The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  This was still very fresh news when, two years later, the Lincoln Highway Association approached the Chief about serving on its committee. Which is to say that the roads on which American motorists traveled—or some of them, at least—were as newfangled and fast-evolving as the vehicles being driven.

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  IN 1922, ESSEX, a division of Hudson, introduced an affordable, completely enclosed car—the first for the masses sealed against the weather, with glass windows and a hard roof—and motoring, until then an unpleasant undertaking in rain and cold, became a year-round endeavor in the harshest climes. The following year, American factories produced 3.9 million cars and trucks and registrations topped 15 million, so many that economists predicted the industry's growth couldn't continue. Most of the white male heads of households who wanted and could afford a car already had one. Most poor whites, minorities, and women wouldn't be buying. Market saturation was at hand.

  It turned out that current owners nursed a hunger for bigger and better cars, and replacement sales flourished. Buyers demonstrated an eagerness to assume debt, as well; thousands were lured behind the wheel by easy credit terms—down payments slashed, installments stretched to twenty-four months. In mid-1925, registrations reached 17.5 million, a car for every 6.5 Americans. A year later, they stood at 19.7 million. And the industry's growth only accelerated. By the end of 1928, another 7 million vehicles were in use. Never before in the history of industry had a product gone from its first appearance to complete societal dominance in so short a time. In thirty years, America had become a nation on rubber wheels.

  The invention's costs grew apace. In 1925, automobiles killed more people in Illinois than diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, and whooping cough combined, in an age when those diseases remained scourges. The same year, 932 people died in auto accidents just in New York City, more than a third of them children, double the rate of five years before. Manhattan's streets, the City Club of New York cried, were host to " Municipal Murder," a daily " Dance of Death."

  It only got worse. In 1928, the rate of death by motor vehicle was five times that of fifteen years before. In 1929, when a new automobile rolled off an assembly line every six seconds, a life was lost to one of the machines every sixteen minutes.

  Danger could not cool the nation's ardor for its cars, however. Neither could burgeoning traffic. By the late twenties, traffic congestion had grown into one of the greatest vexations of everyday life in all of big-city America. As fast as new pavement was laid, it seemed to fill with cars and trucks. In Chicago, the number of weekday auto commuters jumped by nearly a fifth between 1926 and 1928, despite congestion so stultifying that the city outlawed left turns and weekday parking at its downtown curbs.

  " Our street systems will soon be strangled," the American City worried. " Neither the sidewalks nor the roadways of the streets will be able to accommodate the traffic that will be produced. The city's fire protection machinery will not be able to function, and consequently the fire hazards will be greatly increased. The public health will be jeopardized and the congestion problems of all kinds that are developed will soon become a public menace."

  People lamented the death toll even as they piled into their cars. They complained about the traffic as they became part of the problem. They spent ever-growing chunks of their incomes and free time on the automotive habit; in most states, road-hungry consumers welcomed new taxes on gasoline. *

  No wonder cars came to be seen in the same light as older vices. " The number of persons who devote their spare time to study has dropped materially," claimed a visiting member of the German Reichstag in a damning portrait of auto-obsessed America. " There are also many complaints about the increasing superficiality of intellectual life. The common answer is that formerly alcohol injured the people's culture, and that motor driving is a sort of substitute for liquor."

  Their highways improving by the day, their cars increasingly sturdy and comfortable, their prosperity leaping in the burgeoning economy of the mid-twenties, Americans took to the road. Long-distance touring was no longer reserved for well-heeled adventurers, no longer required goggles and a pistol; it became popular recreation for couples and families, who struck out from the cities in search of elbow room, fresh air, a closer acquaintance with nature.

  Popular culture rode shotgun. New characters became standards of jokes, books, movies—the traveling salesman, car broken down just up the road from the farm where he asks to spend the night; and the young woman stopped on the shoulder, staring incomprehending at the confusion of metal and rubber under her roadster's raised hood. And with this nomadic yen appeared new industries catering to the explorer's needs. Filling stations and repair shops multiplied. Eateries sprang up. And most notably, the pavement was soon straddled by places offering beds for the night.

  They started simply. As hotels varied in quality and didn't readily cater to motorists—reaching them could require a battle with traffic, and parking was tight—enterprising towns opened public campgrounds at their edges, often no more than a cluster of tent sites equipped with fire rings, trash cans, and parking spots, the more lavish efforts including restrooms or picnic shelters, central kitchens, even free telephones. They became immensely popular in the early twenties.

  But they also attracted riffraff who stayed long past their welcome, so many municipal camps introduced fees. The moment they did, they found themselves facing private-sector competition, and it wasn't long before City Hall was driven from the campground business. Then the for-profit campground operators squared off, undercutting each other's rates and boosting their offerings; some built little cabins, angling for travelers who didn't care for tents, and the idea took hold—pretty soon the auto cabin camps, as they were called, were roadside fixtures from coast to coast, some bare-bones (a bucket for water, communal showers and cooking), others quite comfortable.

  Within a few years these mostly mom-and-pop operations were biting into the traditional hotel trade, a development that Fortune’s James Agee, judging them " both a sound invention and a new way of life," didn't find at all surprising:

  It is six in the afternoon and you are still on the road, worn and weary from three hundred miles of driving. Past you flashes a sign DE LUXE CABINS ONE MILE. Over the next hill you catch the vista of a city, smack in your path, sprawling with all its ten thousand impediments to motion—its unmarked routes, its trolley cars, its stop and go signs, its No Parking markers. Somewhere in the middle of it is a second-class commercial hotel, whose drab lobby and whose cheerless rooms you can see with your eyes closed. Beyond, around the corner, eyes still closed, you see the local Ritz with its doormen and its bellboys stretching away in one unbroken greedy grin. You see the unloading of your car as you stand tired and cross, wondering where you can find the nearest garage. Your wife is in a rage because she has an aversion to appearing in public with her face smudged, her hair disarranged and her dress crumpled. All these things and more you see with your eyes closed in two seconds flat. Then you open them. And around the next bend, set back amid a grove of cool trees you see the little semicircle of cabins which the sign warned you of.

  The auto cabin camp traded on speed, thrift, and simplicity. You paid maybe a dollar a head for a small, clean room with a double bed— " a sign may have told you it is a Simmons, with Beautyrest mattress"—and a dinette, washbasin, toilet. Your parked car was a few feet from the door. " And in the morning you will leave without ceremony," Fortune advised, " resume the motion you left off the day before without delay." In some parts of the country, particularly California, the cabins weren't so unassuming. Some asked eight bucks a night, which would have been unthinkable in the Midwest. Some were giants, like Long Beach's two-hundred-room Venetian Court. Some dropped the " Cabins" from their name for " Motor Court" or even—get this— " Mo- Tel."

  Touring by auto remained, despite such improvements, a journey of faith, one best undertaken with a trunkful of tools and a head full of mechanical know-how. Con
sider the travails of a young family man driving from Texas to California, who described his journey in a letter to his parents: Outside of El Paso, his ignition failed; he spent " a couple of hours discovering where the trouble was" and three more " walking into town, waiting on mechanics to eat dinner, and other delays." Farther west, in Holbrook, Arizona, the oil lines clogged. " I took the whole overhead valve system off the car and took it inside and cleaned it up, finishing about midnight," he wrote. " Naturally my flashlight burned out just when I needed it, so I had to go to bed and wait until morning to put the thing back on the car." In the meantime, the temperature dipped to ten below zero, " and the car froze up so tight a Cadillac wrecker with chains on couldn't pull me to get started." Back on the road, he encountered bone-crunching cold again the following night, " but drained the car and heated the water on the stove the next morning."

  It didn't hurt to have a good sense of direction, either, because even as the states and federal government rolled out new highway mileage, the tools available to chart one's course on it were few. In 1924, the Bureau of Public Roads published its map of the Federal Aid system, making it available for general consumption as a hardcover portfolio of eighteen oversized sections. But big as it was, the hard-spined portfolio was useless on the road, and Rand McNally didn't produce its first road atlas until 1926. Directional road signs were meager and, often as not, inaccurate.

  The surest source of navigational insight was the Official Automobile Blue Book, which since its first edition in 1901 had served as a low-tech forerunner of today's Mapquest, using odometer readings and landmarks to guide motorists from point A to point B. At mile 51.5, it might say, take the left fork past an unpainted Methodist church. At mile 82, stay to the right to avoid a bottomless mud wallow.

  Even with a Blue Book, the correct path could be difficult to discern, because by now the Lincoln and Dixie highways had scores of imitators; the States were crisscrossed by at least 250 named trails—the Victory Highway, the Jefferson, the Roosevelt, the Apache Trail and the Bee Line, the Red Star, Red Ball, and Red X, each boasting that it was the best way to wherever. More than forty of them crossed Indiana. Sixty-four were registered in Iowa. The trails were blazed with shingles tacked to trees, fences, and barns, and with rings painted on telephone poles; each trail had signature colors—the Lincoln's being red, white, and blue, with a black capital L on the white stripe—so staying on track theoretically meant just following the colored blazes from one pole to the next.

  Trouble was, the trails overlapped. " One well-known route 1,500 miles long overlaps other routes for seventy percent of its length," the Times reported. " Ten different routes are involved in this overlapping and in places two or three of them coincide for many miles." In places, a single road could go by a half-dozen names, and telephone poles were encircled by so many rings that picking out where one blaze ended and the next began was a confusing and dangerous distraction.

  Meanwhile, state highway officials struggled to find sensible labels for the Federal Aid roads in their inventories. Wisconsin was the first state to attempt replacing names with numbers, and a straggle of states followed its example, but the trail associations kept pushing their products with enough zeal that the old names stuck. The cure, highway officials were coming to see, was to strip private entities of their power to name roads.

  Utah's Wendover Road controversy had brought home that trail associations, helpful though they'd often been in automobiling's early days, had become unnecessary, time-consuming, and meddlesome third parties in road-building decisions. In November 1924, during AASHO's annual meeting in San Francisco, the subject of confusing highway names came up in a subcommittee led by Edwin W. James. It recommended that the full association ask the secretary of agriculture to work with the states to fix the problem.

  AASHO followed the recommendation, calling for " the selection and designation of a comprehensive system of through interstate routes" and a " uniform scheme for designating such routes." The aim wasn't to alter the Federal Aid network, which would remain intact; the states merely sought new labels for the most important Federal Aid roads. AASHO asked the secretary to appoint a joint board of state and federal highway men to handle the task, which he did. James was named its secretary; the Chief, its chair.

  At the joint board's first meeting in April 1925, the members reached speedy agreement on numbering the nation's principal roads, rather than naming them, and chose to select the routes to be included in the system before trying to apply the numbers. They also decided that a marker of uniform shape and style should identify the chosen routes, prompting an Ohio engineer, Leo Boulay, to remark that the United States shield, which appears on the front of the dollar bill and was a de facto logo for the Official Automobile Blue Book, would fit the bill. Decades on, James recalled that Frank Rogers of Michigan passed him a doodled shield. James redrew it, including a small " U. S." over a large route number, and the name of a state across the shield's pointed crown. The other members approved the design on the spot.

  That May and June the joint board held a series of regional meetings to gather input on what routes to include in a numbered system. Reconvened at the bureau's offices in August, the group settled on a network of 50,100 miles to submit to the states. Its members took up three other matters that day that left a lasting imprint on the continent. They formally approved James's shield design as the marker for the U.S. highway system. They adopted the modern red-yellow-green traffic light sequence, and road sign designs for use throughout the United States that included the octagonal stop sign—painted black on yellow at the time, because a sufficiently durable red paint wasn't yet available (and wouldn't be until the mid-fifties). Finally, the joint board delegated the actual numbering of the new system to a committee, with James in charge.

  The assignment was a tough one. Numbers would have to be user-friendly, instinctively sound, and flexible enough to permit future additions to the grid. James would later recall that he was told to confer with A.B. Fletcher, a former California highway chief who was serving as a consulting engineer to the bureau, and who apparently had thoughts on how the numbering might work. Fletcher's " big idea," James recalled, was a highway stretching from " away up in the north west, to Key West below the tip of Florida," which he figured would " be the greatest road in the world" and would make a fitting Highway 1.

  James wasn't so sure. " As I listened and looked, I first wondered where No. 2 road would be laid, and where Nos. 5, 10, 50 and 100?” he remembered. Convinced that Fletcher's idea would invite chaos, he studied the map himself, and in very little time, a pattern suggested itself. " It stares one in the face, it is so simple and so adjustable," he said. He would assign even numbers to all of the east-west highways, and odd numbers to those running north-south. The numbering would be lowest in both directions in the northeast corner of the country, up at Maine's border with Canada, and would climb as one moved south and west—in other words, the east-west highways with the lowest numbers would run through the nation's northernmost states, and those with the highest, along the Gulf Coast and Mexican border; north-south highways would bear the lowest numbers on the Atlantic coast and the highest on the Pacific.

  One- or two-digit numbers would denote principal highways. A three-digit number would mark a spur or variant of a main route and usually would connect with the parent road at some point.* The arrangement created a simple geographic weave. With the lowest east-west number at 2 and the highest at 98 (zero and 100 weren't used), U.S. 50 was sure to run somewhere near the country's waist; likewise, the intersection of U.S. routes 25 and 60 would be quite a ways east and just a little south of center.

  James and his committee struck on one more detail. The most important of the east-west routes, including all the transcontinental highways, would have numbers ending in zero—10, 20, 30, and so on. The most important north-south highways would end in 1. James considered it " simple, systematic, complete."

  Looking to drum up support amo
ng his state colleagues, James called on Paul Sargent, chief engineer of the Maine State Highway Commission, to whom he pointed out that U.S. 1 would run from Sargent's own state to Miami. For most of its length, he added, it would follow the eastern seaboard's " Fall Line," along which the Piedmont gives way to coastal plain and the falls of the middle Atlantic's big rivers lay—of the Delaware River at Trenton, the Potomac near Washington, the James at Richmond. The route had been used since colonial times, which appealed to the Maine engineer: as soon as he mentioned it, James later wrote, " Sargent said he was with the whole idea."

  His next stop was Detroit, and the offices of the Lincoln Highway Association, where he " laid [his] scheme before them, very frankly telling them that it would mean the end of the Lincoln Highway Association, the Dixie, and all others." Privately, the association's leaders weren't thrilled with the idea. " In the factory, a motor car model might be Model 'N' or ‘X,’ or some designated number; but it's known to the trade by a name—never a number!” Henry Joy later complained. " Why can't the Bureau, in the name of common sense, adopt industrial practice?"

  But officially, the association posted no vigorous objections. " They understood it all; said they were for a big plan for roads across the U.S.; would be with my scheme if I would give the Lincoln Highway recognition so far as possible in the No. 30," James wrote. " I agreed to do all I could to put it across, and so had their support toward washing out all the named routes.