by Mike Davis

(2006-06-26)

Special Report: 50 Years of Interstates (6/26/2006)
A look back at the impact of America's highways from TheCarConnection.

You're cruising down the Interstate, speed control on 75, air conditioning blowing, CD blasting. You're thinking ahead to the deluxe motel where you have reservations for the night. Life on wheels is beautiful. But it didn't "yoostabee" that way.

The 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing the enabling legislation - awkwardly labeled the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 - for the Interstate System is June 29. Today we enjoy its fruits, but the journey to a safe, fast, self-financed, rational highway system was laborious.

Our aboriginal ancestors - regardless from which continent - started out following animal paths, graduated to trading over man-made routes to nearby villages and then with those at greater distances. Thus roads were "invented" before recorded history. It's believed the wheel, basically a wooden disc, was devised in the Bronze Age, and the spoked wheel around 1800 B.C. The silk trade "road" across continents from China to Europe and Africa began about 550 B.C.

To communicate with and defend their empire, the Romans began constructing their famous road network in 312 B.C., with the first route taking 292 years to complete. A survey taken about 150 A.D. counted some 53,000 miles of Roman roads and the best of them, the 320-mile Appian Way, compared favorably with today's superhighways. Built on a four-foot base with flagstone surface, it stretched 32 feet wide, featuring two outboard 8-foot lanes for horse and chariot traffic with the center 16 feet for foot soldiers.

Moreover, Roman roads were durably designed; bits and pieces still are used in the 21^st century. Road engineering was an art, however, that was lost in the Dark Ages, rediscovered only by the needs of colonial settlement in the Americas .

In Spanish America dating from that age, we have El Camino Reals (Royal Roads) in New Mexico and California and even Louisiana that tied remote missions together. Yet the conquistadores also found excellent roads built at least a century before their arrival by the Inca Empire in Peru .

It was a different story in British America where decidedly unmilitary colonists faced seemingly impenetrable forests, countless rivers, and eventually formidable mountains as they pushed their way inland. The path of least resistance was simply to follow existing Indian trails - and many of our modern highways still cover the same routes. Before the American Revolution, Scots-Irish, Welsh, and German pioneers trekked over The Great Wagon Road, which started westward near Philadelphia, crossed the Susquehanna River, then turned south across the Potomac into the Shenandoah Valley all the way down through a mountain gap into western North Carolina. The means were foot, horseback, or wagons drawn by horses, mules, or oxen, and the "roadway" was just a bridgeless, muddy trail. Today the route is largely a segment of Interstate 81.

Road-building binges

But this was almost the exception. The real early roadways in North America were the seaways and waterways of the East Coast for the English and the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and Mississippi for the French. In England's coastal colonies, the Boston Post Road crossed Connecticut between Boston and New York City , beginning in 1673 to inaugurate a monthly mail service. By 1729, the postal road extended to Philadelphia . Today, it's mostly covered by US 1 or I-95.

The colony of Maryland enacted its first Road Act in 1666 "marking highways & making heads of rivers, creeks, branches, and swamp passable for horse & foot." A 1704 Act set the width of roads at 20 feet with provision for marking roadside trees with notches or branding irons. By the late 1700s throughout the new United States, stagecoach lines ran along the numerous post roads, inns sprang up along the ways, and privately operated turnpikes collected tolls. Then the federal government got into road building when Congress enacted the National Road Act of 1796, providing for a road to be built west from Baltimore to Williamsport where it intersected at the Potomac River with the aforementioned Great Wagon Road. In 1806, a commission was named for extending this highway - called the National Road, now US-40 - on to the Ohio River, along the colonial military route carved out during the French and Indian War of 1754-63, crossing numerous Allegheny Mountain ridges. The National Road later was extended to Illinois.

Concurrently in Great Britain , the Industrial Revolution sparked a great road-building binge that resulted in the Macadam concept of road construction design, patterned after the ancient Roman roads - graded, drained, and composed of three crushed rock layers but with a base only a few inches deep. Initially macadam roads had no surface coating. When tar or asphalt was added as a topping, they became "tarmacs." In Eastern America where forests prevailed, plank roads became common into the 20th century. These consisted of logs or planks laid crossways to prevent wagon wheels from sinking into the mire; while "quick and dirty" to build, their shortcomings were high maintenance and low durability, as the wood quickly rotted.

By mid-19th century, though, road building had fallen into another "Dark Age" of design and federal interest, due to the development of steamboats and railroads for rapid movement and canals for carrying bulk or whatever cheaply. Wagon roads, or course, far preceded the iron rails to move settlers and goods westward over such routes as the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. Meanwhile, a new concept for financing local roads had arisen: citizens were compelled to either maintain the roads abutting their property, or pay taxes to hire someone else to do so. In Detroit in the 1840s, each block elected a Road Commissioner empowered to maintain roads one way or the other, either by his neighbors' labor or their taxes (which also went for the new public school systems). Generally, road construction and maintenance was considered a local matter for communities and counties, including franchises granted for private toll roads.

To the modern interstate

The modern age of highways that culminated in today's Interstate System was triggered in the 1890s by a combination of three elements - the invention of "safety" bicycles and the consequent rapid spread of League of American Wheelmen clubs in urban areas, needs of farmers to get their crops to markets or railroad depots efficiently, and finally, passage of the Rural Free Delivery (RFD) Act for mail in 1896. Wheelmen were unhappy because of problems trying to cycle through rutted mud or, worse yet, Belgian block or cobblestone urban streets. After some years of urban vs. rural turf bickering, the bicyclers and the farmers finally got together and the result, surprisingly even before motorcars came on the scene, was the Good Roads Movement.

The first "concrete" step toward a national highway system was the 1893 creation of an Office of Road Inquiry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  This began as a research operation, later morphed into a policy-development agency for recommendations to Congress as well as a technical advisor for newly organized state road departments. The issues were huge, basically who had responsibility for which highways, where the revenue to build them came from, and how it was to be dispersed. Meanwhile, of a sudden, motorcars had arrived on the scene and the focus changed to touring between urban areas. In 1907, the Supreme Court settled a constitutional question, ruling that the federal government had the power "to construct interstate highways" under interstate commerce.

But the political forces tugged back and forth, and nothing seemed to move forward for years. However, improved roads were forced on local road commissioners by the sheer new demand. One result in 1909: the first mile of concrete pavement in the world (according to the historical marker), along Detroit 's Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads. Yes, that's the same Woodward as in Dream Cruise.

In 1912, because of RFD requirements, the Post Office was empowered by Congress to cough up a mere $500,000 from postage sales for transfer to local administrations to help improve rural roads. But the locals resented the feds specifying how the money could be spent.

So the nascent auto industry, led by Roy Chapin of Hudson and Henry Joy of Packard, in 1913 helped establish a private organization - the Lincoln Highway Association - to promote a single, continuous transcontinental highway, running from New York City to San Francisco. Essentially the Lincoln Highway rolls on as today's US-30 and numerous Interstate links. Other such travel-promoting routes soon followed. Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher, for example, promoted the Dixie Highway system to link Chicago and Detroit to Florida , ancestor of I-75.

In addition, the American Automobile Association (AAA) issued road maps and guides for its members and, along with the Highway associations, developed systems of unique markings for highways, mainly different colored stripes on wayside utility poles to help keep motorists from getting lost. State highway folks founded the American Association of State Highway Officials (ASSHO) as a way to work out differences between states on a professional rather than political basis.

Congress finally managed to pass the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916, providing $75 million to the states over five years for road improvements on a 50/50 split of costs. A key issue was apportionment, the Act budgeting disbursements to states on the basis of their land areas, population and existing mileage of rural mail delivery routes. This left behind AAA and others favoring development of long-distance roads. But in 1921, another Highway Act was passed allocating a proportion of federal-aid funds for interstate routes. 

In the interim, there had been two important developments. First, in 1917, Wisconsin became the first state to start a system of designating and numbering state "trunkline" roads. Second, in 1919 a young Army officer, impressed with the need for good highways for military purposes as a result of American experience in France in World War I, headed a 62-day cross-country "test" caravan of Army vehicles. He found the condition of highways and bridges - many of which collapsed under the weight of trucks - a disgrace. His name was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In any event, the 1920s became a golden age for highway building. The Office of Road Inquiry in the Agriculture Department had become the highly professional Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) of the Department of Commerce. The BPR designated a nationwide system of US-numbered highways, largely from existing routes, which went into effect in 1926. Odd numbered routes went north-south and even numbered, east-west, beginning at the Northeast corner of the country. Thus US-1 went down the East Coast and US-101 the West Coast, while US-2 hugged the Canadian border.

Federal and State highway engineers were recommending ten-foot wide lanes, which might be surfaced with asphalt, concrete or brick, while county and local roads still might be mud or gravel-covered. Almost all roads were mostly two-laned but disastrous three-lane roads also appeared for heavy-traffic areas with the third lane in the middle for passing; the problem was, if two opposing drivers both decided to pass at the same time, a head-on collision could occur.

Help was on the way, however. As early as 1907-8, the Long Island Motor Parkway and Bronx River Parkways reaching out from New York City were designed for limited access. By the mid-1920s, four-laning on such urban roads was common. Chicago 's South Lakeshore Drive opened in 1930.  The first modern limited-access, multi-laned highway connecting two states was the Merritt Parkway (a public toll road), opened in 1938 between suburban Westchester County, New York, and Connecticut . The Pasadena Freeway of Los Angeles County dates from 1940 when it was the Arroyo Seco Parkway , the same year as the first stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Carlisle to Irwin, which followed the path and utilized the tunnels of an incomplete 19th-century railroad.

World War II forced construction of expressways to move war workers - for example, the George Washington Parkway and related roads serving the Pentagon, and the Willow Run Expressway and Detroit Industrial Freeway for employees at Ford's Ypsilanti B-24 bomber plant. And by this time, the norm for lane width had gone from ten to eleven to twelve feet.

The real wake-up call for a nationwide network of high-speed multilane limited-access highways, however, was opening of the first Autobahn link in Hitler's Germany in 1935. General Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower, who headed Allied forces in Europe to defeat the Nazis, noted how well the German highway system had aided transportation of enemy troops and supplies. He had not forgotten his early 1919 experience, and when he took office as U.S. president in 1953, began pressing a bipartisan Congress for support of what became the Interstate System.

As in the early part of the century and events leading up to the 1916 Highway Act, many opposing turfs had to be compromised to achieve the 1956 law all motorists rejoice in today, 50 years later. Besides the system and new highways the Interstate Act of 1956 accomplished, it also was noteworthy because - at Ike's urging - financing was self-liquidating. A Highway Trust Fund was created, financed by a 50-percent increase in federal gasoline taxes, from two to three cents a gallon. (Today it's 18.4 cents per gallon plus another 46.5 cents on average in state gas taxes per gallon.)

When passed, just as in the 1926 naming of U.S. highways, many existing roadways were incorporated into the new Interstate system, provided they met strict standards. Included were a number of new toll roads, such as the Ohio Turnpike and New York Thruway. The numbering system was opposite to the US-highway system, going from the west coast (I-5) to the east (I-95) and south (I-10) to north (I-90). A rush of new construction began, with the most costly parts the urban expressway links.

Now, after 30-40-50 years, major Interstate parts are under reconstruction. It turns out they weren't as well built as the Autobahns, for the simple reason the public demanded immediate roads rather than slower construction of lasting roads.

What did it "yoostabee" like to travel cross-country - on the old "Blue Highways" - before the advent of the Interstates? Ah, that's another story. Just be thankful for the anniversary we mark this week.