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Certainly, the challenge of building a community designed to accommodate the automobile was something very new.  Municipal architects could not draw upon a body of experience.  Clarence Stein did not express his views defining the automobiles role in community design until the construction of Radburn in 1928.  In Woodmar, railroad access meant that residents could commute to work without an automobile.  Furthermore, the visionary aspects of an airport indicate that the future of transportation was changing dramatically.  The rapid change and uncertainty of transportation was reflected in the complex role the automobile occupied in Crane’s general plan of Woodmar. 

The concept of designing a city to meet the needs of the automobile was a tremendous social and technological step in 1923.  Woods adopted the Motor Age as part of his marketing campaign in the promotional literature.  The literature states that, “In the planning of cities, no one factor has had such an influence as the almost universal use of motor propelled vehicles for passenger and freight carrying within the confines of the city.” Several concessions were made for the new transportation era.  A few streets were designed to accommodate four to eight lanes of traffic.  These streets served as freight routes, with sturdier pavements that could carry heavier loads.  Throughout Woodmar, intersections had a wider turning radius to accommodate automobiles. 

The Woodmar plan also minimized the hazards automobiles posed to pedestrians.  An arrangement of “interior blocks” created a plan with houses facing inward on a series of small private parks. The promotional literature stated that “Nowadays the street has become a service way, more or less dangerous and noisy, the service side of a house should face the street, while the front of the house faces an interior park.”  Clarence S. Stein developed similar solutions of  “how to live with the auto” when he designed Radburn.  Stein’s biggest innovation in this area was replacing the typical small urban block with the “superblock.”  This innovation made pedestrian interior circulation systems that were protected from the dangerous automobile traffic.   

With the plan for Woodmar, local developers had adopted a complex marketing campaign for selling real estate to a prosperous population.  They argued that modern community design was evolving into a science with precise social and technical considerations.  Woodmar’s  promotional literature reflected these new considerations, creating a grandiose vision with attractive images and language aimed at attracting a metropolitan elite to the Calumet region.

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