredemeier, "Beltway Becomes Area's Mam ~eet, . as ngton Post, 17 ~ebruary 1985: Al . See also Jack Eisen, "Socially and Busmesswise, the Beltway ecomes a Hit," Washington Post, 5 January 1964: Kl. 11s V an Dyne, "Getting There," 203. 776 See Trum R T 1 "M. d Blessing Seen in Industrial Highway," Evening Star 30 an . emp e, 1xe ' March 1961 : B-12. 777 M~.-1-1. . c· le Guides Boom," Evening Star, 23 March 1966: I)_ I. - u1a Angle, "City's Concrete ire 448 0th er property in the county .... At least two major concentrations, Westgate and Ravensworth Industrial Parks, exist purely because of the beltway."778 Fairfax County credited the Beltway with bringing 7500 new jobs within its boundaries by the time the road opened. 779 Historian Nan Netherton, echoing Sutton's warning, notes that "Fairfax County was well on its way to becoming urbanized before the beltway was begun. Nevertheless," she adds, "the size of an average parcel of land in the vicinity of the beltway [in Fairfax County] fell from 1.5 acres in 1951 to .5 acres in 1964, and during the same period, the average price .of improved residential land close to the beltway Increased from $1,900 to $16,700 an acre."780 But that was Fairfax County, where 57 percent of adjacent land had been vacant. In contrast, Montgomery County had no industrially zoned land at all in the Beltway corridor, and hardly any vacant land of any kind. Unlike in Virginia, the Beltway in Montgomery County passed through heavily populated neighborhoods (Fig. 11 ), with results described in Chapter 5. "There was very little open space left except for occasional chunks at interchange corners where developers had held back in hopes of getting high-density zoning," county planning board member Blair Lee III explained in 1966. 781 Leading Montgomery County developers were not especially perturbed about ------------ 778 Ib'd I . ; 9 C~arles Covell, "Beltway Attracting Industry, Creating New Labor Markets," ~. 16 August 1964: E-6. F 7so Netherton et al, Fairfax County, Virgini~ 598. See al~~ ~obertf thC. Bcurt·ota1n anB dl rederick D Kn "S . E on6mic Change in the V1cm1ty o e ap1 e tway in Virginia,, H·. h app,R ocrn-h Rc ecord 75 (Washington: Highway Research Board, 196 , 1g way esearc 5), 781 Qtd . . 1 ,, · In Angle, "City's Concrete Circ e. 449 missing out on the same opportunities as their Virginia counterparts, though, because they expected much more vacant land to be available adjacent to the forthcoming Outer Beltway elsewhere in the county-which in the end was never built. 782 Although the Price of land near the Beltway in both states rose after the road opened, the effects on growth were far more pronounced in Fairfax County. 783 Prince George's County, which had some residential and industrial development before the Beltway, fell somewhere in-betwee~. Apartment construction and industrial development did not surge as it did in Fairfax, but did see a noticeable rise. "You can't attribute the surge in apartment building to the beltway," the president of the Suburban Maryland Builders Association said in 1966, "but it has certainly been a contributing factor. It has made certain areas in Prince George's County more suitable for development than others. And it has helped industry enormously."784 Some communities felt the push more strongly than others; former city manager Jim Giese explains that many proposals for retail development "that Greenbelt was bombarded With at that time was because the Beltway was coming. And all of the developers Wanted to get in on it. ,,785 The Beltway, Giese adds, literally helped build the town of Greenbelt: 782 Martha Angle, "They Plan to Loop the Loop," Evening Star, 24 March 1966: B-3. 783 Ib 'd . 1 " 1 .; Angle, "City's Concrete Circ e. 784 Angle, "City's Concrete Circle." 785 Int . . . . S al James Giese "Beltway Plaza is a Monument to Its erv1ew with Jim Giese. ee so ' b 2000· 1 0,1-e S 'd b It News Review 14 Decem er . . • Yll r, 1 ney Brown," Green e ' 450 T~e first relationship Greenbelt had with the Beltway was in construction. [City D1~ector of Public Works] Buddy Attick became acquainted with the contractors domg the excavation work, roadwork for the Beltway. And they wanted a place to work on their construction equipment for maintenance. And the city had some old government metal warehouses at what is now the State Highway Administration property. That was owned by the city at the time and had been their sewage treatment plant until WSSC took the sewage and closed it down ... And so Buddy essentially worked out a deal where the contractor could have one of these sheds for his equipment maintenance, in return for which he would ~o some earth-moving for us. And what we had wanted done, the mayor at that time was very much interested in upgrading the end of the lake over on that end. And that area had silted in with dirt and the like, and had become swampy and kind of a shambles. And he wanted us to do something about it. Of course, we didn't have the money or the equipment to do it. So Buddy worked out a deal where this excavation person ... came out with primarily [] one of these cranes with what do they call it, a dragline, is actually what they used ..... And with ' that, we made the peninsula that's now at that end of the lake ... . And then they had leftover dirt. And we had some places that needed dirt. I think one that's directly related to the ~eltway is below the dam. We have, for the lake, a concrete dam. And there's earth backfill, but it went straight down on the backside of the dam. And we got the contractor to bring in fill from the Beltway and fill that up and give us more area behi~d the dam .. 'W_ e filled up to an easement for the W[ashington] S[uburban] S[anitary] C[omiss10n] for a water nfi • h 786 main right-of-way. That's how we got the co gurat1on t ere. The Beltway even spurred religious development: In a 1970 news release, the Federal Highway Administration announced that half of the 36 churches located within a half-mile of the Beltway had been built since the route was publicized in 1958. One church official interviewed noted that "the Beltway is fabulous. Membership has doubled since the Beltway was constructed." "The Beltway was the prime reason for I · . "d t "787 Th l · ocation, 11 another said. "It will help the church grow at a rap1 ra e. . e ocat10n 786 I nterview with Jim Giese. 7s7 Federal Highway Administration, "Beltway Churches Show Impact of Highways on Community Life," news release, 27 December· 1970· 451 Worked in te f . 'b'l' nns o v1s1 1 1ty; several pastors reported that motorists came into their churches for the first time after seeing the steeples from the Beltway. Between 1964 and 1969 , the number of churches within five minutes of Beltway interchanges grew by 40 percent compared to 11 percent for the entire metropolitan area. 788 Would all of these developments have taken place anyway? Sutton argues that on · gomg suburban growth and expansion, not beltways themselves, are responsible for th e development which occurs near the highways. But factors indicating that development was induced by the Beltway-which Sutton does not find in Denver- Were Present in the Washington area. A 1966 report published by developer James W. R.ouse's firm pointed to the surge in apartment construction ( especially in relatively undeveloped areas in Prince George's County) and specified that "many close-in apartment sites have been leap-frogged in favor of sites near the beltway." Industrial development, too, was directly stimulated by the circwnfere~tial roadway_ and much of the activity might not have taken place at all 1fthese new sites had not become available. In Fairfax County, more than one million square feet of industrial space were built in the past year, just a trace l~ss than the total amount constructed during the previous four years. Virtually all the 1964 space was located in the beltway vicinity. 789 There is no question that ongoing decentralization of the Washington area, in part for reasons given in Chapter J, would eventually have reached the land surrounding the Capital Beltway. But the extent and types of development near the Beltway, and the contemporary observations from the first years of the highway by the people involved 788 Boldt, "Beltway: Planning Problem." 789 James W R & C The Beltways of Baltimore and Washington: Their I . ouse ompany, & c 1966 !l1 act on R 1 E A . 't' (Balt1'more· James W. Rouse ompany, ), n.p. ea state ct1v1 1es · 452 with creating and analyzing that development, suggest that the road itself was the cause for changes in land-use patterns and increased commercial, residential, and industrial growth in its proximity. In this way, it influenced the shape of the region's physical landscape, even as it entered into and reshaped social, political, and cultural discourse in ways discussed earlier in this chapter. 453 CHAPTER 10 "WHAT THE PAVE MEANT": COMING FULL CIRCLE790 [Y]ou can bash the Beltway as much as you want, but it's an extraordinarily valuable resource. We'd be dead without it. -Robert Grow, Greater Washington Board of Trade, 2001 791 "There is no other highway like the beltway in this country," writes an ex- trucker who has driven through 48 states. 792 "I think the beltway is a really distinctive road," adds a lifelong Washington area resident. 793 In this dissertation, I have tried to provide a picture of what makes the Capital Beltway a "really distinctive road," while exploring the ways in which it operates as both a physical artifact and a social institution. In this final chapter, I review my findings with respect to the guiding questions I set out in the introduction. I then assess the usefulness of the methods I applied in this study, discuss the ~ffectiveness of applying cultural landscape and 0dology study models in complementarity, and revisit the elements which distinguish Illy odology from others. I conclude with a brief discussion of where I believe further Work can go from here, in terms of both method (research techniques) and content (the Beltway itself). 790 The first half of the chapter's title was suggested by Shelby Shapiro. 191 I nterview with Robert Grow. 192 B eltway Survey #377. 193 B eltway Survey #342. 454 Summary: Significance of the Capital Beltway In Chapter I, I assembled a set of questions for grounding an odological study, and· In Chapters 3 through 9 addressed each of them repeatedly. First, I asked, what beliefs and values does the Beltway reveal and create? As we have seen, it creates and reveals many different beliefs and values. From its inception, as I described in Chapter 4 , the Beltway physically embodied the apocalyptic fears of the Cold War era in its earliest guise as a defense route. Further, that original version of the Beltway and its unnecessarily dangerous physical components spoke to the prevailing emphasis on traffic efficiency at the expense of safety, as I explained in Chapter 7; highway officials st ung by public and political criticism and high injury rates gradually restructured the Beltway to make it a safer place. Elsewhere in Chapter 7, I noted that the Beltway's drivers may see the highway as a triumph over nature-drainage systems and other design elements lead drivers to believe they can negotiate the road under any conditions- but that engineers and maintenance workers know that ice, rain, and Wildlife will never disappear entirely from the· Beltway, and the best they can do is to minimize the danger those and other natural phenomena pose. In Chapter 9, I explained how the Beltway serves as a template for individuals and groups to promote an array of religious, political, and cultural beliefs and to register their critiques of a variety of social institutions, most prominently the feder~ apparatus heavily contained "inside the Beltway. 11794 -------------794 thr gh · 1 The idea of registering critiques of social phenomena ou seernm? Y unrelated means is discussed at length by Barry Glassner, who ar¥11es-co~trovers1~!Y-. ~at tenuous iIInesses such as Gulf War Syndrome and multiple chemical sens1t1v1ty m part 455 Close attention to the planning process, which I included in Chapters 5 and 6 , suggests that the Beltway highlights the precedence (in highway and political officials' view) of the Washington region over the region's smaller individual jurisdictions. Maryland officials in 1959 brushed off Cabin John residents' concerns and Virginia officials in 1999 did the same in Fairfax. In both cases officials argued that those communities' concerns were subsidiary to the transportation needs of the region and that the Beltway and its proposed improvements were necessary for the broader public Interest. In addition, highway officials (by action) and motorists (by acquiescence) consider drivers to be more important than the people who live near the Beltway, seen in the minimal compensation offered to Isidore Elrich's family in 1960 and the minimal compensation which unhappy Virginia residents indicated in 1999 they expected to receive for the Beltway's negative impacts. In my second question, I asked about what dynamics of power and access relate to the Beltway, who controls or has access to the road and its planning and alterations, and what implications and consequences result. I focused directly on these issues in Chapters 5 and 6, where I described how the Beltway's and other public hearings in the l950s and l 960s were set up to put all important decisions into the hands of highway officials, who thus had no need to respect anyone else's priorities. Episodes like the ones experienced by Neal Potter, Paul Foer, and Isidore Elrich were the result, where individuals' personal lives and memories were shattered and drastically reshaped. In exist because they permit the identification of deficien~ies in sp~ific social institutions. Gulf War Syndrome, for example, points to problems m the m11I~ system; multiple chemical sensitivity raises questions about the conswner products mdustry. ~ee Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Thmgs (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 163. 456 ex · · anunmg the updated planning processes of the 1990s and beyond in Maryland and Virginia, I explained the ways in which both states have taken significant strides in sharing power and increasing access to the process, although Virginia still has further to go in providing what its residents consider meaningful access. My rhetorical analysis of a transportation planner's public speech provided a freeze-frame snapshot of the Planning process, demonstrating the significant effect that officials' presentations and Word selections have on the public's own sense of inclusion in the process. From access to the planning process, I turned in Chapter 7 to access to the Beltway itself, and discussed how certain groups (cyclists, pedestrians, the "carless") are not only discouraged from using the highway but are legally prohibited from doing so. The Beltway, which is a public road and ostensibly a resource for all, is therefore in reality a resource limited to people who can fulfill the requirements for accessing a sanctioned motor vehicle for traveling on it. Finally, although officials from several jurisdictions hold authority over their respective portions of the Beltway, no central authority coordinates them. Other bodies have entered the fray to mediate and often to simultaneously push their own agendas; in Chapter 9, I explained how the media, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the Greater Washington Board of Trade and other "pro-highway" groups, and the Coalition for Smarter Growth and other "pro-transit" groups all attempt to influence decisions concerning the Beltway. In th. d t· I asked what assumptions or nonnativities the Beltway my ir ques 10n, reflects and creates, and how it contributes to a social world which seems "normal." This pro I d . Ch t 3 began with the Beltway's creation itself, replacing a cess, argue m ap er , fraan,,ent d d d" . . d · al transportation network with direct connections c.•u e an 1sJomte reg10n 457 between both states and among the suburbs. After 1964, area residents found it natural to expect and take advantage of those efficient linkages; this mindset eventually superseded the earlier one in which the suburbs were considered to be spatially and socially far apart from one another, and Maryland and Virginia even more so ( one respondent writes "Can you imagine the traffic in this area now without the Beltway?"). 795 In fact, the Beltway and other new highways were so successful in appealing to motorists that, as I described in "Pedersen's Paradox" in Chapter 6, they reinforce a sense that individuals must have acceptable access to quality roads which Work Well. This sense of entitlement to inexpensive (relative to Europe, for example) Private automobile transportation is deeply ingrained, making it difficult not only for Maryland officials to generate strategies to dislodge it, but also-as Neil Pedersen explains- for anyone to even think seriously of alternative perspectives in the first place. In Chapters 5 and 7, as mentioned above, I discussed how the Beltway helps create a reality in which the concerns of motorists are paramount and those of people living near the highway are secondazy or even negligible. In Montgomery County, the Beltway goes through people's back yards with sound barriers and guardrails as compensation; this becomes an acceptable fact of life for the public, even if it is entirely unacceptable to the individuals who live within those yards. Also in Chapter 7, I explained how even though major expenditures on and ubiquitous media coverage of the Beltw h . ·on that it is an integral part of and valuable resource in ay create t e 1mpress1 19, B eltway Survey #521. 458 everyone's r D • (th 1 I 1 e, certam groups e "car ess ') benefit far less than others, and in fact the highway is a significant impediment for cyclists and pedestrians. In what ways, I asked in my fourth question, does the Beltway function as an arena of consensus and conflict, and of unity and division? Conflict and division played out in Chapters 5 and 6, where I looked at the tensions between Maryland and Virginia and between highway officials and residents. Also in Chapter 5, I dissected a number of overlapping conflicts in the case of the Beltway's "disappearing parkway" segment, Particularly the tensions among a variety of agencies and political bodies and over the relative importance of highway construction versus natural resource protection. But Chapter 9 focused most directly on the Beltway's conflicts, including those between local and long-distance drivers, between motorists and truckers, between public and Private space, and among motorists themselves. In addition, though I did not elaborate on it, I noted the tension between the two states and the District of Columbia, which controls Part of the Wilson Bridge. In Chapter 9, I explained that the Beltway also engenders unity both in terms of creating an increased geographic proximity for residents and in providing a framework of common experiences and language. Before the Beltway's construction, the Washington area was less cohesive as a distinct social unit; afterwards, a new sense of commun1·ty d 1 d D pher Alan Henrickson defines a community as eve ope . emogra a t . . 11 d 'all dt'aerentiated group consciousness .... [T]he erntona y an soc1 Y ui . 'd · al · Sub. . al' fth 1 ce must be taken mto cons1 erat10n ong With ~ecttve re 1ty o e Pa , . n1 · B 'd it b · · d ontexts. A 'place 1s not o y a site. es1 es the so ~ecttve contents an c . hical and social-geographical physical-geographical, economic-geograp '. 't · · db th settings that structure the Was.hingtoJ6communtty, t ts organtze y e mental maps held by its inhabitants. ---796 u --------- " 126 .nenrickson, "A Small, Cozy Town, · 459 The Beltwa I d . Ch . h Y, argue m apters 4, 8, and 9 wit support from my respondents, re st ructured the mental maps held by area residents, and led them "to think of DC and its suburbs as a single metropolitan area," in the words of journalist Lany Van Dyne. 797 At the same time, the Beltway and Metrorail system (opened 1976) together recast what Henrickson caIIs the physical~geographical setting of the community: Metro planners' and local officials' decision in 1967 to tenninate most rail transit lines at or near the Beltway reinforced the Beltway's unofficial status as a boundary line for the core of the .metropolitan community. 798 In my fifth question, I asked how the Beltway is perceived and experienced by th e individuals whose lives intertwine with it, how it has influenced their lives and identities, and how they have in turn influenced the road. To answer this question, I focused in depth on the relationships between members of different groups and the Beltw · · hb h . t d 't . th · ay: 1ts creators, in Chapter 4; its early ne1g ors, w o mcorpora e 1 mto eu live · d · Ch t 5 · s In Chapter 4 as a playground and racetrack an m ap er as an overpowermg nuisance; its later neighbors and its supervisors, in Chapter 6; police, fire and rescue, and .maintenance personnel in Chapter 7; and a wide range of survey respondents, in Chapters 8 and 9. I addressed the influence of the Beltway on individuals' lives most directly in Chapter S, where I detailed the effects on selected neighbors, and in Chapter 8 , Where my d d d to the Beltway with a variety of strategies ranging respon ents respon e &orn copin 'th . 1 , the Washington area entirely . .. ug WI its stress to eavmg 797 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 203. 79g Schrag, "Mapping Metro," 22. 460 I also observed how much power a single individual has to affect other people's lives. The instigator of the accident I watched transpire, in the episode described in Chapter 7, significantly influenced thousands of other drivers, and the few people in Virginia's Smart Traffic Center whom I watched manage the incident response similarly controlled how the rest of the afternoon would play out both for people already driving and others who were planning to. Members of the Chevy Chase Fire Department shared this observation. "One person can affect more people's lives by one action," Rick Blandford told me, "than you could ever do other than a terrorist attack. If you think about it. Take a car out here on a busy day around Christmas vacation, and flip it. And see how many lives you affect." "Not even that!" Timothy Bell said. "Take your truck out, Park it on the shoulder, and turn the lights on. It would come to a standstill. Just throw the lights on, and walk and just go someplace else. Man, it would shut down. It Would totally shut down."799 Finally, Washington area residents have contributed to and found a distinct Personality in the Beltway. Roads do attain this type of special character, but as I explained in Chapter 1, it is usually the nostalgic highways (the National Road, Route 66) Which gamer popular and scholarly attention to explore that character. In this study, I have argued that the study of gritty and utilitarian roads also has much to offer, and that those roads too may develop distinct personalities. The following thoughts, offered by a Silver Spring resident, best articulate from among my respondents what constitutes lhe Beltway's intangible personality: I want to share an idea I have told friends from time to time. It is a treat to ----- 799In --- ----- . terview with members of the Chevy Chase Fire Department. 461 register it with someone with a special interest in the belt. I grew up in rural CT where the roads h~? an entir~lf different ''.feel". People talked about them as if they had personal1t1es, descnbmg them with human terms like "sweet" "fun" and "relaxing", some even felt like old friends and we could often con~ince my M?m to change our route so we could take a road that made the trip more e~oyable. I would go for drives for the pure pleasure of spending time on them kinda like going for that Swiday drive after church or dinner, but I prefered to ' take these jaunts at night. If that were heaven, the belt is hell. I say this for a reason other than you might expect - not so much because the actual driving experience is usually aggravating. It is because the road has no soul. I know this sounds bizarre but the circular nature of the road deprives it of any real sense of direction. It has no origin or destination, it goes nowhere in particular, it belongs to no one and no one lives there. It is like an abstraction, it epitomizes frustration. As a result people approach it only with impatience and utility. I think, as with people who share this characteristic, they are treated with a fundamental lack of respect and disregard - this permeates the experience of being there and that is partly why there is such antipathy for the road. People do not care for the belt like they might for other purely linear stretches of asphalt that create a distinct path on the earth. It is as if it does not have integrity - this leads to its functional detriment - it is like a host to parasites or a prostitute with johns. Who can get attached without being ambivalent and resenting its presence? Is anyone else expressing this sentiment or should I just go back to the cowitry?800 Whether or not an inanimate artifact can be said to truly have a personality, this Woman's explanation and others from respondents in Chapter 8 make clear that individuals' perceptions about the Beltway's character have important consequences. The Beltway informs a wide variety of the daily and long-term decisions and actions of many Washington-area residents, and plays a :fundamental role in their ways of thinking about their lives and the world arowid them. Taken together, the many kinds of significance which meet in and radiate out of the Beltway demonstrate that this utilitarian road, largely overlooked in scholarship and often reviled by its users, is one of the most important social, cultural, economic, and 800 Beltway Survey #481. 462 political fig · h . . ures m t e greater Washington area. Residents of the region truly cannot co . nceive of a life or landscape without it. Beyond its meanings in a national context ' understanding the Beltway is fundamental to understanding metropolitan Washington: with0ut it, the region would be a drastically different place at all of the levels I have addressed. Looking back and looking forward To study the Beltway from what I have called an odological perspective, I Introduced several experimental research methodologies, in addition to incorporating 0ther already established techniques. In particular, in an attempt to codify a :framework for the cultural study of roads (J.B. Jackson's odology), I developed a series of five guiding questions drawing from earlier scholarship on American highways; and in an effort to understand the Beltway's influence on and by individuals, I created and carried . out a Web survey. The findings summarized in the first section of this chapter suggest that my application of both of those methods was .fruitful; each served as a substantive tool in guiding my data collection and analysis of the Beltway's many types of significance. I am particularly pleased with the Web survey: among other factors, it successfully drew a broader geographic range of infonnants than I could have reached In this context using a paper survey, and it brought to my attention individuals with deep and emotional connections to the Beltway whom I do not believe I could have located through other means. Certainly the cost factor i~_also a benefit of this research 463 me th od; using my academic institution's Website to host the survey, I was able to limit .. my financial costs to the paper and ink needed to print out the responses. I recognize a number of limitations inherent in Web surveys, and though I made purposeful attempts to compensate for them (as I described in Chapter 2), they did not disappear entirely. I especially regret the would-be respondents who did not ~ave access to or knowledge for Using the Internet, and those who were denied access because several newspapers misprinted the Internet address of the survey. Despite those limitations, and although neither I nor anyone else had much exposure to it before I initiated this project, I find th at the rich benefits of the Web survey make it a valua~le tool-when carefully and thoughtfully applied-for cultural landscape study, ethnography, and odology. While the Web survey helped me reach out to informants I would have trouble locating using traditional ethnographic methods, my odology framework guided me in look' d d · th · d' Ing at the Beltway in ways other scholars ha not ~ne m e1r own stu 1es of roads. Each of the five guiding questions was addressed in at least one of the works on highways which I introduced in Chapter 1, but none of those studies incorporated all of the questions. By consolidating them into a single analytical framework and a single study, I have tried to offer a new example for how others seeking to understand roads from American Studies and odological perspectives might progress. In addition, the type of rhetorical analysis I included in Chapter 6 does not appear in any of the Published works on American highways. In that section, I focused at a very detailed level and on 'fl ent how the highway planning process operates; by a very spec1 1c mom Writing fr thn hi oach I was able to depict and analyze the process as om an e ograp c appr , 464 it occurred . , not retrospectively (and usually secondhand) as all other odologies have done. To help in answering the five guiding odology questions, I drew heavily on a cultural landscape fieldwork model comprising five operations with multiple subh d. · ea Ings. I found that the cultural landscape and odology frameworks dovetailed effectively with each other. The fifth operation of the cultural landscape model, cultural analysis, included suggestions for approaching the issues raised in the first four odology questions (beliefs and values, power and access, assumptions and normativity, and conflict and consensus). The third cultural landscape operation, focusing on perceptions, complemented the last odology question which emphasized the same approach. The remaining three cultural landscape operations provided me with a framework for describing the highway, its boundaries, and the interactions between its components; doing so laid the groundwork for the type of analysis and synthesis demanded by the odology questions. Earlier versions of my cultural landscape fieldwork model did not include issues of Conflict, power and access, representation, identity politics, multisensory analysis, or sacred dimensions. Using the revised model in Appendix A for this study, I found that those issues-especially conflict, power and access, and representation-were critical to understanding the Beltway's significance and the ways it influences people's lives. Equa11y important was the model's emphasis on considering the importance of different kinds of landscape components, which encouraged me to think about the many ways in Which the Beltway's people, objects, and non-human natural components interact. Over the course of the study, in fact, I found that every operation and subheading of the 465 fieldwork model could be applied substantively to the Beltway, although I gave more att · ention to certain issues than others. This type of interdisciplinary cultural landscape approach, I believe, could be similarly used equally effectively in the study of other roads as Well. In my study, I gave particular attention to power, access, and conflict (especially in Chapters 5 and 6), the interactions between components of the landscape (Chapters 4 and 7), perceptions of the landscape (Chapter 8), and cultural analysis (Chapter 9). Certain other topics from the cultural landscape framework received comparatively short shrift. Perhaps my weakest effort comes in the final operation under the heading of identity; although I raised issues of the Beltway with respect to class and race, I did so briefly, and hardly touched on other categories of identity. I also gave little attention to the sacred dimension of the Beltway landscape, beyond short discussions of the Brentwood Foursquare Church brochure and the Mormon Temple. There is clearly lllore Work to be done regarding the Beltway from each of these perspectives. Like the Beltway, this study is an incomplete and imperfect contribution which others will hopefully improve. Conspicuously absent from the study, for example, is substantive comparative analysis. Except for the beltway literature review at the end of Chapter 9, J did not place the Beltway in perspective with similar roads regionally, nationally, or internationally. For this case study, I consciously elected to downplay comparative analysis in order to focus on other issues; still, the cultural landscape lllodel could benefit from a step emphasizing comparison and contrast, for use in the analysis of other sites. Further effort in this type of methodological sense is needed to strengthen both my odology and my cultural landscape study models. They will of 466 course need continuous attention and revising in the future in order to incorporate newly relevant issues. From a content perspective, there is far more to say and learn about the Capital Beltway than I have included in this 450-page study. Roads are rich resources indeed. In th e course of the previous nine chapters, I noted certain topics-the Wilson Bridge, the Springfield M' · 1xmg Bowl-which could easily take on full-length studies of their own (and have, though not yet by academics). In Chapters 5 and 9, I selected a few key conflicts to explore in detail, but there are many others: tensions in th~ 1970s over proposals to widen the Beltway in Kensington, and battles in the late 1990s and through 2001 over the proposed Metro land development on environmentally sensitive land adjacent to the Beltway and Greenbelt Metro station, are only the tip of the iceberg. 801 80J T On controversies in Kensington, see Martha Angle, "Beltway Brings Traffic and "~ouble to Maryland Suburb," Evening Star, 22 March 1966: B-1; John McKelway, 1 ow They Want to Run the Beltway Past MY House," Evening Star, 17 February F975: B-1; Roberta Wyper, "I-495 Plans Stir Debate," Montgomery County Sentinel, 20 E eb~ 1975: A-1; Barbara Palmer, "215 Md. Homes Saved as Beltway Plan Dies," ~. 20 February 1975: B-1; Joe Green and J. Y. Smith, "Beltway Shift in ~ensington is Called Off," Washington Post, 20 February 1975: El; Sonia Boin, Connecticut Residents Fight Park Beltway Reconstruction," Suburban Record, 19 March 1976: 1; Leon Dash "Widening of Beltway Opposed by Neighbors," ~hinotnn p,_,,,_ 16 March 1976: Al6' Genie Kolius, "Beltway Widening Protested by 400"~11 ' ' , Montgomery Journal, 18 March 1976: A-1; "Decongesting the Maryland Be~tway," Washington Post, 3 June 1976: Maryland Weekly, 7; Paul Hodge, "Beltway Exit on Kensington Parkway to Close," Washington Post, 21 August 1980: Maryland Weekly, 10. On the Greenbelt Metroland controversy, see Virginia Beauchamp, "SMA and SHA Each Discuss Beltway Access to Metroland," Gree?belt News R:view, ~O September 1999: 1; Jackie Spinner, "$1 Billion Greenbelt ProJect Founde~s, Washin~on Post, 20 December 1999: B 1; Virginia Beauchamp, "History of a ~lanru?g Pro.c:ss, . Greenbelt ~. 3 February 2000: I; Virginia Beauchamp, Pubhc Part1c1pat1on Process Generates Issues and Concerns " Greenbelt News Review, 17 February 2000: I; Virginia Beauchamp "Greenb;lt Station Development Finds Beltway Access Crucial," ~belt News Review, 24 February 2000: 1; Virginia Beauchamp, "Developer 467 Nor, as mentioned above, did I offer any international context for the Capital Beltway; beyond the extensive 1980 Payne-Maxie study of American beltways, there is little comparative research yet published on beltways either nationally or internationally. However, as I indicated in Chapter 1, none of this was of much interest to my s urvey respondents themselves. For some of them, my study prompted one question and one question only: how can the terrible traffic situation on the Beltway be improved? M:y survey told respondents explicitly what this project was about-namely, not finding traffic solutions-yet I still received comments along the lines of "I hope your study Will Provide insight on how to improve the traffic," "hopefully you will have some input on making it flow smoother," and "I hope you can generate some interest/solutions about how to improve the Beltway. 11802 To these respondents, I sent personal email messages expressing my appreciation for their encouragement, but apologizing that my Project had a different set of goals. It did, at the outset. But heeding the issues which clearly were of paramount concern to my infonnants, I attempted to develop my own solutions for ameliorating Beltway traffic based on what I learned during the course of this study, after accounting for the odological questions I had set out to answer. What J learned surprised me; I conclude (probably to the disappointment ofmy respondents) that Beltway traffic problems are not solvable by any conventional means. There are several reasons for this, as described below. Proposes St t B 8 ·t· Lands "Greenbelt News Review, 2 March 2000: 12; and V. a e uy ens1 1ve , . . S L d B " trginia Beauchamp, "Council Agrees to Meeting With tate on an uy, Greenbelt ~. 1 February 2001: 1. 802 Beltway Surveys #589, 488, 325. 468 In the first two novels of his popular Foundation series, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov describes how psychologist Hari Seldon perfects the field of psychohistory, in which scholars use algorithms representing typical social behaviors to predict social, political, and economic history far into the future. As his civilization prepares to fall, Seldon calculates the most likely course of events stretching for hundreds of years, and prerecords a number of videotaped speeches to be released for vieWing at irregular intervals in the centuries to come. Each speech includes a brief summary of what events have recently transpired (according to his predictions) and suggestions about what his viewers can do to prepare for upcoming events. For the first few hundred years, social events across the universe play out along Seldon's Predictions; however, a single unexpected factor Seldon could not have predicted (a :mutant) then disrupts what he had projected would happen, and from that time forward his assumptions and predictions diverge further and further from reality. 803 In a transportation context, planners take the place of Asimov's Psychohistorians, and planning and political officials join together in the role of Hari I Seldon. They plan for the future using everything they know about the past and the Present, but like Seldon, cannot usually account for phenomena which have never before existed at the time they develop their plans. And in the case of the Beltway, the Planners' predictions at the key time-the 1950s and 19?0s, when the road was designed- turned out to be so wildly inaccurate that it is hard to imagine later generations of officials being able to compensate for their errors. 803 Isaac A . F d t' (New York· Gnome Press, 1951 ); Isaac Asimov, s1mov, oun a 10n · · ~tion and Empire (New York: Gnome Press, 1952). 469 Here is why. In Maryland, the State Roads Conu:nission estimated in 1964 that 55 ,ooo vehicles per day would use the state's portion of the Beltway. Still, it prepared for the future by designing the road to handle 100,000 vehicles per day, with plans to Widen from six to eight lanes by 1970 and increase capacity to 140,000 vehicles per day. The original figure--55,000-was exceeded in the .Beltway's first year of operation. 804 Virginia's predictions were even lower, at 49,000 vehicles per day; its original section of the Beltway had capacities of 50,000 (four-lane portion) and 75,000 (six-lane portion). 805 As in Maryland, Virginia's high estimate of 49,000 vehicles per day Was exceeded in the first year of operation. So in both states, Beltway ridership rose past initial estimates almost 1Illinediately. But the key is in the numbers themselves: Virginia expected 49,000 Vehicles per day and Maryland 55,000 per day, with gradual increases. Yet by the turn of the century, the entire Beltway carried approximately.one million vehicles per day. 806 There is simply no way that a single highway can absorb ten times its original expected Volume of vehicle load without extremely significant changes in travel patterns, modal switches (e.g., a massive shift to mass transit) or physical infrastructure. To adequately carry the current volume given the state of the rest of the current regional transportation infrastructure, the original planners would have had to design a highway with probably quintuple the current number of lanes. Certainly contemporary officials cannot add that ------ --- - - 804 Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag;" Angle, "Road B~lt as D.C. Bypass." 805 Angle ,,·R dB .1 D C Bypass·" Jane Seabeny, "Va. Beltway Widening: Tardy, C , oa m t as . . , d · "V w·d · f ostly" w h. p t 26 November 1976: Al; Hu gms, a. 1 enmg o B 1 , as mgton os , e tway." 806 Feaver, "Washington's Main Drag." 470 many lanes. But without them, it is unlikely that the Beltway by itself can ever be " 1 so ved." What went so wrong? For the Beltway, what played the role of Hari Seldon's mutant and disrupted planners' original expectations? Journalist David Boldt answered th e question in 1972: "the central reason for the daily jams [on the Beltway] is the inability in the e_arly 1950s to forecast the major shifts to suburban living, the maturing dependence on the automobile, and the effect the Beltway would have on itself. 11807 The congestion and eventual lack of adequate lanes resulted from a drastic underestimation of What would happen to Washington's suburbs and how drivers' patterns would shift to become far more inter-suburban than before. In another example of undersight, the National Capital Planning Commission predicted in 1952 that the percentage of the region's population living in Washington's suburbs would rise from 40 percent to 50 Percent by 1980. But by 1970, the suburbs' share was already 74 percent. 808 As a result, th e Beltway was planned to serve a distinctly different suburban community and distinctly different travel patterns than actually came to pass. M-NCPPC planners recognized by December l 964, just four months after the Beltway opened, that its unexpected effects on development had likely already invalidated growth plans developed by the commission less than a year earlier and had weakened or nullified Prosp . 1 809 ects for the wedges and comdors P an. ---- 807 B - - ------ oldt, "Beltway: Planning Problem." 808 Ib' Id, 809 Peter S D' . "Pl c. Suburbs Feared Outdated by Beltway Growth," W . . 1ggms, an 1or ~ ' 17 December 1964: C6. 471 The planners and engineers I spoke with confirmed that faulty predictions had made traffic solutions difficult. Jack Hodge, who worked for the vu· g;"; D .L.u.ia epartment of Highways during early stages of the Beltway's development, recalled that "when the Capital Beltway was planned, initiaIIy, the planning people in Fairfax County felt that aII of the development would stay inside of the Beltway. WeII, obviously they didn't figure exactly right. "810 But making correct predictions would not necessarily have meant that Virginia would have built a road appropriate for 2001; after all, state officials felt siUy even building a four-line highway through rural farmland. Hodge explains: I don't think that one can say that states do not plan far enough in the future. They can. Two things. If you build what is really truly needed, it looks as if you wasted money because there's lanes of pavement there that's not gonna be used for a period of time. Then you have spent money that you have badly needed somewhere else. So I guess, it's how much can you afford to spend. And in Virginia's case, on a 55,000 mile system? Of aII the roads, of course, not just the Interstates. I guess that's where you have to look at it. And you always have those engineers that are doers, and build what they gotta build, and then you have those planners, and somewhere between the two, the twain have to meet. 811 Subsequent projections also missed the mark: Maryland State Highway Administration's Neil Pedersen remembered developing traffic forecasts for the year 2005 back in 1980, when the Beltway had traffic volumes of about 120,000 vehicles per day on the Maryland portion. "We were saying 160,000 vehicles in the year 2005. WeU, here we are in the year 2001 , and the year 2000 counts ... are pushing 250,000. So we kind of d h c. t t say the least 11812 Maryland's planners, Pedersen un ers ot our 1orecas , o · 810 J nterview with Jack Hodge. 811 Ib"d I • 812 I nterview with Neil Pedersen. 472 explained d , assume that the long-planned Outer Beltway or Intercounty Connector Would be built and that high-tech development along the I-270 corridor would not suddenl kyr k . Y s oc et. Once both assumptions and others proved wrong, the planners' predicted future, like Hari Seldon's, veered far off-course with little hope of returning. Conditions on the Beltway were exacerbated because other transportation facilities, which might have helped to alleviate its traffic more than they eventually did, fell victim to the same faulty projections, while still others, including the inner-Beltway portion ofI-95, were not built at all. Architect John Corley, who helped design the Metrorail system from 1974 to 1999 (the first segment opened in 1976), acknowledged in 200 l that "[t]he original plans for Metro saw the predominant ridership as workers coming from homes to jobs. The jobs were downtown, and residences radiated in all directions from downtown. 11813 But this pattern did not hold into the Beltway era, as Larry Van Dyne explains: [Metro J was designed as a "radial system" to move people back ~d forth between downtown and the suburbs-"a perfect system for the city of 191 O," as one highway advocate caustically puts it. And while it help~d ~ev~talize downtown DC and was terrific for people who worked there, 1t did little to serve the new breed of commuter who had to travel across the suburbs to get to and from work. 814 While Metro does not serve the suburbs as efficiently as it might if planners had had a crystal ball, hundreds of miles of highways proposed in the 1950s and 1960s never appeared at all. When planners and politicians cancelled plans for the four phantom :';.Qtd. in Nina Mitchell, "The Hole Story," Washington City Paper, 7 September 2001 : 814 Van Dyne, "Getting There," 207. 473 beltwa · d ys Intro uced in Chapter 3, the Northeast and North Central Freeways, the Northern Parkway and Southeastern Expressway, and other highways in and around Washington, they relegated existing and future traffic to· a transportation infrastructure significantly smaller than they had earlier anticipated. Thus, by the time Metro and the Capital Beltway opened, the planners' assum · pt10ns underlying them were already erroneous. From all of these observations, I conclude that because a few additional highway lanes cannot realistically compensate for the enormous shortcomings in planners' projections from the 1950s, and because Increased transit is not a satisfactory solution for reasons explained by Pedersen in Chapter 6, the only viable action for significant improvement on the Beltway is the lllanipulation of external factors, as per my discussion of Pedersen's Paradox. I do not see a meaningfully effective alternative. I acknowledge that construction of "missing" facilities, such as the Intercounty Connector (ICC), would likely improve traffic for certain areas. However, I noted in Chapter 6 that even the SRA's extensive 1994 study of the ICC concluded that construction of that highway would not significantly improve traffic conditions on the Capital Beltway. Apart from manipulation of external factors, 0 nly a massive expansion of the area's transportation infrastructure, of highways and mass transit, could do that, and such an addition is neither financially, politically, nor e . nvironmentally viable. Yet at least the Beltway, with all of its deficiencies, was built. Its inadequate carrying capacity, its displacement of residents along its right-of-way, its adverse effects on its abutters and its encroachment on parkland are to a large extent products ' . of their time, which is to say pre-1969 when the policies described at the end of Chapter 474 5 went into effect. Had Maryland and Virginia attempted to build the Beltway after that year, when suburban patterns and traffic projections might have been clearer to planners to engineers, the more stringent social and environmental regulations would have guarded against these deficiencies-but the enhanced sensitivity and awareness of these concerns, underlying the l 969 policies, would quite possibly have prevented the road from being built at all. The Outer Beltway experienced that exact fate. Washington's Main Street, which unifies the metropolitan region even as it is fraught with conflicts thus had its best chance for becoming a reality within a short ' . Window of time: before 1952, there was little impetus to circumscribe Washington's suburbs; after 1969, it might have proved too difficult to insert a superhighway into densely inhabited middle-class suburban neighborhoods and through carefully protected Parkland. "I can't picture the Beltway being put in today~" I remarked to Slade Caltrider, Who oversaw its construction in Maryland as an assistant district engineer for the State Roads Commission and later became the State Highway Administrator. With finality, he an b .1 11s1s swered, "It could never be w t. sis I nterview with Slade Caltrider. 475 APPENDIX A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS FIELDWORK MODEL The American landscape, at its heart, is an agglomeration of things, both animate and inanimate. Several scholars working along the lines of material culture st udies-that is, the analysis of the relationship between objects and people-have outlined sets of operations for artifact study. 816 Each of their models has been geared toward individual objects. But study models which consider broader cultural landscapes--incorporating but not limited to individual items--have been lacking, despite the general consensus that cultural landscapes are a manifestation of material culture, or "material culture writ large. "817 In this discussion, I clarify the concept of the oft-used "cultural landscape" designation, argue that artifact analysis models are Insufficient for broader landscapes, and propose a series of operations which consider issues specific to landscapes as well as those basic to general material culture study. What, then, are cultural landscapes? The tenn appears regularly in scholarly and Popular literature, but is seldom defmed with accuracy. The concept of cultural landscapes overlaps material culture, anthropology, archaeology, cultural geography, and not a few other disciplines. In essence, cultural landscapes add a dimension to the 816 For example, see E.M. Fleming, "Artifact Study:~ P~oposed Model," Winterthur ~ 9 (1974): 153-173; Jules David Prown.' "M!nd_ m Matt~r: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method," in Material. L1fe.m Arnenca, 1600-1840, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern Umve~1ty P~~~s, 1988~, 17-34; and Charles p M t "The Connoisseurship of Artifacts, m Material Culture S . on gomery, h ·11 Am . A . . -1.Yili._es in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Nas v1 e: encan ssoc1at1on for State and Local History, 1982), 143-152. 817 p rown, "Mind in Matter," 27. 476 st udy of individual artifacts. Material culture study, at its basic level, explores the dynamic relationship between human beings and material objects, in order to understand the beliefs, values, and conventions of those people who created, maintained, or altered those objects. Central to this definition is the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between humans and artifacts: both persons and objects are given agency, as each influences and is influenced by the other; artifacts are not simply considered to be passive, mute manifestations of humans' cultural patterns. Cultural landscape study takes the two agents from material culture--humans and artifacts--and adds a third agent, nature, thus creating a three-way relationship. Merging the anthropocentric "culture" with the nature-bound "landscape," and invoking material culture's emphasis on the dynamic relationship~ between humans and artifacts, creates the interdisciplinary cultural landscape approach. Still, no singular definition has gained hold in the field. Geographer Carl Sauer introduced the tenn "cultural landscape" in his 1925 essay, "The Morphology of Landscape," to indicate the result of active human influence on a natural site. 818 However, Sauer recognized only the human influence on a landscape, writing explicitly that "we waive the claim for the measurement of environmental influences. "819 This restriction eliminates any possibility of a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature. Furthennore, Sauer focused on the physical cont~nt of human effects on the land ( e g cli'm t h t · hange) not on the beliefs and values underlying those · ·, a e c ange, erram c , 818 Carl O S "Th M h 1 gy of Landscape" [1925], in Land and Life: A . auer, e orp o o d J hn L . hl (B k 1 . ~ction from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, e · 0 eig Y er e ey. Dniversity of California Press, 1963), 315-350, 819 Ib'd 1 ., 342. 477 changes. Sauer's quantitative approach and one-sided process leave his original conception unsuitable for a more comprehensive analysis which does recognize a dYnamic relationship between artifacts and nature. More recently, Dell Upton has offered an insightful abstract view, explaining cultural landscapes as "the fusion of the physical with the imaginative structures that aII inhabitants of the landscape use in constructing and construing it. "820 The landscape can tbus be considered the fusion of physical and social constructions of reality. Again, though, the explanation avoids attention to the power of those physical structures. An alternative, somewhat more comprehensive definition considers the cultural landscape to be a cumulative record of the work of humans and nature in a certain place, as shown first, by tangible and intangible evidence which reflect the beliefs and values of the peoples in that place at different times, and second, by the reciprocal effect that the people of that site and its artifactual and natural components had on one another. In short, with cultural landscapes, the two-way dialogue expands to a triangular relationship by adding nature's agency, requiring study of the reciprocal effects which the humans, artifacts, and natural components of any site have on each other. This framework may appear problematic in that it separates humans from nature, Which seems to make it inapplicable to cultures in which humans are considered to be integral components of a natural cosmos. Furthermore, geographers Peirce Lewis and Michael Conzen have argued with justification that virtually all natural components of the planet have been affected to some extent by humans~ and that therefore every 820 Dell Upton, "Architectural History or Landscape History?" Journal of Architectural ~ 44 (1991 ): 198. 478 landscape i 1 al 1 d 821 • s a cu tur an scape. Though 1t may be fallacious to insist that any site is e f n trely unaffected by human activity, for purposes of clarity my tenns remain "h llinan"· "arffi " · 'fy' , 1 act , s1gru mg landscape features designed intentionally and purposefully by humans; and "nature." This separation recognizes the unique power Which hum h 1 . ans o d to alter the natural world and the mherent power of natural processes-including stonns, earthquakes, climate changes, and so on-to influence People's lives. For purposes of this study model, the tenn "nature" is used to denote what might be more accurately called the non-human natural environment. What we refer to as " nature," in everyday speech, is in reality a cultural construct, a conception of an aut · onomous world framed by our cultural systems, so nature becomes a lens through Which · ' t It .. we view and interact with a non-human env1ronmen . ts important to recognize that there does exist a natural world outside of our conceptions of it, even if "we can never know nature at first hand" without viewing through our cultural lenses. 822 Anne Whiston Spim clarifies the tension between nature (the ~on-human world) and nature (people's conception of that world): To deny the dynamic reality of the nonhum~ world is ... ~isleading and potentially destructive. Rain, rivers, mountams, trees, and b1rds are not just figments of human imagination; they exist. · · · [T]~ey · · · have an_ existence outside that which we grant them. Failure to appreciate the dynamic, . autonomous role of nonhuman features and phenomena promotes the illusion that humans can construct and control everything .. · · There is always a tension ----- 821 p .--------- S G .d e1rce Lewis, "Axioms for Reading the Landscape: ome w. es to the American Sc~ne," in The Intezpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geo?raphical Essays, ed. D. w. Me1nig (New York: Oxford University Press, 197~), 12; Michael P. Conzen, The ~g of the American Landscape (Boston: Unwm Hyman, 1990), 2. 822 William Cronon "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History ~ 17 (Fa.Il 1993): 15. 479 in landscape between the reality and autonomy of the nonhuman and its cultural construction. 823 Michael Barbour adds that "nature is real, of course, but we can experience and relate to 0th ers only a filtered, personalized version of nature."824 In this study model, it is Barbour's "real" version of unfiltered nature which the tenn "n t ,, . a ure 1s used to indicate. The steps of the model suggest ways for evaluating how humans apply their own social frameworks to tum that nature into personalized cultural constructions. While in general usage, therefore, "nature" actually denotes a culturally constructed version of the non-human natural environment, the remainder of this discussion for semantic ease uses the tenns "nature" and "natural" to mean "non- human natural environment" and "related to the non-human natural environment " ' unless explicitly noted otherwise. Artifact study models do not meet the challenge of addressing the key elements of cultural landscapes as construed above, particularly considerations of nature's role. The basic operations in the models, such as Jules Prown's description, deduction, and speculation and E. M. Fleming's identification, evaluation, cultural analysis, and interpretation may indeed be useful in landscape analysis. 825 But they do not address Particular issues whlch are significant to broader landscape interpretation. Considerations of spatial perception or nature's agency, for example, do not enter into these models. ~ 23 Anne Whiston Spirn, "Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted," In .lliicommon Ground, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 112-113. 824 "Toward a Conclusion," in Uncommon Ground, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 457. 82s Prown, "Mind in Matter," 24-26; Fleming, 167-173. 480 This is not to suggest that landscape study models are altogether absent. Cultural geographers Peirce Lewis, Donald Meinig, and Christopher Salter have offered guidelines specifically for landscape analysis. Lewis has· been the more comprehensive ' outlining the components of cultural landscapes: physical environment, perception of the landscape, ambitions for altering it, cultural strictures, and tools and technology used to shape the landscape. 826 Elsewhere, Lewis has listed a set of axioms and other suggestions for use in landscape study. 827 But Lewis's and the others' guidelines are more suggestive hints than they are step-by-step models of operations to carry out. 828 More importantly, their models are grounded in 1970s cultural geography and do not account for more recent themes in cultural study such as power and access dynamics, contests of meaning, and issues of identity. Their hints, therefore, would be more effective if they were placed into a more systematic, comprehensive model of landscape evaluation which is more consistent with contemporary scholarship. The study model I suggest here is composed of~ve operations, some of which have multiple subheadings (Table 1). These steps are description of dimensions, boundary identification, perception analysis, consideration of the dynamic relationship among the three components of the cultural landscape, and cultural analysis. s26 Peirce Lewis, "Learning From Looking: Geographic and Other Writing about the American Cultural Landscape," American Quarterly 35 (1983): 242-261. 821 Lewis, "Axioms"; Peirce Lewis, "The Monument and the Bungalow," Geographical ~ 88 (1998): 507-527. 828 See Christopher L. Salter, "Cultural Geography as Di~covery," in Re-Reading £!mural Geography, ed. Kenneth E. Foote, Peter J. Hugill, Kent Mathewson, and Jonathan M. Smith (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 429-436. 481 Table I .---Cultural Landscape Fieldwork Model (2002 revision) Operation I. Description of dimensions 2. Boundaries 3. Perceptions 4. Dynamic relationship 5. Cultural analysis Sub-operation a. Physical I) Humans 2) Artifacts, and/or 3) Non-human natural components b. Multisensocy c. Spiritual/sacred a. Set in time and space b. Creators and alterers identified c. Exp~riential ~s: abst_ract (if applicable) d. Social vs. poht1cal (1f applicable) a. Identify b. Aesthetics c. Cognitive landscapes d. Language and terminology e. Spatial relationships a. Humans as agents b. Nature as agent c. Artifacts as agents a. Cultural context & significance evaluated b. Power and access dynamics I) Competing meanings 2) Images and representation c. Identity analysis d. Absent components e. Variable survivability (if applicable) f. Technology g. Role of the researcher The first operation is a descriptive phase, similar to those in Prown' s and Fleming's artifact analysis models but expanded to allow for landscape elements. 829 This process defines the cultural landscape in several dimensions, introducing to the 829 p rown, "Mind in Matter, 11 24; Fleming, 156. 482 researcher a variety of complementary ways to think about the landscape's composition. The first dimension, the cultural landscape's physicality, defines the site in terms of its thr ee basic elements, namely its humans, its artifacts, and its natural components. These distinctions relate landscape analysis to material culture study: these three categories correspond directly to the three principal subjects of material culture study, which Prown has defined as things made by humans, natural objects modified by hwnans, and llilmodified natural objects. 830 This portion of the operation, consistent with Fleming's identification step for artifacts, can similarly "be simple and brief ... or it can be extended and detailed. "831 The choice will depend in large part on the size of the landscape (spatially and/or temporally), the information available to the analyst, the capabilities of the individual researcher, and the goals of the study. Though the idea of a cultural landscape is an interdisciplinary concept, few scholars have the background necessary to describe (let alone analyze) in minute detail each of the human, non-human natural, and artifactual sides of a given landscape. Still, all three elements deserve some description regardless of the analyst's particular expertise. The basic purpose of this operation, again following Fleming, is to answer "the question, What is it?"BJ2 Suggestions for describing individual objects appear in the 830 Jules Da 'd p "The Truth of Material Culture: Fact or Fiction?" in History: vi rown, L b d W D · · £mm Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven u ar an . avid Kmgery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 2· 831 F leming, 156. 832 Ib'd I • 483 artifact study models and wiII not be repeated here. 833 Describing the human contributors to a cultural landscape is a separate issue. Questions here can focus on the individuals or groups whose physical presence coincided with the physical space of the landscape within a set time period, and/or on those persons who directly affected the physical or conceptual composition of the landscape during that period. Who was responsible for designing the elements of the landscape, .for creating them, for maintaining them, for changing them? Who lived, died, worked, played, socialized, or 0therwise participated within the landscape? Further, the individuals associated with a landscape may or may not actually occupy its physical space. Midwestern power plant owners, for example, could be considered part of the New Hampshire cultural landscape, because emissions from those plants increase air pollution and decrease mountain views in northern New England. Similarly, western ranchers frequently consider federal land policies to be intrusive, but it is still those policymakers thousands of miles away who are partially responsible for the ways in which those landscapes are developed and used. A cultural landscape's People, therefore, can be generally divided into categories of individuals outside the Physical boundaries of the landscape who nonetheless exert significant influence on it, and those present within the landscape itself. Identification of the natural components of a landscape similarly offers an answer to "What is it?" While the researcher with scientific training will be able to go into more detail here, it should always be possible to outline a general picture of a site's vegetation, temperature, organisms beyond humans, climate, and the like. Because all 833 See Fleming, 156-7; Prown, "Mind in Matter;" and Montgomery, 145-52. 484 natural phenomena may be considered to be affected by hwnans in some way, the analyst may choose to combine this sub-operation with description of the landscape's artifacts (hence the 11and/or11 in Table 1). The objective of this first operation is not to Write a cultural history of the individuals involved, nor t~ script a natural history of the site, but to provide an introductory sense of the components that contribute to the landscape's identity. These components are not strictly visual in character. Americanist John Kouwenhoven writes: We [ must J not overlook the importance of what might be called sensory thinking .... Just as there are sight-thoughts, there are also feel-thoughts, smell-thoughts, taste-thoughts, and sound-thoughts. Our primary allegiance, as sentient creatures, is surely not to the creations of our verbal ingenuity, but to the particular sights, tastes, feels, sounds, and smells that . . ld . t di 834 constitute the Amencan wor we are trymg o scover. Cultural landscape analysis, by extension, can and should be, when possible, a muitisensory endeavor; this is the descriptive operation's second suggested dimension of landscapes. But most contemporary scholarship in the field prompts the researcher to go out and simply look. The decorative arts artifact study models cited earlier allow a little touching while preparing to describe the objects within the culture landscape under study, but otherwise, cultural landscapes seem to be for eyes only. That is a shame. But not a surprise, according to I. Douglas Porteous's theoretical text on multisensory landscape analysis. "When we consider landscape, 11 Porteous writes "we are almost always concerned with a visual construct. ... While ' visual landscapes have been analysed to death, non-visual sensory modes have been s34 John A. Kouwenhoven, "American Studies: Words or Thi?gs?" Rep_nnted in Material !dillure Studies in Americl!, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Nashville: Amencan Association for State and Local History, 1980), 90-92. 485 paid little attention in studies of 'landscape appreciation."'835 Few scholars have analyzed landscapes as soundscape, and almost none have attacked the smellscape or touchscape (Porteous's terms). 836 Yet skin is the body's largest sensory organ, and tactile sense almost always remains even after other senses have deteriorated. Smell? too, gives useful infonnation about an individual's surroundings. Non-visual senses in general are more proximate, helping to negotiate life immediately around the body; they are also more emotional and less intellectual, tied closer to pleasure and well-being. Cultural landscape analysis need not confine itself to only one sense. 837 Multisensory landscapes are more serious a concept than they may appear at first. At the tum of the new century, soundscapes, for example, are no longer an obscure and abstract concept, if they ever were. Even in 1990, Porteous wrote that sound had become a major planning and industrial issue. 838 More recently, a journalist writes, "National Park Service officials say the rising din of mechanical noise in natural areas has made them realize they must manage the parks not only for sights, but for the sounds, as well." NPS staff have drafted "soundscape preservation" policies to guide 835 J. Douglas Porteous, Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 22. 83 ~ ~orteous offers a sample .framework f~r intelJ:'reti_ng s~ellscapes, ~d cites th~ V1kmg Museum in York, England, as a p10nee~ m histonc smellscape mterpretation, in an exhibit where it recreates tenth-century Jorv1k s~ells such as fish, leather, and earth (22-35, 45). For soundscapes, the classic reference 1s R. _Murray Schaefer, The Tuning ~ (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). 837 Porteous, 6_7; Edward r. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 39-59. 838 p orteous, 62-65. 486 unit adm' · . . m1strators m managmg and reducing unwanted sounds A recent draft · prompts ad · · ministrators to monitor sound levels within their units and encourages the restoration of"d egraded soundscapes," a step raising the question of when a landscape can be considered to be in a "natural" condition, if ever.839 Cultural and historical scholars are beginning to pick up the lead. For example, Jo Tacchi's ongoing research explores how radio sound "creates a textured 'soundscape' in the home, within which people move around and live their daily lives."840 The commercial world, especially stores, shopping malls, and theme parks, vezy deliberately manipulates all senses to create "atmospheric" conditions, in Douglas Rushkoffs Phrasing, which maximize the potential for consumer spending. 841 In her analysis of the Sea World parks, Susan G. Davis provides an excellent example of multisensozy cultural landscape analysis. Sea World administrators, Davis argues, carefuUy construct an experience promoting consumer spending and Intentionally create a comfortable conception of nature which contributes toward that end. For example, the soundscape is characterized by omnipresent music which creates relaxation and deflects annoyance. Tactile emphasis--the touchscape--encourages Participatozy involvement and the opportunity to interact directly with park spaces, through judicious placement of animal petting pools and barrier rails. Even the 839 David Foster "Amid Holiday Buzz, Parks Asking for Quiet: A Move Toward 'Soundscape' Pr~servation to Offset Mechanical Din," Boston Globe, 3 July 1999. 840 0th " . M 'al Cul Jo Tacchi, "Radio Texture: Between Self and ~rs, I? aten. tures: Why ~' ed. Daniel Miller (Chicago: Umvers1ty of Chicago Press, 1998), 84 '. Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What 'They' Say (New York: Riverhead, 1999), 89-101. 487 tastescape plays into the parks' construction: the food offered, which accounts for 25% of Sea World's revenues, is both functional and celebratory, so that customers will leave With a good taste both figuratively and literally. 842 Davis's study is significantly enriched by her use of a multi sensory perspective. Analysis of other sites can benefit as well from a similar approach. However, specific guidelines for interpreting cultural landscapes as soundscapes, smellscapes, tastescapes, and touchscapes are still lacking ( and perhaps this will encourage a reader to propose a set). Porteous courageously struggles to outline a working vocabulary and analysis framework for soundscapes and smellscapes, but both his terms and his techniques are UoWieldy. 843 For the time being, case studies such as Davis's are the best models for effectively incorporating a multisensozy approach into what has traditionally been visually-privileged cultural landscape analysis. Even if a formal study apparatus is not available, researchers can still remember that the people, the objects, and the natural elements they analyze have more character than their visual appearance. The third dimension for defining cultural landscapes focuses on their sacred or spiritual character. In Western societies, analysis within the natural and social sciences has generally shied away from consideration of the spiritual, particularly because the topic is subjective and difficult to quantify. However, issues of sacredness do inform the relationships between humans, nature, and objects, and need not be ignored even if they do not fit easily into Western analytical frameworks. Western academics may have Particular difficulty examining cultural landscapes from this unfamiliar perspective, and 842 Susan G. Davis, Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World ~ (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1997), 93-94, 103-105, 111-112. 843 p 0 rteous, 22-65. 488 may find many types of sites devoid of any spiritual connotation; still, it is important to have a framework at hand for assistance in studying site~ which are not devoid and Where issues of the sacred do infonn the relationships between people, objects, and nature. Belden Lane has suggested four approaches for identifying and analyzing landscapes through a spiritual lens; those strategies can be applied in this first operation to define the sacred composition of a site and again in th~ fifth operation to analyze its significance. The ritual approach, Lane explains, distinguishes between landscapes as "topos" and II h fl • • uaI 'nfl c ora. Topos sites are inert and do not exert spmt I uence on creatures or objects within the site's boundaries, while chora sites are spiritually enhanced with a common bond linking all elements of the landscape; purposeful ritual activity within the landscape aIIows people there to experience it as chora rather than topos. The ~ approach, introduced by Mircea Eiiade, differentiates between sacred and profane places; sacred sites are marked by the presence of divine powers or supernatural forces. The cultural approach, supported by David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, emphasizes conflict; the degree to which people choose to fight and die for a site determines the strength of its sacred character. The phenomenological approach, advocated by James Gibson and Edward Casey, focuses on nature; the topography and th . . dn 844 e natural setting of landscapes create their sacre ess. Questions for describing the sacred character of a landscape can concentrate on the defining factors of one or more of Lane's approaches. For the ritual approach, what 844 Belden C L "G' . Voice to Place: Three Models for Understanding American Sacred s · "anRe,1 .. ivmgd Amen·can Culture 11:1 (Winter 2001): 53-56. pace, e 1g1on an 489 types of intentional ritual activity characterize the cultural landscape under study and may allow it to be experienced as chora rather than as topos? For the ontological approach, what divine powers or supernatural forces do people consider to be present or absent from the site? For the cultural approach, what conflicts have occurred within the landscape which could be considered to contribute to its sacredness? For the phenomenological approach, what natural elements of the landscape play a role in establishing its sacred character? These questions, like the ones relating to the landscape's physical and multisensory dimensions, may be answered briefly and descriptively; in later operations, the researcher can return to those descriptions and analyze their significance. 845 For the second operation in the study model, careful attention must be given to defining and analyzing the landscape's boundaries, in order to clarify what, where, and when is (was) the landscape under investigation. Boundaries must be set both in space and in time, then explained and analyzed critically. A series of questions can begin to address this issue: Who set the boundaries, when, and why? Who recognized them and who did not? How did different people's perceptions of them form and change over time? How do the boundaries reflect relationships between people and between people and nature? The primary objective at this point is to clearly identify the boundaries; more in-depth analysis, building on the latter questions offered above, can follow in the third, fourth, and fifth operations. Two additional frameworks can enhance boundary interpretation. First, Americanist Kent Ryden has distinguished between experiential and abstract 845 I am indebted to Jennifer Stabler for introducing me to these approaches to studying the sacred. 490 boundaries. Early colonial boundaries--for example, stone walls--were often tangible, experiential, physically measured and visually marked by landmarks. In contrast, more recent property boundaries have tended to be abstract, intangible, defined on two- dimensional maps or diagrams and translated onto the land itself. 846 Examining whether a landscape's boundaries were determined and perceived through concrete experience or through abstract planning can assist in analyzing more closely how the landscape's humans interacted with and perceived the land. Similarly, J.B. Jackson distinguishes between social and political boundaries.847 Social boundaries are internally defined; they define a region by its inhabitants within it, and serve to establish a relationship with the area outside it. An example might be a suburban neighborhood. Political boundaries, on the other hand, are externally defined, drawn to isolate the inside and to be conceptually independent of the humans within. An example of this is Iraq, whose boundaries, which were drawn by outsiders, do not relate directly to its inhabitants. Analysis of whether a landscape's boundaries are social or political can reveal who is and has been in control of the landscape, whether they are insiders or outsiders and what that means, and how they relate to and perceive the landscape. The third operation in the study model attempts to understand the perceptions of the landscape and its components by the different people who altered it or did not alter it. This stage can begin with such questions as: What are these perceptions? How were 846 Kent Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University Press of Iowa, 1993), 26-36. 847 J.B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 15. 491 they formed? How and why did they change? How did different humans' respective spatial organization patterns reflect their values, beliefs, rules, and landscape perceptions? Here Donald Meinig's ten modes of landscape perception-interpreting the landscape as nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, or aesthetic--can be incorporated as helpful guidelines. 848 In particular, issues of aesthetics, Meinig's tenth suggestion, may be examined at this point: What issues of taste, beauty, and appropriateness does a given cultural landscape raise? What are the cultural and political implications of a site's aesthetics? To what extent are its aesthetics considered normative and unproblematic, and with what repercussions? Who, if anyone, stands to gain and to lose from the landscape's design and appearance? These issues may be revisited in the fifth operation during cultural analysis of conflict and power dynamics, but may at least be introduced here while examining the ways in which people perceive the landscape. Under this operation falls the concept of cognitive landscapes, or landscapes of the mind, which Peirce Lewis has explained as "the mental structures that lie beneath tangible patterns in the landscape. "849 The point here is that physical form and people's actual spatial conceptions often are mutually independent. And so, building off the work of Lewis, Kent Ryden, Michael Ann Williams, John Michael Vlach, and a growing number of others, the analyst should question not only how and why different people have organized the landscape space physically, but also how they have organized it 848 D.W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene," in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. D.W. Meinig (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 34-47. 849 Lewis, "Learning From Looking," 245. 492 conceptually or cognitively. What intangible meanings, associations, and functional delineations accompany the components of a landscape, and how do these offer additional insights into individuals' and groups' beliefs and values? Scholarship by Williams and Vlach helps to ill~trate this crucial point. Williams's study of early twentieth-century southwestern North Carolina homes demonstrates that personal narratives may allow recovery of spatial experiences and perceptions that neither physical objects nor documentary evidence alone can explain. Williams compares the structure and uses of three common house types-single pen, double pen, and center passage-and finds that while each type is physically and structurally unique, the three types once shared a single system of spatial use. Residents of each house type concentrated most functions into a single room, kept a conceptually if not physically separated kitchen, and used no formally designated bedrooms. Because surviving house types did not reflect these spatial uses, Williams relies heavily on her fifty informants' testimonies to recreate the layout, vocabulary, and meanings of the houses: verbal accounts alone reveal, for example, that in physically open spaces such as the single pen's principal room, residents nonetheless divided their space functionally and conceptually.850 Similarly, John Michael Vlach argues that appearances may be deceiving, that an apparent order may not be the only order. Vlach examines both the traditional, visible landscape of plantation slavery, which reflects the precise geometric order imposed by plantation owners, and the same landscape as reconceptualized by slaves, a 850 Michael Ann Williams, Homeplace: The Social Use and Meaning of the Folk Dwelling in Southwestern North Carolina (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1991). 493 landscape not as plainly visible. While planters manipulated the land as a political and social show of power, slaves refused to acknowledge the imposed symbolic meaning, and· Instead mentally reconfigured components of the landscape according to their own spatial imperatives. Each type of building within the plantation landscape-Big House ' smokehouse, barn, and so on-had a separate function or meaning for the slaves and for the plantation owners. 851 The point is a reminder that landscapes are socially constructed as much as spatially or physically constructed. In addition, the language oflandscape inhabitants or constructors should be a central element of analysis. The terminology and language systems used by groups and individuals both shape and reflect cultural perceptions, and in fact are social constructions as much as landscapes themselves are. Even the most commonly used landscape designations in mainstream discourse carry significant connotations. William Cronon argues, for example, ''.just how invented, just how constructed, the American Wilderness really is . ... [T]here is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is 851 John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For further discussion of slaves' techniques of subversive resistance, see Warren Perry and Robert Paynter, "Artifacts, Ethnicity, and the Archaeology of Ame~ Am:ricans," in "I, Too, Am America": Archaeological Studies of African-Amencan Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia),. 299-31 O; Lawrence W. Levine, Black £!!,Iture and Black Consciousness: Afro-Amencan Folk Thought from Slavery to fuedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1_977), and ~eland Ferguson, Jln.common Ground: Archaeology and Early Afr1c~ Amenca, 1 ?50-1800 (Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 1992). Paul R. M~lms extends this argument beyond slaveiy, arguing that "apparently innocuous ma~enal cul~e, such as bottled goods and canned food reflect African America's subvers10n of racism between the mid- nineteenth c;ntwy and the Depression." See Mullins, "An .Arc~eology of !ace and Consumption: African-American Bottled Good Consumpt10n m Annapolis, Maryland, l 850-1930," Maryland Archeology 32 (1996): 1-10. 494 entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear. "852 Cronon demonstrates how the deceptively simple term "wilderness" in fact represents a complex set of ideological constructs with roots deep in the past. Similarly, other terms used to designate categories and elements of landscapes should also be considered for their ideological underpinnings. Finally, in this third operation focusing on perceptions, the researcher can attempt to evaluate space itself, to consider the spatial relationships between elements of the landscape. One possibility for this approach is anthropologist Edward Hall's system of proxemics. This framework, Hall explains, comprises "the interrelated observations and theories of man's use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture. 11853 In The Hidden Dimension, Hall introduces three frameworks for thinking about space. The first, sensory spaces, have already been discussed at length. The second, fixed spaces, depends on how pennanent is each component of a cultural landscape. Within this system, fixed-feature spaces include both material manifestations (the rooms in a house) and internalized conceptual designs of those spaces (the fixed functions of those rooms). Semifixed-feature spaces allow for flexibility of design and function (a house's mixture of movable furniture and fixed-feature enclosures). Infonnal spaces are generally tacit and invisible perceptual boundaries, essentially what this model calls landscapes of the mind.854 Hall's third framework, perceptual spaces, offers perhaps the most potential, but 852 William Cronon, "The Trouble With Wildernes~," ~n The Best American Essays1 .1.22§, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward (Boston: Houghton Mzffim, 1996), 95. 8s3 Hall, 1. 8s4 Ib'd I ., 97-105. 495 also the strongest limitation, as Hall developed his system based on his research with almost exclusively northeastern, white, middle-class adults, and warns that other demographic and social groups do follow other patterns. Hall suggests four distance zones within space: the intimate distance zone (0 to 18 inches from the body), personal distance ( 18 inches to 4 feet) , social distance ( 4 to 12 feet), and public distance ( 12 to 25+ feet). Each zone is characterized by use in certain social scenarios; for example, individuals usually stay in the social distance zone during casual and impersonal interactions; beyond the range of touch, this zone sees a loss of intimate, textural, and visual detail permitted by the first two zones. 855 How useful is this in the context of cultural landscape studies? Hall himself gives the caveat that these zones are not universally applicable, so at best this offers an example of one way to think about space, rather than a universal template. Even so, Beverly Gordon and Thomas Schlereth suggest that this framework is readily adaptable to material culture and cultural landscape analysis. In a case study of several people's reactions to a quilt, Gordon extends Hall's proxemic model from the person-person relationship he describes to the person-object relationship of material culture studies. Hall's justification for proxemics is that, depending on the distance of people's interactions, they respond with attitudes, perceptions, and feelings characteristic of those distances. People interact in similar ways with objects, Gordon points out (and, it may be added, with landscapes as well). What's more, because men and women relate differently to distances due to their respective socializations, gender analysis- not to mention other social lenses--can 855 Ibid., 110-121. 496 enter into the proxemic framework. 856 Schlereth encourages even more extended use of the proxemic framework ' carrying it into the analysis of cultural landscapes. For example, a researcher could find tbis model useful in analyzing how the inhabitants of an enclosed space such as a historic house may have experienced and interacted with it. Keeping in mind the cultural contingency of Hall's categories, a researcher could use Hall's terms to calculate the average intimate, personal, social, and public distances in different parts of the house, and from those calculations could propose hypotheses about the residents' perceptual world. 857 Specific questions to be asked of a landscape from this perspective remain to be developed. But Gordon's and Schlereth's uses ofproxemics at least offer viable arguments for this type of space-centered evaluation as well as examples of its application. Gordon writes that the proxemic framework can be used to supplement and build on more traditional forms of analysis and is a useful tool for even seemingly distant subjects such as the meaning of objects and material culture. It offers a new means of understanding the divergent experiences of men and women-one with the potential to help unpack and demystify biases that exist on a less than conscious level. 858 Proxemic and other spatial relationship analysis, along ~th attention to cognitive landscapes and to language and terminology, thus serve as the sub-operations to the 856 B p . An 1 . f G d everly Gordon, "Intimacy and Objects: A ~oxem1c a ys1s o en er-Based Response to the Material World," in The Matenal Culture of Gend~r. The Gender of ~terial Culture, ed. Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Wmterthur, Del.: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 237-252. 857 Thomas J. Schlereth, Artifacts and the American Past (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1980), 95-96· 8s8 G ordon, 250. 497 broader effort to identify the perceptions of the people associated with a landscape. The fourth step in the study model directly addresses the landscape as a manifestation of material culture, by examining the dynamic, give-and-take triangular relationship between humans, the built environment, and nature. Historian Donald Worster has noted that "no landscape is completely cultural; all landscapes are the result of i!.iteractions between nature and culture," necessitating the consideration of agency on all sides. 859 Study here can thus begin with the simple questions: How did humans act as agents in shaping the landscape and the built environment? How did nature act as agent? How did artifacts act as agents? How did the three affect each other and respond to each other? Deeper analysis should then emphasize how internal relationships affect the landscape: how nature interacts with itself (for example, in tenns of climate and animal life), and how different groups of humans interac·t with each other. The fifth and final operation, cultural analysis, should underlie the previous steps even before it is given explicit attention here. This operation addresses the relationship of the cultural landscape to aspects of the cultures associated with it, similar to E.M. Fleming's similar operation which examines "in depth the relation of the artifact to its own culture. 11860 Using the mostly descriptive infonnation gathered from the Previous operations, the researcher now evaluates the relationship between the landscape and its human actors, by relating the different uses and perceptions of the landscape to the social, political, economic, or cultural contexts that surround them. What ideologies, meaning systems, social systems, shared beliefs, attitudes toward sls9 Donald Worster, "Seeing Beyond Culture," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 144, 860 F leming, 157. 498 nature, attitudes toward people, can the landscape help to understand? How do the boundaries, perceptions, and dynamic tensions previously identified shed light on these issues? In exploring the contexts of a specific cultural landscape, it may be useful to consider it as the materialization of a confluence of discourses, or as a node at the intersection of cultural networks. "Discourse," geographer Richard Schein suggests, may be understood as "shared meanings which are socially constituted, ideologies, sets of common sense assumptions .... [a] social framework of intelligibility, within which all practices are communicated, negotiated, or challenged."861 Because the decisions which go into the physical and cognitive constructions of a landscape are embedded in these social discourses, the landscape both symbolizes those discourses and is a constitutive part of their continuous development and reinforcement. In his case study of Ashland Park, Kentucky, for example, Schein discusses how a specific neighborhood serves as the materialization of discourses of landscape architecture, insurance mapping, zoning, historic preservation, neighborhood assumptions, and consumption. 862 Researchers can ask similar questions of their own landscapes: what set of social discourses does a cultural landscape symbolize, and how does it contribute to the development and reinforcement of those discourses? It is important to keep in mind that a landscape constitutes an ongoing process-- not a stagnant, two-dimensional image--in which perceptions continuously change and 861 Richard H. Schein, "The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87:4 (1997): 663. In the definition cited, Schein draws on the work of James S. Duncan. 862 Ibid. , 664-675. 499 elements are constantly retained or rejected. Questions toward this point can include consideration of who first altered or created specific landscape components, when, and why; what those components meant to other persons at that time and at later times; and why specific elements were retained or altered at different times. Several lines of questioning offer depth to this operation. The first focuses on the contested meanings of objects and landscapes and on the power struggles to assign meaning to and assert agency over them. "The structure and content of buildings, rooms, and streets," Angel Kwollek-Folland writes, reveal struggles and compromises over meaning and use and pass on the results of such contests. When space and time become an arena of disagreement, their physical and verbal articulations reveal both underlying cultural assumptions and the process whereby those assumptions are modified. 863 . Among many examples, recent work has analyzed the late twentieth-century conflicts over shaping the landscape at Antietam National Battlefield and the tensions through that century between national parks and American Indian reservations, which have often competed for the same sites.864 James Loewen's opus on American monuments and markers is an excellent introduction to the power struggles and local and national debates over both historical and contemporary meanings which the markers can 863 Angel Kwollek-Folland, "The Gendered Environment of the Workplace, 1880-1930," in The Material Culture of Gender, The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 158. 864 Susan Trail, "Creation of the Commemorative Landscape at Antietam National Battlefield," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, forthcoming; Robert H. Keller and Michael Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). 500 represent. 865 Researchers similarly examining power and conflict in specific landscapes might ask the following: What competing or coexisting meanings characterize or have characterized the cultural landscape? Do these meanings in fact compete, or do they peacefully coexist? Under what circumstances were these meanings assigned to the landscape? Who is or has been responsible for the assigning? Which meaning, if any, is or has been dominant? What local and/or national contextual conditions might help to explain why that meaning achieved dominance? Who has had the power to shape the cultural landscape itself and to access it, and who has been denied the powers of creation and access? Contests over power, meaning, and access also play out with respect to the representations of landscapes. Bruce Johansen has suggested a set of questions to aid in this portion of landscape interpretation: What representations or images are associated with the landscape, and what are their origins? What groups and/or individuals play roles in the production of those representations, and what groups or individuals are excluded from the production process? What effects do the representations have on the landscape itself? Do they come to assume a life of their own, independent of the site itself, in effect becoming the cultural landscape? What elements of the actual landscape are and are not included in the representations, and who is and is not included in the target audience? What overt and covert messages and ideologies are inherent in the representations? How do multiple representations of the .same landscape contrast with 865 James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: New Press, 1999). 501 each other?866 Answers to these questions about power and contested meanings should consider the effects of social categories, such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. To promote such interrelated analysis, the model places consideration of social categories and power dynamics next to one other within the cultural analysis operation. In the last decade, material culture studies has seen tremendous growth in scholarship addressing artifacts, vernacular architecture, and cultural landscapes in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.867 Rather than list a separate set of considerations for each category of identity, I provide one example by focusing on using gender as a lens for analysis. A briefreview of case studies by Angel Kwolek- Folland and William D. Moore on the intersection of gender, cultural landscapes, and material culture helps to generate a set of questions which could be applied to other 866 Bruce Johansen, email to Jeremy Korr, 1 August 2001. For further discussion and case studies of issues of landscape image and representation, see Gerry Keams and Chris Philo, ed., Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (Oxford: Pergarnmon Press, 1993); Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (New York: Verso, 1996); Nancy Stieber, "Microhistory of the Modem City: Urban Space, Its Use and Representation," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58:3 (September 1999): 382-391; Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850-2000 (London: Routledge, 1998); and Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modem Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 867 See, for example, Exploring Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. VII, ed. Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); The Material Culture of Gender, The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997); Gender. Class. and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. V, ed. Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers. Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, ed. Grey Gundaker (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 502 fieldwork. These gender-based questions can be used to apply other social categories as well, by replacing references to gender with race, class, or others. In a recent analysis of the workplace between 1880 and 1930, Kwolek-Folland argues that "to the extent that spatial arrangements make manifest the abstract social relations of gender, they provide a unique way to analyze and understand not only the gender systems of a given culture as these systems change over time but also the way gender systems are implicated in the creation of power structures such as status. "868 The indoor cultural landscape of the office encouraged the maintenance and further development of gender differences both spatially and socially. Common overt discussions of male and female skills, metaphorical uses of maleness and femaleness, and spaces built or patterned to accommodate and manipulate gender difference all contributed to this phenomenon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and probably earlier and later as well). For example, domesticated private offices communicated the manhood of their occupants through such physical items as bearskin rugs and overstuffed chairs. This type of furnishing was considered inappropriate for women, who in any case did not generally hold the higher positions needed to occupy this kind of private office; correspondingly, men who did not command this type of space were at times considered less masculine. Anterooms adorned with couches and chairs reinforced leisurely and vain constructions of femininity, while the sparse placement of women's rest rooms both inconvenienced women and embarrassed them as it became apparent where they 868 Kwollek-Folland, 158. 503 were going each time they left their office room and headed for the stairs.869 Kwolek- Folland's analysis and conclusions are well supported by the convincing connections she draws between the social and spatial worlds of the office, which together reinforced gender codes familiar from the world outside the workplace. Like Kwolek-Folland, William D. Moore evalua~es a historic interior space in terms of gender, but his analysis focuses entirely on masculinity. Using architectural, artifactual, and documentary evidence, Moore argues that tum-of-the-century Masonic lodge rooms were manifestations of larger societal changes, especially in religion and conceptions of gender. Themes of hierarchy and social incorporation were integral to the rooms' function and design. These spaces, which served as theaters and sites of worship, reinforced and exaggerated the characteristics ascribed to masculinity in the outside world. 870 Spatial arrangements in the lodge rooms contributed to a hierarchical system. Officers sat in oversized, elevated, ornamental seats, while most members sat in identical settees around the room's perimeter. The settees, which all faced the center of the room and allowed the members to see each other, manifested in material form the abstract idea of male fraternity and reinforced a group dynamic. The rest of the world was physically shut out: lodge rooms had no windows, or else their windows were shuttered or blurred by stained glass. Long staircases and frequent soundproofing also promoted the sense of belonging to the group by excluding outsiders. These physical 869 Ibid., 166-168. 870 William D. Moore, "The Masonic Lodge Room, 1870-1930: A Sacred Space of Masculine Spiritual Hierarchy," in Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, V, ed. Elizabeth Collins Crumley and Carter L. Hudgins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 26. 504 spaces emphasized hierarchy and corporate identity, in the ways Moore points out, because through those themes Masons responded to changes to conceptions of masculinity in society at large, which were themselves responses to shifting social and economic conditions. 871 Moore's method of analysis, not his actual argument, is where his essay is most valuable. He follows what is essentially a four-step process: 1. Describe the space within the cultural landscape. 2. What values are emphasized by the spatial construction of (and, secondarily, by the social activity within) that landscape? 3. Among those values, which reinforced societal conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and the tensions between them? How did they reinforce those conceptions? 4. How do those processes of gender construction and reinforcement relate to the cultural landscape's societal context? Moore's framework mirrors my own model in its progression from description to analysis. More significantly, his framework could be applied to other social categories as well, by replacing gender, masculinity, and femininity in steps 3 and 4 with, for example, race, class, ethnicity, or sexuality. Drawing in part from Moore's and Kwolek-Folland's essays which take a gendered perspective, the following set of questions may be useful for fieldwork use in evaluating cultural landscapes through a gender lens: (1) In what ways has the cultural landscape been gendered? I.e., in what ways does it incorporate elements of masculinity, femininity, or other genders? How do values and beliefs incorporated into the cultural landscape reinforce or challenge societal gender expectations? Grant McCracken, whose own essay offers additional questions to ask of the gendered 871 Ibid. , 27-36. 505 relationship between objects and people, phrases it this way: How do the components of the cultural landscape create and transform the experience of culturally constituted gender?872 (2) Who is and/or was responsible for this process of gen9,ering? When? For what reasons? (3) Do or did the cultural landscape's creators, users, and alterers accept or subvert traditional gender roles? How did the cultural landscape encourage or discourage them, in either case? ( 4) How does the cultural landscape's reinforcement or rejection of traditional gender roles, covered in the first and third questions above, relate to the cultural landscape's societal context? For example, Moore, after identifying components of Masonic lodge rooms which reinforced traditional conceptions of masculinity, positions that process of reinforcement as a response to certain social and economic conditions in the U.S. at large.873 (5) For consumer-related cultural landscapes such as theme parks, supermarkets, and shopping malls: How does the cultural landscape's promotion and marketing contribute to its gendering? How do its "atmospherics"--its deliberate manipulation of the different senses--contribute to its gendering? (6) Power dynamics: From the vantage point of gender, who is permitted, encouraged, and prohibited from accessing the cultural landscape? By whom? On what grounds? (7) How, if at all, does the cultural landscape contribute to substantiating and naturalizing "asymmetries of power and status between men and women?"874 872 Grant McCracken, "The Voice of Gender in the World of Goods: Beau Brummel and the Cunning of Present Gender Symbolism," in The Material Culture of Gender, The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katherine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, Del.: Herny Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 444. 873 Moore, 26-39. 874 McCracken, 444. 506 The next sub-operations of cultural analysis concern absent components and variable survivability. By absent components, I mean that evecy landscape reflects a set ofd · · · · ecis1ons not only how to construct it, but also how not to construct it. The ways in Which people choose not to alter a landscape are as culturally valuable as their decisions Which do lead to alterations. The decision not to build·the Disney's America historical theme park in Haymarket, Virginia, for example, leaves no visible trace on the landscape, but certainly does reflect the values of the many people involved in that decision. 875 In this and similar cases, questions can target the entire decision-making process: why did different groups and individuals decide to make certain changes and not others? How did they designate visible or invisible boundaries between sites to be altered in different ways (e.g., between a "wilderness area" and adjacent land)? Variable survivability is a point brought to attention by Cacy Carson and others: the structures, components, and boundaries of a landscape at any given time are not necessarily representative of corresponding elements at any earlier or later time. In Particular, extant artifacts or dwellings should not automatically be considered to represent the majority of similar fonns from their time period. Carson et al. argue, for example, that colonists in the Chesapeake region tended to build flimsy, impermanent shelters and houses because hiring builders was expensive and typical lifespans were short. Families thus tended to dedicate their resources to their work and to tangible short-term benefits; as a result, the few well-built structures that survived into the recent 875 See Mike Wall M' k y Mouse Histozy and Other Essays on American Memol}'. (p ace, 1c e 68 H k . 1 . hiladelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 1.63-1 . aymar et 1s ocated m Prince William County, about 25 miles west of the Capital Beltway. 507 past were not indicative of the prevailing Chesapeake colonial architectural patterns. 876 Landscape analysis should recognize that any structure ( or absence of structure) seen or studied may represent an anomaly that has survived for any number of reasons, rather than the norm. If so, the researcher may consider the reasons both for survival of the anomalous form and for disappearance of the standard form. Final issues to consider under this operation include the roles of technology and of the scholar. First, as Peirce Lewis has suggested, the tools or technology that a given group or individual used to shape the landscape, as well as the manner in which they used that tool, can be analyzed to understand more clearly their perceptions toward the landscape and intentions in altering it. While "the effects of any tool depend on the level of technological sophistication, and also on a society's ability to pay for it," the manner in which individuals actually use their tools (when known) can also give insight into social relations and cultural roles by age, gender, race, and class.877 Questions here include: Who created the tools used to shape the landscape, how, when, and where? How did those individuals who used the tools acquire them? Who used the tools, and what terms did they apply to the process? How did those particular tools shape the landscape in a way that alternative ones did not? Lastly, the inherently subjective role of the scholar in the interpretation process must be recognized and addressed substantively. To some extent, this is a fundamental assumption of all scholarship: the writer's perspective will necessarily inform the 876 Cary Carson, Norman F. Barka, William M. Kelso, Garry Wheeler Stone, and Dell Upton, "Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies," Winterthur Portfolio 16 (1981 ): 135-178. 877 Lewis, "Leaming From Looking," 249. 508 writer's analysis and narrative. Researchers must be conscious at all times that even as they identify and explain the perceptions of others, they are necessarily framing their perceptions with their own meaning and language systems, so that interpretation will always be to some extent a work of translation. The responsible text is one which directly addresses this phenomenon as a component of the analytical process, rather than one which hides behind a translucent shield of assumed objectivity. This study model is applicable to a variety of sites, including both urban and rural landscapes. Because the crux of a cultural landscape is its dynamic triangular relationship, any landscape can be analyzed in part by evaluating the balance between humans, nature, and the built environment. This triangle works even when the visible signs of one or more components are minimal. Study of a treeless block of urban row houses, for example, could consider why and how humans and built structures have overshadowed nature; study of a park could analyze why and how human and architectural presence is minimal. 878 Ecologist Alice Ingerson has demonstrated persuasively how frequently scholars--scientists, humanists, and those who claim to bridge the divide--discount humans or nature as agents in creating landscapes, thereby yielding unnecessarily one-sided perspectives. 879 But a comprehensive understanding of any cultural landscape can develop from applying this triangular approach which respects all agents of the landscape. 878 For a more detailed discussion of techniques for interpreting explicitly urban sites, see Eric Sandweiss, "Mind Reading the Urban Landscape: An Approach to the History of American Cities," in Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Cultures, ed. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Bernard L. Herman (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis Du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1996), 319-357. 879 Alice E, Ingerson, "Tracking and Testing the Nature-Culture Dichotomy," in Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, ed. Carole L. Crumley (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 43-66. 509 It would be unrealistic to pretend, however, that a single set of guidelines can apply wholesale to every landscape. These operations and questions should be revised, adapted, and even reordered appropriately for every individual study. Cultural landscape study is a difficult arena: beyond the dual relationship between humans and artifacts in material culture, landscape analysts must consider the additional agent of nature, which introduces a new set of dynamics. Still, by asking the right questions, some of which this study model is intended to provide, analysts can study cultural landscapes as material culture with an eye toward understanding ever more clearly humans' beliefs, values, and conventions. 510 APPENDIXB WEB SURVEY OF Capital Beltway Questionnaire City and car, like Man flnd wom11n wedded with A ring forever. -- Beltway haiku by Ira Gitlin, 1990. Used by permission. My name is Jeremy Korr and I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. I would like to ask you a series of questions about the Capital Beltway, in order to better understand the role the Beltway plays in the Washington area and in people's lives. In pretests, most people finished the questionnaire in 20-30 minutes. I very much appreciate your help. Click her~ if you'd like an overview ofmy dissertation, Washington's Main Street: Consensus and Conflict on the Capital Beltway, 1952-2001, before you complete this questionnaire. In some questions, you will see a series of possible answers. The question will prompt you to click in the circles or squares to the left of the answer(s) you choose. Other questions ask you to write in your answers. At the end of the questionnaire you will have an opportunity to write in clarifications for any answers you feel need further explanation. You may skip any - questions EXCEPT for those in parts A and E. It is important for purposes of this questionnaire that an adult 18 years of age or older answer these questions. If you don't have time to complete the entire questionnaire now, you may submit part of it, include your email address where prompted, and complete and submit the rest later; I can match up the two parts using your email address. Alternatively, you may print out this document and send your response by mail to Jeremy Korr, c/o Department of American Studies, 2125 Taliaferro Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-8821. Please ~!!l~.H me with your questions or concerns. And please tell others (even outside the Washington area) about this questionnaire: each response contributes to a richer and more detailed portrait of the Beltway. ~lease click_ here to l?_e.@! the Cl!Pital Beltwa)' questionnaire. - - - ·· ---- Special thanks to Dr. Lillie S. Ransom, Debra DeRuyver, John Cordes, and Dr. Jenny Thompson (University of Maryland) and Zachary M. Schrag (Columbia University) for their assistance in developing this questionnaire. Return to Jererny _Korr's home_pJige. 511 Capital Beltway Questionnaire P1ease remember to complete f1uis A and E of this questionnaire-otherwise the system will refuse to accept your submission! You may select whichever questions you like from the remaining sections of the questionnaire. Part A: Permission (please complete this section) I. Permission. By submitting this form, I give Jeremy Korr, University of Maryland doctoral candidate, pennission to use my responses, without compensation, for his research on the Capital Beltway. I understand that my responses may be used in lectures, publications, and other presentations which Mr. Korr may make. 0 l agree. 2. Identification. Your answer to this question will determine the degree of confidentiality of your responses. Please choose one: o Use my name (or direct identifiers) as appropriate in presentations and/or publications. o Do not use my name or direct identifiers in presentations and/or publications. Instead, describe me in demographic tenns (for example, a 27-year-old woman from Vienna). o Do not use my name, direct identifiers, or demographic description in presentations and/or publications. 3. Follow-up. May I contact you for a follow-up interview or clarification? Ifno, please skip this question. If yes, please fill in the spaces below. Your name and contact information will remain confidential and will be used only to reach you for a follow-up interview or clarification. I will not share your name or contact information with any individual or organization. Follow-up interviews will be conducted between September2000 and May 2001. Name:,------, Phone number:,-----, Best time to call: ..-----, Email address: 512 Par• Is -t : c.,pmions ~ We'll .begin with a little word association. What word or phrase rst comes to mind when you think of the Capital Beltway? . ·[ _________ , 2 · In what ways do you think the Capital Beltway is and/or has been an advantage • 0 the Washington, DC area? [ I 3 - In what ways do you think the Capital Beltway is and/or has been a disadvantage to the Washington, DC area? [ I 4 - Can_ you tl).ink of any parts of the Beltway or its adjacent landscape which look especially nice? [ I 5. Can you think of any parts of the Beltway or its adjacent landscape which look especially ugly? [ I 6: Do you have a favorite and/or a least favorite part of the Beltway? If you have either or both, please identify and explain. [ I 7: If you considered the Capital Beltway as a tourist site, what would be the highlights? 513 I 8. How has your role, with respect to the Beltway, influenced your thoughts and attitudes toward it? For example, if you are a trucker who regularly uses the Beltway, you probably have a significantly different perspective than if you were a daily commuter, a police officer, a construction worker, a police officer, a politician, a person who lives next to the highway, or a through traveler. I 9. What, in your opinion, distinguishes the Capital Beltway from other high-speed highways? In your answer, you might identify other highways which you believe provide a strong contrast to the Beltway in some way. I I 0. What thoughts, if any, do you associate with the terms "inside the Beltway" and "outside the Beltway"? I 11. Can you think of any ways the Capital Beltway might be considered a boundary? I Part C: Experiences I. Which of the following activities have you participated in at least once while driving or traveling as a passenger on the Capital Beltway? Please check all that apply. After making your choices, you will find space to elaborate if you wish. 514 0 a. Ran out of gas 0 b. Skidded on water, ice, 0 c. Witnessed an 0 d. Involved in an or snow accident occur accident O e. Involved in a O f. Used a CB radio 0 g. Used a cellular D h. Sent or police stop phone received a fax O i. Sent or received D j. While driving, read from 0 k. BCC8I!le Jost D L Drove in reverae email a newspaper. book, or other material O m. Used the horn to honk at another D n. Swore at another driver D o. Made obscene D p. Attempted to loud enough for the driver gestures toward cut off another driver to hear another driver driver n q. Engaged in a 0 r. faperienced a panic n s. Applied makeup D t. Brusbed your race a•.cack teeth D u. Shaved a part of your body 0 v. Had a sexual and/or D w. Urinated or D J:. km line portion• woulrl IIUrh nlH latrr. i l'arl!'I nf thr. rnalf' ' ,..nalm:.! ........ , .... ,,_ ... _,,,,_.. IV COASTAL P'LA...., n8ili _,_,..,.,._,_, _ _ ., , ..,.,a.11, w.1,1.,11,_,_, c:J _,11 _ , __ ..,_,,c1o1.n • • ,.,1 ....,., ,.,,ou.c, 1a .-,··-·---••••-"'0 _,_ , __ ,, ...... - .... --.11 ...... ... , ...................... , uE::::J -··-·•-·-'"., ... ,,....,. .. ~ .. --, ...... ''fm ..... -·a.--o.·• .~/ :::.:> Ill ! '~i~ IV GEOLOGY '" ' ""'"""' WASH l ,.G,1 0 K lilCT ltO l" Ol tU." AREA M,*,P NO. l Figure 9. Geology of Washington metropolitan area. The District of Columbia is represented by the portion of the rotated square, overlapping provinces III and IV, which lies north and east of the unlabeled Potomac River. The area within the square but south of the river has belonged to Virginia since 1845. The Capital Beltway circumscribes the District and the continuation of its square boundaries at a distance of about three miles, or roughly 0.5 cm, from those boundaries. Source: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Natural Features of the Washington Metropolitan Area (Washington: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 1968), 5. 529 Beyond The Beltway © Liz Donaldson 1988 A G D G Am D :¥ t11= J I a J a a 1 .J J w 1 Ir EJ (FFJ Ip J J 1 • G D Em C D G D G 3 t r rJ 1 .J w J r I r r r r J J J J I J r J =II B D7 G C Am D G • D :t@ # II= E1 I f r CJ r I r f E' p I F CJ f E FE I r E r f I G Em Am D . D G D G lrff' PIF Cf[Fff 1CJ J Named after a contradance band Beyond the Beltway that included, Al Taylor, Marty Taylor, Larry Brandt, and myself. There's also a song of the same name by Ritchie Schuman. Figure I 0. 11 Beyond the Beltway. 11 Reel composed by Bethesda musician Liz Donaldson. Reprinted with permission. 530 ·1 1: . . ..., ._ ,. ~,, .. ~ ,I . - ~,, ~I -<' ::, I · :i' U-1 . . , I I • .. : · FAUS t.,_< ,:' . ARLINGTO I . i' ... CHURCH ~. ,_ ..... ·;--,·--~ ·; · •:•,·,·i .:--. ~ . .. : ...· :_~ ~~r··-:=· .. .. .. :~~~: . . ··: -· .. ; ·~ ~ ... ·' ··.: . • i u ... ,1 . ., "'w·: ~ • • ~ . I , 1. ~ .. F.AIRFAX ' COUNTY -Am~eba~~e. sp~awr:of:r~~a~ritial) ireasjshown'iii gr~y);jlidic'ates.'w¥y.rJ: industry avoided loc~ting ne~t.·to Circumferentialroute:m :~oritgo~~t-h County. Plann~rs -think Rockville.lµ"ea, pl}l.S_:nm~bio~ l;,~fax :~~d .P~~~e .. c:: Georges .Counties ; off~f ~,~l~ --r~~r; ;:~r·t~· / ( ~:·-?;:'.i/ ",'-7.·: ·:-~'.·;(~:: .. '.f,J~; Figure 11 . 1961 map of residential development in Washington area. Source: Evening Star, 30 March 1961: B-12. Copyright 1961, The Washington Post, reprinted with permission. 531 WORKS CITED II ,i A A • VU\ Fights Co · · · ngest1on with endgndlock.org. 11 AAA World, November/December 2001: 40. AAA Mid-Atlantic. "Bad Traffic Leads Many Residents to Consider Leaving the Washington Area." Online. ''AA SHro [ American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials J Interstate Highway Research Project: Interview with Mr. W. Lee Mertz, conducted by Dr. John Greenwood for Public Works Historical Society, March 5 and 12, 1988. 11 In Richard F. Weingroff collection, Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C. Abbott, Carl. Political Terrain: Washington. D.C. From Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Writing Against Culture. 11 In Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Fox, 13 7-162. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991. Achenbach, Joel. 11A Loopy Birthday to the Beltway at 30. 11 Washington Post, 17 August 1994: Bl. A.darns, Annmarie, and Sally McMuny, ed. Exploring Everyday Landscapes: fuspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VII. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. 532 Adams, David L. Letter to the editor. Washington Post, 21 June 1975: A13. Advertisement for Charles County, Md. Fairfax City Times, 7 August 1964: 10-11. Advertisement for Giant Food Inc. Evening Star, 16 August 1964: E-5. Agar, Michael. Culture Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. New York: William Morrow, 1994. "Agnew Allots Special Fund for Pook's Hill" [sic]. Evening Star, 2 June 1967: C-1. "Agreement Reached on Widening Capital Beltway to Eight Lanes." Fairfax Herald, 12 May 1972: I. Alexander, Ernst. Approaches to Planning. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992. American Public Works Association. Histozy of Public Works in the United States, 1776-1976. Chicago: American Public Works Association, 1976. American Trucking Associations. "How to Drive on the Capital Beltway." Brochure. Alexandria, Va. : American Trucking Associations, 1991. Anderson, Lon. "Another Collision on the Capital Beltway." AAA World, January/February 1999: 6a. Angle, Martha. "Beltway Brings Traffic and Trouble to Maryland Suburb." Evening ~ . 22 March 1966: B-1. -· "City's Concrete Circle Guides Boom." Evening Star, 23 March 1966: D-1. -· "Matyland to Widen Beltway. 11 Evening Star, 20 December 1971: A-1. -· "Pooks Hill Interchange Getting 2 More Ramps." Evening Star, 9 March 1966: -· "Road Built as D.C. Bypass Has Become a Main Street." Evening Star, 21 March 1966: A-1. 533 _ . "They Plan to Loop the Loop." Evening Star, 24 March 1966: B-3. Anonymous. Letter to the editor. Evening Star, 30 August 1964: B-1. Argetsinger, Amy. "Montgomery Won't Sell Its Connector Property." Washington Post, 5 February 2000: Bl. Arizona Bicycle Club. "Bicycling on Freeways in Arizona." Online. (21 February 2002). Arniao, Jo-Ann. "Montgomery Group Offering to Pay Higher Taxes to Lower Beltway Noise." Washington Post, 15 January 1991: Bl. Arney, William Ray. Thoughts Out of School. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. New York: Gnome Press, 1951. _. Foundation and Empire. New York: Gnome Press, 1952. Babington, Charles. "Glendening Answers Call for More Sound Barriers." Washington Post, 17 June 1997: B 1. Bacon, James A. "Northern Virginia Made Its Own Traffic Mess." Washington Post, 21 January 2001: B8. The Baker Engineer [house organ for Michael Baker Jr. engineering firm] 3:8 (November 1957). Bardaglio, Wrexie. Letter to the editor. Washington Post, 13 October 1985: B8. Barnes, Mike. "The Beltway, in Critical Condition." Washington Post, 20 August 1989: B8. "Barrier to Avert Crashes is Begun on Wilson Bridge." Evening Star, 22 March 1983: B-1. Harold Bartholomew and Associates. 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Greenbelt News Review, 2 March 2000: 12. _ . "Greenbelt Station Development Finds Beltway Access Crucial." Greenbelt News Review, 24 February 2000: 1. _ . "History of a Planning Process." Greenbelt News Review, 3 February 2000: 1. _ . "Public Participation Process Generates Issues and Concerns." Greenbelt News Review, 17 February 2000: 1. _ . "SMA and SHA Each Discuss Beltway Access to Metroland." Greenbelt News 535 Review, 30 September 1999: 1. Becker, Jo. "New Md. Metro Route Down to 2 Choices." Washington Post, 1 September 2001: B 1. Becker, Myron. "Call Boxes on Beltway Slated for Use by July." Evening Star, 19 June 1967: B-3. Beckerman, Seth. Letter to the editor. Evening Star, 23 August 1964: A-10. Behr, Peter. "Area Leaders Hit Traffic Roadblock." Washington Post, 28 September 1997: Al. "Belt Highway Plan for Rock Creek Park Opposed by Citizens." Evening Star, 14 October 1953: A-8. "Belt Highway Vital, D.C. and Two States Agree." Evening Star, 16 March 1954: B-1. 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"The Beltway (II): Signs of Danger" [editorial]. Washington Post, 28 March 1974: A22. "The Beltway (I): Speed and Safety" [editorial]. Washington Post, 27 March 1974: A18. "B eltway to Get Chain Link Fences." Evening Star, 22 December 1964: B-13. "B eltway Widening Approved." Fairfax City Times, 4 September 1964: 7. "B eltway Widening Begun in Virginia." Washington Post, 18 April 1974: C2. ''B eltway Widening Planned This Fall." Fairfax Journal, 26 April 1970: 1. Benefiel, Rebecca. "Intention and Reality: The Planning of the Capital Beltway and Its Impact on the Greater Washington Metropolitan Area." Unpublished undergraduate paper, Yale University, December 2000. Bergantino, Joe. "Delay in Beltway Widening." Fairfax Journal, 29 November 1973: 1. Beveridge, George. "Appeal Planned With Dismissal of Parkway Suit." Evening Star, 28 July 1954: A-17. -· "Belt Highway Inquiry Ends in Row on Rights." Evening Star, 27 February 1955: A-10. -· "Belt Road Plan Probe Defended by Chainnan." Evening Star, 26 February 1955: A-1. -· "Butler Assails Senate Role in Belt Road Row." Evening Star, 25 February 1955: A-1. -· "Court Studies Dismissal of Belt Road Suit." Evening Star, 24 March 1954: A-21. -· "Inter-County Belt Work to Start Despite Park Dispute." Evening Star, 20 February 537 1955:A-1. -· "Planners Get Detailed Plan on Belt Road." Evening Star, 21 May 1954: A-19. "R -· oad Decisions by Planners Renew 2 Fights." Evening Star, 11 June 1954: A-19. - · "Road Dispute Poses a Query on 'Parkway."' Evening Star, 22 November 1953: A-12. "T -· wo Pooks Hill Tums Omitted as Unjustified." Evening Star, 13 January 1960: "B· ids Asked for First Lap of Inter-County Beltway." Evening Star, 19 April 1956: "Bids Let on Highway Projects." Fairfax City Times, 21 February 1963: 1. Blum, Justin. "Backers of Bypass Tum to Va. House for.Support." Washington Post, 28 February 1998: BS. Boin, Sonia. "Connecticut Residents Fight Park Beltway Reconstruction." Suburban Record, 19 March 1976: 1. Boldt, David R. "Beltway: Planning Problem." Washington Post, 26 December 1972: Bl. Bone, A.J., and Martin Wohl. Economic Impact Study of Massachusetts Route 128. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1958. Bowman, Gary M. Highway Politics in Virginia. Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1993. Branigin, William. "Mixing Bowl is Speedy and Costly." Washington Post, 25 April 2001: B3. Bredemeier, Kenneth. "Beltway Becomes Area's Main Street." Washington Post, 538 17 February 1985: Al. -· "I-70S: How Cow Country Became a Corridor City." Washington Post, 31 December 1973: Al. Brentwood [Md.] Foursquare Church. "Prayer Around the Beltway" (brochure, n.d.). Brown, Doug. "Wooden Barriers at Beltway Work Sites.Called Hazardous." .Washington Post, 3 August 1975: B3. Brown, Earle Palmer. "Few Words in Defense of Capital Beltway." Rockville Qazette, 23 May 2001 : A-1 7. -· "It Seems Everyone is Blaming the Beltway." Montgomery Gazette, 21 April 1995: PAGE. 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"Montgomery Asks U.S. Help to Find Two Exits Missing From Beltway." Evening Star, 16 September 1964: B-5. _. "Montgomery Beltway Dooms 'Indian Rock."' Evening Star, 13 October 1963: A-1. _. "New Span to Unmask Island Jungle." Evening Star, 5 July 1960: B-3. Clay, Grady. "The Tiger is Through the Gate." Landscape Architecture 49:2 (Winter 1958-1959): 79-82. _, and Karl Raitz. "Never a Stationary Highway." In The National Road, ed. Karl Raitz, 351-354. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. "Closing the Ring" [editorial] . Washington Post, 17 August 1964: A16. 541 Cohn, D'Vera. "Beltway Decree Extended." Washington Post, 22 February 1986: Bl. Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Highways. Interstate Highway System. New York: Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff, 1956. Community Renewal Program, Prince George's County, Maryland. The Neighborhoods of Prince George's County. [Upper Marlboro, Md.]: The Program, 1974. "Commuters Give Beltway First Test." 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Weingroff collection, Federal Highway Administration, Washington, D.C. 588 RECORDED INTERVIEWS * indicates pseudonym by request of informant Timothy Bell Rick Blandford Pat Boyer(*) M. Slade Caltrider Isidore Elrich Douglas Feaver Paul Foer Jim Giese Minka Goldstein Ethan Gould(*) Robert Grow Craig Hinners Jack Hodge Loren H udziak Paul Hughes Murray Hunt Jr. Bahram J amei Larry Kidwell Drew Knight James Landolt Lisa Loflin Robert Mannell Bill McKinney Carlene Mc Whirt Raleigh Medley Lorenzo Miller Sidney Miller (*) Russell Newell Isadore Parker Fred Pavay Neil Pedersen Kenneth Plunkett Maj Shakib William Shook Chris Shulman (*) Robert Spence Margo Stanton Patrick Stanton Doxey Tobocman (*) Leslie Treistman (*) February 2001 February 2001 January 2001 September 2000 January 2001 January 2001 October 2000 January 2001 March and May 2001 February 2001 January 2001 February 2001 January 2001 January 2001 January 2001 January 2001 January 2001 March 2001 February 2001 December 2000 January 2001 January 2001 April 2001 January 2001 March 2001 March 2001 February 2001 March 2001 October 1998 October 1998 March 2001 February 2001 March 2001 February 1999 December 2000 January 2001 January 2001 January 2001 February 2001 January 2001 589 Charlie Watkins Lester Wilkenson Jr. Tyrone Young January 2001 October 1998 January 2001 590