Zed,

   Hmmm. Linkage indeed points to nastyness between '39 and '49:

   http://www.trainweb.org/mts/ctc/ctc06.html
   http://www.tlio.demon.co.uk/nclchoms.htm

   At least one site starts the plan around where I believed:

   http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/courses/geog100/CarCult-Big3.htm

   I think WW2 cuts both ways on this -- a *massive* industry had built around the Detroit factories; unless the population switched to cars and the highways built to support them, this infrastructure would collapse from its own weight. So those schemes that started small were accelerated in both their pace and their scale.

   My point isn't that the evisceration was a good thing -- only that we'd live in a very, very different world without it, and it'd be a world not necessarily utopian.

--Dan