American towns developed housing that was no longer within 
sight of shop or factory. The railroad next took over the 
development of the suburbs, with housing kept within walking 
distance of the railroad stop. Shops and hotels around the 
railroad gave some concentration and form to the suburb. The 
automobile, followed by the airplane, dissolved this grouping 
and ended the pedestrian, or human, scale of the suburb. Lewis 
Mumford contends that the car turned the suburban housewife 
into a full-time chauffeur. Certainly the transformations of the 
wheel as expediter of tasks, and architect of ever-new human 
relations, is far from finished, but its shading power is waning 
in the electric age of information, and that fact makes us much 
more aware of its characteristic form as now tending toward 
the archaic.

     Before the emergence of the wheeled vehicle, there was