Architecture
Motels differ from hotels in their location along highways, as opposed to the urban cores favoured by hotels, and their orientation to the outside (in contrast to hotels, whose doors typically face an interior hallway). Motels almost by definition include a parking lot, while older hotels were not usually built with automobile parking in mind.
Because of their low-rise construction (most were simple one-story buildings, anything more than two floors with outside corridors being rare) with large car parks, the number of rooms which would fit on any given amount of land was low compared to the high-rise urban hotels which had grown around railway stations. This was not an issue in an era where the major highways became Main Street in every town along the way and inexpensive land at the edge of town could be developed with motels, car lots, filling stations, lumber yards, amusement parks, roadside diners, drive-in restaurants and theatres and countless other small roadside businesses. The automobile brought mobility, and the motel could appear anywhere on the vast network of two-lane highways.
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