At the close of the millennium, many local and national politicians admitted what many architectural critics and planners had noted for years: the landscape of post-World War II America had been planned around automobiles more than around people. Reflecting the nation’s great enthusiasm for automobility, the 20th-century landscape integrated this transportation infrastructure and allowed it a defining influence. In some ways, this dominance snuck up on many Americans; yet such change is more attributable to blinded free choice than to naïveté: the 20th-century American lived under the spell of the open road. Although the United States seized the invention, the automobile was first developed in Europe in the 1890s. French manufacturers marketed the first successful automobile in 1894. Inconvenience from a lack of roads and infrastructure as well as a dependence on transportation technologies such as trolleys precluded Americans from rapidly accepting the new “horseless carriage.” The ma...