The provision of routes for transportation whether by road, rail, wire or pipeline is consuming ever greater areas of land yearly, with resultant costs of land acquisition and losses through land alienation. The tendency has been to provide diverse routes for road, rail, wire and pipeline. This has resulted in duplicate acquisition of strips of land between end points and unnecessary alienation of productive land from alternative uses. The situation is particularly critical in areas of rough terrain and in densely settled areas where land is at a premium.
Suburban-inner city links, particularly where they are based upon private transportation, can disrupt settled local communities and tear out usable housing as a result of the overriding priority given to expressways and intersections. Modernizing lands have the opportunity of devising transport systems of a less ruthless type.