Engineers and equity: the political economy of high-speed roads in the 1960s and 1990s

This paper examines the cultural and political origins of Melbourne's Metropolitan Transportation Plan of 1969, especially its proposal to build over 600 kilometres of freeways. It gives particular attention to the influence of American paradigms of transport planning, and to the experiences of the cohort of young Australian traffic engineers who attended the Yale traffic engineering course in the 1950s and 1960s. It concludes with a comparison between the transport planning regime of the 1960s and the privatised expressways of the 1990s.