Level of Service: Design Standards, Imposed Car Dependence, and the Production of Urban Space in the Capitalist State

Transportation scholarship has become increasingly critical of design standards and engineering methods that promote car-dependent development patterns in American cities. Level of Service (LOS) is a design standard that has received scrutiny for its misapplication to urban streets, accommodating highway-like traffic flow where local service and accessibility should be a priority. Combining the work of contemporary planning and engineering researchers, Marxist urban theorists, and critical theorists Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, this paper understands such design standards as forms of knowledge that reproduce power structures of capitalism. The paper focuses on an in-depth historical analysis of three watershed moments of federal decision making that helped establish and reproduce a car-centric discourse of urban transportation in the United States. Using this analysis, the paper describes how the widely accepted use of LOS as a quality measure for urban streets acts as mechanism of the capitalist state's spatial logic of managing urbanization around production and consumption to reproduce its own dominance.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Urban and Regional Planning

Department dc:contributor.department

Urban Affairs and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Heltzel, Will Vincent

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Bieri, David Stephan

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Vinsel, Lee
• Wagle, Paroma Subodh

• Transportation planning
• Level of Service
• design standards
• capitalism
• social space

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:44068

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/135040