Disney’s Highway to Hell

This scarifying nine-minute peek into an auto-enslaved Disney world of the future, as seen from 1958, is as amazing for what it gets right (like urban sprawl) as much as what is laughably off the mark (like urban sprawl = Utopia).

Notice how skinny everyone is, though no one ever walks (except dad, from his car elevator to his desk). And dig that Sun-Powered Electro-Suspension Car — still right around the corner!

Addendum: Here’s another look at what the future might have looked like as this cartoon was being produced. 

Video from YouTube via Polls Boutique

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

STREETSBLOG USA

Sprawl Is Back in New Jersey

|
It’s starting to look like 2005 again in New Jersey. That’s what Andrew Besold at Network blog WalkBikeJersey has been noticing on his bike rides lately. Tracts of large houses are popping up again in formerly rural areas, and it’s threatening to overrun what’s left of the state’s unspoiled areas: Prior to the Great Recession, the housing […]
STREETSBLOG USA

Sprawl Is a Global Problem

|
Sprawl isn’t just a problem in car-centric America. Even cities with the world’s best transit systems are surrounded by suburbs with poor transit access, according to a new report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. As billions of people migrate from rural to metropolitan areas in the next few decades, these growth patterns threaten to maroon people without […]
STREETSBLOG USA

Confirmed: Sprawl and Bad Transit Increase Unemployment

|
Since the 1960s and the earliest days of job sprawl, the theory of “spatial mismatch” — that low-income communities experience higher unemployment because they are isolated from employment centers — has shaped the way people think about urban form and social equity. But it’s also been challenged. The research that supporting spatial mismatch has suffered from some […]
STREETSBLOG USA

Planning Director Claims 6,600-Home Development on Farmland Isn’t Sprawl

|
Building 6,600 homes on farmland outside city boundaries? Some might consider that the very definition of sprawl. But leaders in the Fresno region beg to differ. James Sinclair at Network blog Stop and Move reports that Norm Allinder, the planning director for Madera County, told the Fresno Bee that such a development “doesn’t perpetuate the legacy of sprawl,” because it […]