"Throughout history, many Americans have longed to 'eliminate all barriers between goods and people.' to quote Herbert Hoover. The dream of defeating time and space through transport and communication, in fact, has had more followers in America than in any other country. This is ironic, for even as Americans have seen roads and gateways as avenues of freedom, they have also arranged them into a system meant to discipline that freedom--a trap as well as an escape. 4

4. "Roads have long been viewed as radical interventions, usually connecting cities (although today they connect suburb to suburb more than they do city to city or suburb to city). See Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations, p. 56:

It is the city that makes world-wide and conspicuous the self-conscious struggle to maintain a traditional ethos, as it is the city, in the first place, that traditional morality is attacked and broken down. The conflict on the religious or ethical level between city and country, urbanite and peasant, sophisticated mind and simple villager or tribesman, is an ancient and familiar theme...In the Mayan village of Chan Kom, to which my mind ever reverts in these connections, my good friend, a certain thoughtful villager, saw with dismay the coming of the highway that would bring the evils of the city to the peasant community his own leadership had built. Recoiling from the consequences he had not foreseen of an urbaization for which he had put forth great effort, he began to see the city as a source of moral evil. 'With the road will come drunkenness, idleness, vice,' he said."

-William Leach, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, p. 33