By 1940, most urban planners had come to understand that roads were not good per se, that a highway was not an unqualified boon for mankind. By the early 1950’s, much of the general public appeared to understand this, too, even if the press did not.

By the year 1500 the majority of wheeled vehicles, in the parts of the world where they were still being used at all, were lowly two-wheeled agricultural carts. Five thousand years after the invention of the wheel, it was still not in widespread use. In North Africa and much of the Middle East it had been abandoned altogether; medieval Arabic and P

French Riviera, one of the first places in the world where motoring for pleasure became fashionable, was particularly badly affected. “I am informed that it has been found impossible of late to either lease or sell certain villas in the French Riviera, and that the paradise of the motorist has become the inferno of the inhabitant,” the diplomat wro