President Dwight Eisenhower, for whom the Interstate Highway System is named (the full name is The Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways), said of it, "its impact on the American economy … was beyond calculation."
This was an understatement. Every aspect of our national life — from business to social interaction to daily chores — was affected by the National Defense and Interstate Highway Act of 1956.
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President Eisenhower reviews the Clay Committee's recommendations for a new national highway system in 1955. (FHA)
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The statistics are staggering: more than 42,000 miles of limited-access roadway, linking nearly every US city of more than 100,000 people. More than $150 billion spent on construction alone. Maintenance accounts for much more, and yet it seems hardly enough to keep them from crumbling. Enough concrete for 80 Hoover Dams. Enough earth moved to bury Connecticut two feet deep. Historian Steven Ambrose called the system "way bigger than the pyramids."
The push for superhighways was also a response to social changes that were well underway. The US had a national highway system before the interstates. Motorists had been getting their kicks on Route 66, the fabled Chicago-to-Los Angeles highway, since 1926. By the beginning of the Depression, there were 40 million cars and trucks on the nation’s narrow, muddy, and potholed roads. Will Rogers once said "We'll be the first nation in the world to go to the poor house in an automobile." He was right. The dirt-poor Joads in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath drove to California in their own truck.
The 62 days that young Dwight Eisenhower spent traveling cross-country in a military convoy in 1919 convinced him of the need for a national highway system. His wartime experience with Germany’s autobahns reinforced the belief. And in the 1950s, when paranoia peaked, highways were seen as a way to fight off invaders, as well as to provide an escape route for those who believed that "get in your car and get the hell out of here" was preferable to "duck and cover."
But the system was built primarily to bolster the economy, and the effects on business have been both profound and subtle. Obvious beneficiaries were construction-related companies like Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc. and Vulcan Materials; the Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler — now Daimler-Chrysler), and oil behemoths like Exxon Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron, for whom the system has been an enormous subsidy. Despite the "new economy" based on computers and the Internet, one in seven American jobs is still related to the auto industry.
Fast-food companies benefited, as well. The restaurants provided a familiar refuge for those traveling on the improved roads. McDonald’s, Diageo’s Burger King, Wendy’s, and Tricon’s KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell proliferated after the system was built, while many local businesses located off the interstate died.
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A section of the Capital Beltway outside Washington, D.C., shown here in the mid-1960s, today carries more than 200,000 vehicles a day. (FHA)
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The United States Postal Service could move the mail more efficiently, and Federal Express (owned by FDX Corporation) and United Parcel Service could make overnight package delivery, formerly reserved for cities on major air routes, ubiquitous. Down the line, these services facilitated the rise of e-commerce. Imagine shopping on the Internet … and waiting four to six weeks for delivery. And computer advances combined with fast delivery allowed companies to institute just-in-time inventory systems.
The effects on the social fabric have been more profound.
The superhighways changed architecture. People had been fleeing the city for garden suburbs built along train lines since the 1880s. But those communities usually had an urban feel and remained connected with a central city. The growth of car-dependent suburbs began after WWII with Long Island, New York-based Levittown and intensified as new suburbs sprouted along the interstates. They often lacked sidewalks, their houses usually had no front porches, and often most of the streetside façade consisted of garage doors. Outdoor family life shifted to the backyard.
The new suburbs changed commerce. They lacked commercial infrastructure, and what developed was totally car-based: strip malls and later regional malls, as well as free-standing big-box stores like Wal-Mart Stores, Kmart (city-based Kresge’s vehicle into the suburban malls), and specialty retailers like Lowe’s and The Home Depot. One-stop-shopping became a watchword to save the time and distance cost of driving between shopping areas.
The opening of the new suburbs changed the cities by siphoning off the middle class. Eisenhower’s original vision of the system left the cities intact. In some places, however, the roads were routed into the central city, usually through poor neighborhoods. Elsewhere city-center spurs came later, but they, too, went into areas whose residents were most powerless.
We are a car culture; cars aren’t merely a convenience but part of who we imagine ourselves to be. Driving is a national obsession. We revere the idea of the freedom of the road. We chose our cars to reflect our personalities. Driving is viewed as a right and a rite for Americans from all points on the socioeconomic spectrum. Cars and highways allow us to go where we want, when we want — whether we can park when we get there or not.
Some of the arguments against the interstate highway system are aesthetic. As the late CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt put it, "Thanks to the interstate highway system, it’s possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything." Would Jack Kerouac have given us On the Road had the road consisted merely of rest areas and truck stops?
To some it is axiomatic that trains would have remained the primary mode of transportation had the government not promoted highways. The railroad industry saw the writing on the wall; the debate over superhighways prompted railroad strikes in the 1950s. Nearly as much has been spent on mass transit infrastructure as on highways since the 1950s. But Americans remain resistant to mass transit: ridership in some of the nation’s new light-rail systems is below projections. Only a tiny fraction of people-miles is spent on mass-transit trains, and 40% of that tiny fraction is in the New York City area.
We accept sprawl, traffic, and air pollution as tradeoffs for freedom and mobility. Over the last 40 years the Interstate Highway System has shaped American culture, and no political movement will change that anytime soon. The people have voted with their gas pedals.
Paul Geary is a writer for Hoover's Finance and Healthcare team.
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