Underlying, quite literally, the suburbanization of homes and jobs was a huge commitment by the government to the infrastructure that supported this spatial disintegration. Sewer systems, water supply, gas, electricity, roads, and above all freeways, were imposed on the landscape. More than anything else it was the freeway and its pandering to the now easily-consumable automobile that made feasible the suburb.
	But the automobile did more than make possible the suburb; the automobile and its ancillary effects left an indelible mark on the urban character. Beginning in the 1920's with the peak and decline of public transportation, the personal car became the literal and symbolic vehicle of modernity. The very first "automobile suburbs" took form in the 1920's when cars became an affordable option for upper middle class urban dwellers. Their popularity led to the reconstruction of the cityscape: widened streets, parking lots, gas stations, and, in the post-war era as automobiles became a mass-market consumable, the dismantling of urban trolley systems, such as those that once operated in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
Most pervasive, though, was the freeway in all its nefarious forms. Even more destructive to the urban fabric than were Haussmann's Parisian boulevards, the federally-instigated interstate highway system was to forever transform the way Americans moved through their nation. Barbarously blasted through cities that were seen "principally as obstructions to the flow of traffic… from which Americans should be given every chance to escape"(3), freeway construction nearly always sacrificed the poor and the minority for the convenience of the suburbanite. Thus, Marshall Berman's Bronx is "cleft" by Robert Moses' "meat ax" to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway, brutally displacing tens of thousands of mostly Jewish residents. And in Los Angeles, the black community was drawn and quartered by the Harbor, Long Beach, Santa Monica, and Century freeways. It is no coincidence that the concurrently-proposed Beverly Hills freeway (which would have alleviated one of the most grueling surface-street routes in Los Angeles) was stopped by that rich white community, while black Southcentral Los Angeles was run roughshod over.
	Freeways changed the way the city was used and viewed. No longer was a traveler on a wide road in the same context as the city's stimuli; freeways were insular, impervious thoroughfares, speeding people (when not jammed with traffic) through the city in a way that demanded no response to it. Siegfried Geidion's 1939 remark on New York's West Side Highway is especially prescient of the post-war freeway's effects: "The space time feeling of our period can seldom be felt so keenly as when driving."(4) More than anything, this space time feeling was a fugitivism from the urban milieu, an exodus of capital and consumption that was to devastate the city.
In its earliest post-war incarnations, the suburb was still tied in to the city by the presence of most suburbanites' employment and consumption in the urban locale. But this spatial configuration was only the temporary confluence of two eras. Through the 1950's and especially in the 1960's, the once-vital inner cities collapsed as their economic lifeblood moved to the suburbs. First, it lost its personal tax base when its wage earners left for suburban homes. Quickly following, though, was the consumption, as suburbs hosted shopping centers and malls. Entertainment, when not at the suburban drive-in movie, was satisfied in the home by the readily-consumable hi-fi and the television. The small-scale manufacturing that had sprung up in the city in the 1910's and 20's also took flight. When the Depression sparked intense competition in the transportation industry, trucking took hold. The post-war building of freeways mediated the rise of trucking as the dominant transportation mode when industry, seeking large extra-urban sites for mass production, set up near freeways. And into the 1960's, imports from Germany, Japan, and the then-nascent Third World "newly industrializing countries" were beginning to impact the manufacturing sector, further reducing employment opportunities in the city. The inner cities became places that no longer held anything for the suburban dweller, save the doctor, the lawyer, or the government office. Employment, residence, and consumption were nearly all suburbanized experiences, linked by the omnipresent automobile in this paradigm of the post-war spatial construct.(5)
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