Suburbanization could not have occurred to such a dramatic degree without automobiles and the construction of new roads that allowed commuters to travel from the suburbs to the city for work. The Ford Motor Company produced a film to muster support for the extension of Route 128, a highway designed to bypass the traffic of downtown Boston.

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MAN 1: Boston is the hub of a very complex highway system. In New England, all roads lead to Boston and Boston has kept growing, swelling the towns around it. Today its metropolitan area extends over 42 cities and towns, with a population of two and one half million.

Once country roads served the outlying communities adequately. But overnight they became city streets, with through traffic hopelessly entangled as you see it here.

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It became so bad that a trip of 15 miles, say from Stoneham, north of Boston, to Newton on the south side, actually took over an hour. At the state house, there was a highway on paper, which could have alleviated all that traffic congestion. Lack of public support had kept it in the files, until the people of Essex County, through their board of trade, got it out into the light of day.

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Here you see it on the map, Highway 128. Starting from Gloucester, the old fishing point, it swings in a wide 18 mile arc, around the rim of greater Boston, all the way down to Dedham, with its last section now nearing completion.

Today, John Smith of Gloucester can leave his family in the morning and travel safely and quickly over a modern express highway to his job. Because new roads, like magic arteries, pump increased values into adjacent land, he now travels past property whose value has increased 100 times over.

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Along this highway have sprouted seven great industrial centers, occupied by some of the country’s leading manufacturers, and other centers are now being developed. New wealth and new revenues have come to the old New England towns along the highway.

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And not to forget our Mr. Smith, and thousands more like him, here he is arriving at his place of work without once having had to fight the Boston traffic.

MAN 1: When the people of Essex County pushed for the construction of 128, in order to relieve traffic congestion, they didn’t know they were going to ring Boston with a golden semicircle. And that’s what Highway 128 is called today, “Boston’s Golden Semicircle.”

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So far you’ve seen what improved highways and traffic control mean to a metropolitan area. But all good roads are part of one great pattern, the interstate system that serves the whole nation, the great primary roads that connect the cities, and then the roads that feed into the system. We need good secondary roads to serve the rural population and small towns of America.