One for the Roads

A nation's character, like a man's, can be read in the lines on its face. The roads that lace the U.S.'s 110,000 hamlets, towns and cities into a single organism have transformed a remote, leisurely agricultural society into a compact, highspeed industrial civilization that is in constant pursuit of mobility.

The superhighways of the U.S. are a monument to motion (see color pages). Once, European tourists returned from a visit to the U.S. talking of Manhattan's skyscrapers. Today they talk of the U.S. road. A ride across the arching bridges, down the six-lane expressways, under the water and beneath cities, even through buildings, past automated toll booths, in and out of sweeping cloverleafs is an experience few Europeans can farget. On the intricate stacks of downtown Los Angeles, where motorists peel off like jet fighters, on the rolling expanses of the longest toll road--the 561-mile-long New York State Thruway--U.S. drivers are routinely enjoying an achievement in engineering skill and a manifestation of public wealth unmatched anywhere else on earth. Today's superhighways cost an average $1,000,000 a mile; in downtown areas, the cost can rise to $50 million.

For a nation in a hurry, the results are impressive. Kansans, for example, can flip from Wichita to Topeka (137.7 miles) over the Kansas Turnpike in an hour and 50 minutes (v. 4 1/2 hr. over the old 170.4-mile highway); Massachusetts truckers can make the New York State line from Boston in 159 minutes over the Massachusetts Turnpike (v. 245 minutes over Routes 9, 20 and 102); the 30-mile Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike has cut travel time from 90 minutes to about 35. A New York state legislator can drive from Manhattan to Albany in less than three hours. A man who does not feel the need of sleep or coffee breaks can drive from Boston to Chicago in less than 24 hours without hitting a traffic light (1,141 miles on the Massachusetts Turnpike, New York State Thruway, Garden State Parkway, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes, Indiana Toll Road, Calumet Skyway).

Construction Ahead. The road itself is one of the mystiques in American life, the heritage of a pioneering people. The compulsion to move on--anywhere--is as great today as it was for the Massachusetts settlers in 1636 who migrated over an old Indian trail into the Connecticut Valley wilderness (and thereby established what is now approximately U.S. Route 20 between Boston and Sturbridge, Mass., and State Route 15 from Sturbridge to Hartford, Conn.). That compulsion has translated itself into astonishing figures. There are about 3,500,000 miles of roads in the U.S. today, and 61 million autos. The nation's toll roads, which now total 3,254 miles, bring in about $475 million a year in revenues. Abuilding is the $41 billion National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, authorized by Congress in the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, which will comprise a total of 41,000 miles by 1972 --by which time there will be about 100 million cars.

Until the automobile came along, there was no raging demand for good roads. The pig paths, Indian trails and riverbanks were sufficient until the mid-19th century. But commerce and the growing need for travel were so limited by weather conditions that states and private companies began laying plank roads and charging tolls to pay for them. Curiously enough, the growing bands of cyclists in the U.S. sounded the first strong demand for something better. Ironically, the railroads, not realizing that the road would grow into a monster that threatened their very existence, argued for good roads as a means of helping farmers get their produce to the depot.

Merging Traffic. But not until 1912 did an Indianapolis promoter, Carl G. Fisher, who had built the Indianapolis Speedway, suggest the possibility of a transcontinental highway. He raised more than $4,000,000 from states, industries and private citizens. Fifteen years later, the Lincoln Highway (Route 30) was completed, running 3,389 miles from Jersey City through Philadelphia. Gettysburg, Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, Omaha, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City and Sacramento to San Francisco. Slowly the old trails over which the pioneers had searched out and shaped the new nation were frozen in concrete, labeled with numbers: much of the Spanish Trail of the old Southwest virtually became U.S. 91, 44 and 85; the Camino Real in California. U.S. 101; the Chisholm Trail, U.S. 35 and 77; the Santa Fe Trail, U.S. 56 and 50; the Oregon Trail, U.S. 30; the Natchez Trace. U.S. 61.

Like growing pains, the highways made changes in essentially every aspect of American life. The salesmen blazed bigger trails, truckers hauled new varieties of goods, families sent their children off to educational and cultural centers, commerce established itself in new places, new towns burgeoned along the roadsides like strings of Christmas-tree baubles. The ubiquitous car begot the drive-in movie and the drive-in restaurant and the drivein laundry and the drive-in bank--and the new problem of bored, squabbling children in the back seat.* With progress in roads came more cars, more roads for the cars, and more cars for the roads that had been built to accommodate more cars. Some lovers of the rural lanes and long-forgotten trails that smell of pines and whisper of streams took the new highways as an affront to nature. Thomas Wolfe raged at the "great glittering beetles of machinery drilling past forever in projectile flight . . . unknown nameless lives hurtling on forever, lost forever, going God knows where!"

No Parking. But the road has shaped the country. The bedroom suburb, the new epicenter of U.S. population, owes its existence to the highway which whisks the suburbanite from home to downtown job. As the improved roads dumped more and more cars into the city, the city itself became choked. With more and more cars pouring into their streets every day, the cities had to strain to build additional highways and parking facilities without benefit of tax receipts that they had lost along with the departing families and businesses.

The automobile and its rail-less track became an autocrat and a sacred cow; no one dared stand in its way. Family homesteads, a town's ancient elms, historic monuments were sacrificed to spare the passing motorist a few minutes' delay. Bypasses and underpasses and overpasses snaked through and around the cities. Some of the results were beautiful as well as functional; some were just functional. In Trinidad. Colo., for example, through travelers on U.S. Highway 85 used to drive down curving Commercial Street, make a right-angle turn at Main Street, then inch their way out of town through heavy traffic. The Colorado highway department solved the problem, if not the esthetics, by building a huge overpass smack over the town.

Low Clearance. By far the most ambitious single highway project ever to come down the pike is the new million-dollar-a-mile federal highway program, which, by incorporating and expanding existing toll roads, bridges and tunnels, and by constructing brand-new roads, aims at a network connecting nearly 300 cities of 50,000 people and over. At first the cost was pegged at $27 billion, but by the time the members of Congress got finished parceling out special advantages to one another, they had raised the figure to $41 billion and had set in motion something that may well become one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of politics. By committing the Federal Government to pay the states 90% of the costs. Congress made the prospect of highway-construction business so irresistible that many localities went overboard. Some cities called in caravans of bulldozers and sent them crashing through the heart of their downtown areas with out regard for future core-city planning. Other localities rushed to put down roads where none were needed. Sample: in Nevada, after three federal highway interchanges were built for $384,000, investigators clocked an average traffic run of only 89 cars a day; one of the interchanges gives out on a road serving nothing but a railroad shanty, another leads only to a ranch, while the third leads to some unused mines, a few small ranches and a since-abandoned bordello.

Though the ostensible justification for the program was to provide a military and civil defense road system for use in case of war. the supposed defense highways have proved somewhat indefensible: more than 2,000 bridges and underpasses have been built with a 14-ft. minimum clearance, despite the fact that much military equipment requires a minimum of 17 ft. headroom. After nine months of conferences and surveys, the Pentagon settled for a 16-ft. clearance, and the highway builders ordered reconstruction of the low bridges at a cost of more than $700 million.

Beyond the Hill. In a real sense, the U.S. road is a proper monument for the U.S.. a nation of restless people whose hallmark in history has always been their willingness to leave behind the familiar and comfortable to discover what is beyond the next hill, sure that the unknown represents opportunity, not danger, and supremely confident that the best is yet ahead.

* One excellent though temporary pacifier: the Alphabet Game. One team watches the advertising signs on the right side of the road, the other takes the left. The winner is the one who first finds all 26 letters in alphabetical order. After p, the big thrill comes with the discovery of a QUakeR STate Oil sign.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.