Without the Interstate highway system, the RV industry would probably not exist. Luxury motorcoaches would have a tough time cruising across the country without nearly 47,000 miles of smooth, easy-to-drive asphalt highway helping them make time.
Now is a good time to give credit where credit is due. The Interstate highway system just celebrated its 50th birthday last year. President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the system when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, authorizing the U.S. government to build the network of roads using a federally maintained program and federal funds.
The Interstates were not the country’s first freeways. States had been building urban parkways and turnpike highways for years, and the Feds had been discussing a national network of expressways since the 1930s. But the Interstate system was the first national freeway project, paid for by the United States government and owned by its states.
The road network is the biggest public works project in American history, and the nation got quite a bit for its money. Interstate highways created long-range travel on demand and radically improved road safety. They fostered the growth of fast food restaurants, motels and brand-name gas stations. In fact, the owners of the Holiday Inn and McDonald’s restaurant brands were the first who sought to open new locations near Interstate highways, and the experiment made both companies household names worldwide.
Freeways allowed quick access to “the suburbs,” which offered new homes to the new families of the Baby Boom. They even did their part to help Americans get through the Great Depression.
Good Roads
It’s hard to believe that only a century ago, American had no driveable highways at all. But the more people bought cars, the more automakers and automobile owners demanded roads on which the machines could be operated safely and efficiently.
Germany pioneered the concept by building a national system of “autobahns” that offered limited access, large signs for speeding drivers, and an easy drive for military convoys. Curious about its own roads, the United States government ordered a military convoy cross-country on American highways in 1919. The trip took an eye-opening several months, and when convoy leader Dwight Eisenhower became president after World War II, he made funding for the Interstate system his personal crusade.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt also advocated coast-to-coast highways, not just for domestic travelers and defense, but to employ out-of-work people during the Depression. The Germans had built their freeways in part to stimulate the automobile industry and their overall economy, a plan that worked. For the American public, concerns about public mobility and auto safety outstripped military motivations for building the highways.
Americans were in the road business well before the Interstates. According to The American Highway, by William Kaszynski, the United States’ first highway was established between Boston and New York City in 1673 for the purpose of mail delivery. The path eventually became known as the Boston Post Road, and the route was marked with milestones by deputy postmaster Benjamin Franklin.
Roughly 3,000 miles of turnpike roads were built in the early 1800s, the most famous being the National Road, which ran from Maryland through Indianapolis to St. Louis, Missouri. The route is still in use today as U.S. 40. “For almost 50 years, the National Road was the busiest thoroughfare in America,” Kaszynski writes.
Over the course of the 1800s, the nation began favoring canals and railroads over highways. But at the turn of the 20th century, America’s muddy roads oozed back into the public consciousness. The railroad industry left rural residents without front-door access to modern transportation technology. And when the United States Post Office instituted rural free postal delivery, it needed decent roads to deliver on its promise. Meanwhile, enthusiasts of two new leisure-time technologies, the bicycle and the automobile, started the “Good Roads Movement” in the 1890s.
The country’s first hard-surface transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway from New Jersey to San Francisco, was a private initiative backed by small-town concrete companies and paid for with donations. As word about the project spread, other organizations began charting routes, such as the Dixie Highway and the Blue Ridge Parkway. There was no nationwide numbered highway system, so each highway had its own logo. By 1920, there were more then 250.
The mass of new trails immersed drivers in a sea of signs and arrows. Groups such as the American Automobile Association compiled maps and written directions to help neophyte road-trippers cross the country without feeling overwhelmed. As “auto camping” caught on in the early 1920s, cartographer Rand McNally cashed in on the fad with his first national road atlas, published in 1924.
The Office of Road Inquiry, the first federal agency dedicated to improving highways, was established in 1893, and was soon replaced by the federal Bureau of Public Roads. Thomas MacDonald, a “Good Roads” enthusiast and the country’s strongest early proponent of federal road building, was named as its head in 1919. The Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916 created the first highway program that distributed federal money to states. Finally, in 1926, the government established a national highway numbering system, sometimes called the “federal-aid” system. U.S. 1 served the East Coast, and U.S. 101 the West Coast.
By the 1940s, the new system of two-lane highways had already become obsolete writes Kaszynski: “Bridges and road width were kept to a minimum, usually barely wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, leaving little margin of error for the driver. Shoulders were
The country’s first hard-surface transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway from New Jersey to San Francisco, was a private initiative backed by small-town concrete companies and paid for with donations.
practically nonexistent in most places. Hills were seldom leveled, so highways followed the landscape’s contours. A chief complaint among drivers was numerous hills and steep grades. Motor vehicles were not as reliable then, and cars and trucks alike often overheated and encountered other mechanical difficulties … Caravans of frustrated drivers formed behind slow-moving vehicles creeping up seemingly endless hills.”
But planners and engineers had already designed the next generation of roads. The nation’s first limited-access road, the Bronx River Parkway, opened in 1923, and the cloverleaf interchange was introduced to the country in 1928 in Woodbridge, New Jersey.
After years of research, a federally funded Interstate highway system was put before Congress for the first time in a 1939 report co-authored by MacDonald. The report suggested a network of freeways as an alternative to another proposal, a national system of toll roads.
By the late 1930s, most urban areas in the United States boasted at least one stretch of freeway-style road, whether it was a parkway or an elevated or depressed highway. The first freeway intended for long-range traffic, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, hosted its first car in 1940. The road connected Irwin and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to help drivers traverse the Appalachians between the Midwest and the East Coast, and its immediate success prompted the state to make it even longer. Los Angeles’ first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (later called the Pasadena Freeway), opened in 1940. Turnpikes in New Jersey, New York and other states had opened by the mid-1950s. As Tom Lewis puts it in his book Divided Highways, “By 1955, a driver could travel from New York to Chicago on superhighways without ever encountering a stoplight.”
A Trusty Shield
Following the 1956 act, all these freeways were dubbed Interstates, with new numbers and signs to match. The American Association of State Highway Officials applied numbers to the highways, taking the grid of older federal-aid “U.S. highways” as inspiration. To distinguish Interstates from U.S. routes, the AASHO applied a mirror image formula: Interstate 5 parallels U.S. Highway 99, while Interstate 95 runs alongside U.S. 1. U.S. 20 passes through the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, while Interstate 20 covers Texas. There is no Interstate 50, as it would have covered some of the same ground as U.S. 50.
The AASHO picked the red and blue shield to mark Interstates in 1957, after reviewing dozens of submissions from state highway officials. The winning design came from Texas, but the word “Interstate” at the top of the shield was lifted from Missouri’s entry. The winning design was easily one of the more attractive of the bunch: Alternatives ranged from circles, triangles and squares to awkward designs like an outline of the United States border and a giant capital letter “I.”
The now-familiar green sign background was tested against blue and black on a sample stretch of freeway. Although green won in a landslide, the color still had to overcome the vehement objections of federal highway administrator Bertram Tallamy, who favored dark blue. He was reportedly color-blind and saw green as pale yellow.
The Interstates are paid for primarily with federal money, but the money is dispersed to states, which own and operate the highways themselves. However, many turnpikes built before the 1956 act still charge tolls, a proven way to raise operating revenue. Eisenhower wanted all of America’s freeways to be toll roads, but his aides talked him out of it, saying the roads would not generate enough traffic in rural parts of the country to cover the debt.
The Next 50 Years…
The interstate highway system was launched in an era of cheap gas, big tail fins and boundless confidence. Its first 50 years have undoubtedly been filled with unexpected engineering challenges, unanticipated controversies, and unforeseen funding difficulties. Nevertheless, Eisenhower’s view would prove correct, as stated in his 1963 memoir, Mandate for Change 1953-1956:
More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America. ... Its impact on the American economy — the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up — was beyond calculation.
Now planners are asking what the next 50 years will bring — and there are signs the system will grow to be bigger, faster and even more efficient.
In order to connect Americans to the things they want and places they want go, at a cost they can afford, transportation planners are looking to Autobahn-like speeds, global positioning satellite navigation and wireless communication between vehicles to help relieve congestion near cities. More conventional solutions are in the works, too, including adding more lanes to existing roads and even adding whole new interstate freeways.
Whatever its future holds, one thing is certain: the interstate highway system will continue to “change the face of America.” |
