Highway Action Coalition
The Highway Action Coalition was a civil society organization in the United States founded in 1971 to fight the highway lobby, also known as the "road gang", or “highwaymen”, and to fight for funding for public transportation and pedestrian-focused urban planning. They served as part of a broader movement called the highway revolts, freeway revolts, road protests, or expressway revolts. They were active until at least the mid-1980s.
Highway Trust Fund
In 1956, the United States began constructing the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in history. In rural areas the highways were popular, but by the late 1960s many Interstates had begun to penetrate inner cities, destroying neighborhoods, adding pollution, and generating political resistance. Local anti-highway groups sprang up in dozens of locations from Boston to Seattle calling for changes to the Highway Trust Fund, an exclusive source of highway-only dollars from Washington.Founding
In 1971, Environmental Action and several other organizations launched the Highway Action Coalition with the purpose of allowing the federal Highway Trust Fund to be used for mass transit and other non-highway transportation projects. As a result of an article by Denis Hayes many people fighting isolated highway battles found some national focus and wrote several letters to Denis about their battles. The HAC letter files eventually passed to Gary Nelson and are now archived at the Transportation Library of Northwestern University.Although the trust fund was among the nation’s most sacrosanct of funding sources, and although it was defended by the political might of the automobile, oil and construction industries, HAC used its citizen lobbying and its publication, The Concrete Opposition, to harness the anger and call for flexibility in funding all modes of transportation.