“The demise of the nation’s rail-transit systems occasioned few protests because most people agreed with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia that the automobile represented the best of modern civilization while the trolley was simple an old-fashioned obstacle to progress...The misguided and unfortunate result of such thinking was that Americans would no longer have transit options and that the car would become a prerequisite to survival...the automobile became the single form [of available transportation], and the suburbs became abjectly dependent on a vehicle that demanded ever-larger resources in terms of street-space, parking facilities, and traffic patrols.” (171)

(Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.)