Transportation Patterns and Business Districts

I noticed a basic pattern in urban development that early transportation innovations often complemented and reinforced previous transportation patterns. More recent transportation innovations are often quite the opposite, and seek to undermine or rearrange previous transportation patterns. I made a series of maps to show what I mean:

The first era is the era of water transportation. There was very little infrastructure in the Midwest in the mid 1800s and it was convenient to use water as easy transportation. The map below shows the business districts as identified by the 1926 Sanborn maps: Downtown LaSalle, LaSalle's 8th Street Business District, Peru's 4th Street Business District, Water Street Business District, and Oglesby's Downtown. This is a bit anachronistic since Oglesby was not founded in the days of water transport, but I threw it in to make mapping easier and to add reference. Peru was founded on the Illinois River and LaSalle, along the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Both received large volumes of steam boat traffic. 

 

Very quickly after came railroads, which effectively competed with the canal enough to shut it down. In this case the Rock Island Railroad was completely parallel to the canal. Railroads often followed old water routes due to the ease of transferring right of way along waterfronts and due to the gentle grades that locomotives need. The blue dots on the map represent stations, where the majority of passenger and less specialized freight would have entered and left the network.

Roads systems back then were very poor and largely unimproved. Major roads often supplemented the existing railroad and water systems. Thus many run perpendicular to the waterways and run through and radiate out of the business districts. Roads would connect people to where they wanted to go, this necessitated going through the business districts. Bridges were especially important, since they funneled traffic into the business districts. They replaced ferries, which were not limited by engineering in where they could start or stop.

The roads below are green and the data was taken from a 1922 highway map of Illinois. It is interesting that a fair portion of these roads no longer exist in an unbroken form. They were not roads with limited stops, like today's highways, they had very little traffic control. They speeds used by horses and men were not high enough to warrant much control except in especially dense traffic situations within the cities. These highways were really just marked trails. The innovation to label highways came to help travelers find their way across the nation.

The Rail era crested with rails in the streets. Streetcars mainly transported passengers within cities. They traveled at lows speeds of about 6 to 8 mph so that passengers could run and hop on. Streetcars were often built to connect speculative subdivisions to the business district. Interurbans were electric railways that transported passengers between cities. The streetcars and interurban systems are in red on the map beneath.

As automobiles grew in popularity, traffic signals came into being and roads were prioritized into feeders and arterials. In the 50's onward the idea came to try to relieve traffic in town by bypassing the town. Interstates and limited access highways were brought about. Old highways were routed to the edges of the business districts instead of through. Eventually automobiles and regulations ended passenger rail leaving Water Street commercially inactive. Eventually it was rezoned as industrial. Oglesby's downtown is more off the beaten path as well. Commerce and industry now hugs the Interstate systems. The beige blobs beneath are what would probably be considered the modern equivalent of downtowns.

Perhaps in the future, downtown style business districts will go the way of horses, passenger rail, steamboat, and canal packet as the infrastructure that sustained them is eroded:

...but I doubt it.

These maps show the assembly of people, traffic, and life into the business district and the reinforcing pattern created by early transportation systems. Modern transportation systems dealing with larger vehicles are much more concerned with providing larger capacity and prefer to disassemble the urban environment, as they divert people to different, further locations, in order to keep the old roads from congestion. And they succeed, perhaps too well, creating congestion in new places, while deadening the old. There is relatively little change in the total amount of activity on the whole, but it is taking place in a much more distributed and disassembled environment than in eras past.