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[Commisioner Robert McLaughlin] pointed out that the District would lose land to the freeways, which would then abet the flight to the suburbs by ‘middle and high in come families,’ leaving the District with a greater proportion of poor people. A subway would be preferable, he suggested, and in any case, if the federal government wanted to cut freeways through the District, it should expect to pay for them. The city would not fund its own destruction.
— Zackary Schrag, in The Great Society Subway (2006), p. 40, detailing the backdrop to the creation of the capital area’s rapid transit network in the late 1950s.
