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.
[2] In 1956, the United States began constructing the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in history.
[3] 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.
[7] On August 13, President Richard Nixon signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973—still with the old nomenclature but now allowing spending on transit.