Smith, Wilbur S.

A professional transportation engineer, Wilbur S. Smith (1911–1990) formed a consulting firm in the early 1950s that worked with many state highway departments and local governments in designing urban segments of the Interstate Highway System. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Smith studied electrical engineering at the University of South Carolina. Graduating with an M.S. degree in 1933, he found an entry-level position with the South Carolina Department of Highways, where he transformed himself into a traffic engineer. In 1937, Smith completed an extensive training program at Harvard University's Bureau for Street Traffic Research and returned to South Carolina to head the state highway department's new Traffic Engineering Division. In 1941, he spent a year at Yale University's Bureau of Highway Traffic (which had relocated from Harvard to Yale) working on a research project on “The Economics of Highway Transportation” funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. At the time, Sloan was chairman of General Motors and president of the Automotive Safety Foundation. Smith did not return to South Carolina at the conclusion of the research project, but instead accepted an appointment at the Yale Bureau of Highway Traffic. World War II intervened, and Smith spent 2 years working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Civil Defense developing civil defense training programs for state and city officials. He returned to Yale in 1943, where he remained until 1957, serving as associate director and then director of the Bureau of Highway Traffic.

During his years at Yale, through his teaching, research, writing, and consulting, Smith developed his professional expertise and national reputation as a traffic engineer and transportation planner. During this period, Smith coauthored two major texts in the field: State-City Relationships in Highway Affairs (1950) and Traffic Engineering (1955). He served as president of the Institute of Traffic Engineers and published articles in its journal, Traffic Engineering, as well as in other professional publications, such as Traffic Quarterly and Civil Engineering. During this period, Smith worked closely with the Eno Foundation, established by William Phelps Eno, a wealthy philanthropist who developed an expertise in traffic codes and highway safety in the early 20th century. The Eno Foundation published many of Smith's early highway studies and promoted his consulting work in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1952, Smith established his own engineering consulting firm, Wilbur Smith and Associates, with offices in Columbia, South Carolina, and New Haven, Connecticut. In 1957, Smith left Yale to devote full-time effort to his consulting work as a transportation planner, now picking up as a result of passage of the 1956 interstate highway legislation. At that time, most state highway departments had expertise in building rural roads, and only a few large cities had built any freeways or had traffic departments that could engage in advanced highway planning.

Seizing this new opportunity, Wilbur Smith and Associates quickly took on a major consulting role in developing interstate expressway plans for many states and cities. By the early 1960s, Smith's firm had prepared expressway plans for 65 cities, including Miami, Baltimore, Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, Charlotte, Kansas City, Phoenix, and St. Louis. Smith's 2-year study of the interstate program, Future Highways and Urban Growth (1961), cemented the firm's central role in highway planning, but it also provided important insight on the impact of the big new roads on the American city. During the 1960s, Smith's firm widened its focus to take on a variety of other urban transportation planning projects, including bridges, tunnels, parking garages, shopping centers, [Page 735]airports, seaport facilities, subways and mass transit facilities, railroad terminals, and land use studies. By the late 1970s, Smith's firm had offices in 28 United States cities and 13 foreign countries, more than 750 employees, and major projects under way on six continents. In 1981, through an exchange of stock, Smith merged his firm into Armco, Inc., a major steel producer diversifying at the time into other fields, including engineering and consulting. Smith retired in 1984 after a long professional career that has been a major influence in building and reshaping the transportation infrastructure of the American city.

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