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

by Earl Swift

  In the wake of his victory over the Townsend bill, MacDonald had hinted at a new subject of research: " to study the existing highway traffic and probable changes and developments with a view to adjusting the location, type and width of the roads." Surveying the " points of origin and destination of pleasure traffic," he'd written, would make it " possible to define with sufficient accuracy the natural lines of traffic, and prescribe the type and width" of the roads it justified.

  The first such studies had come in the mid-twenties, in the form of driver surveys and traffic counts. In New England, California, and a handful of other places, investigators had stopped motorists at roadblocks to inquire as to the origin and destination of their trips; others, counting by hand or with machines, had monitored roads to determine favored routes. Those early surveys had revealed a few basic truths about American drivers: that given a choice, they followed the better road; that they crowded an area's roads in proportion to the area's total population; and most significant, that they traveled in greatest numbers between and adjacent to big cities.

  The Chief entrusted this fact gathering to a personality even more hungry for information than he: Herbert Sinclair Fairbank, a lifelong bachelor who commuted to the bureau's offices from Baltimore. Thin, bespectacled, and scholarly, Fairbank was both a man of letters and an accomplished engineer—a voracious student of the classics and of history, a graceful writer, and a champion of research as the primary foundation of road building.

  A Cornell man, class of 1910, Fairbank had spent a short while with the federal Bureau of Mines before coming to work for Logan Waller Page as a student engineer aboard Good Roads Trains—a whistle-stop publicity venture popular early in the century, in which trains would roam the country for weeks at a time, stopping at cities and towns to deliver the gospel of road improvement and how it might be accomplished with whatever materials happened to be at hand. In time, Fairbank had been recognized for his strong gifts as a writer. He was put in charge of Public Roads, the bureau's magazine, a role that required not only skill as an editor but an ability to vet technical papers submitted for publication. By the late twenties he'd become the Chief's intellectual right hand and exerted a growing but anonymous influence on bureau policy. Together, they'd elevated the bureau's spirit of inquiry to an institutional obsession.

  Now, while MacKaye and Mumford, McClintock and Malcher offered up their visions of the ideal highway, the Depression was pushing the bureau into research that would yield an ever-clearer picture of how, and where, to build what we now know as modern expressways. The economic crisis reordered the nation's road-building priorities. The goal was no longer perfecting a system of national highways, but putting men to work. The rate at which the money gushed out of Washington was unprecedented. In 1931, more than 1.1 million people had jobs on Federal Aid and emergency road projects, and federal dollars poured into not only primary roads, but city streets and farming lanes.

  MacDonald was exasperated by the unfocused nature of the make-work approach. Money was squandered on minor roads that served few users; meanwhile, many of the important roads built since 1921 were going to hell from lack of maintenance, and a tremendous number were already obsolete. Pavements were narrow—in many states, the standard width of two-lane primary roads was just eighteen feet, and some weren't even that. The cars using these skinny lanes were bigger than their predecessors, and a lot more powerful; the new ones could hit eighty-five miles per hour and needed roomier lanes, wider curves. Their drivers had to have unobstructed views of what lay ahead, to give them time to react to trouble.

  What was needed, in a system that already measured three million miles, was not work for its own sake, but a better sense of priorities—a firmer grip on where money should be spent first, on where motorists went and how and why they chose their routes. The bureau needed such insight, to be sure, but so did Congress, the states, and the president. So the Chief and Fairbank conceived of a study that would identify the most important of the most important roads, and thus which should be improved, to what degree, and in what order. They got the go-ahead in 1934, with the passage of that year's Federal Aid highway bill. Sponsored by Sen. Carl Hayden of Arizona and Rep. Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma, it contained a provision that set aside up to 1.5 percent of each state's Federal Aid apportionment for highway planning and research.

  The earmark was used to finance a years-long campaign of highway surveys that MacDonald would describe as " the most comprehensive research study ever undertaken," and which produced insights " of such fundamental character and rich content" that they propelled highway planning " from guess work and opinion to full professional stature." They were the scholarship behind Washington's highway thinking for decades, not least the interstate highway system.

  The surveys involved 240 bureau employees and about 5,000 hired hands from forty-six states. They mapped and conducted a detailed inventory of every mile of road in the country, pinpointing tight curves, drop-away shoulders, deep ditches, exposed culverts, narrow bridges—the hazards that became more dangerous with each new year's speedier cars. Seeking road designs that would keep up with the models and traffic to come, they launched " vehicle-performance studies" that yielded a catalog of typical driver responses to a wide range of road conditions—the way motorists adjusted their speed to account for lanes of a particular width, for instance, or for curves and grades of varying severity; how they hugged the center stripe when a ditch or bridge abutment lay hard against the shoulder.

  Companion studies tested how well trucks and buses climbed hills pulling different loads; the data would prove useful in identifying too-steep grades, as well as stretches of highway demanding additional lanes for slow-moving heavy haulers. To measure traffic and its characteristics, the bureau used an assortment of counting machines, some of them permanent, others portable, several of which its engineers invented. One, installed nearly five hundred times over, used photoelectric cells and light beams; others used electric strips or pneumatic tubes laid across the road.

  The level of detail these machines produced bordered on the microscopic. In studying the physics of passing on a two-lane road, the tests measured the speeds of the passing and passed vehicles before, during, and after the pass; the specific points at which any changes in speed occurred; the distance the passing vehicle traveled in the oncoming lane; the time and distance it straddled the center line; and the actions of both vehicles in response to traffic approaching from the other direction.

  What did the bureau glean from this? For one thing, how much room it took to pass safely at various speeds and in a range of circumstances, and how far ahead a would-be passer needed to see before he swung into the opposing lane. Beyond that, though, it learned that if passing were difficult on a particular stretch of blacktop, traffic would stack up behind slower-moving vehicles and the capacity of the road would be reduced. With changes to its geometry, the road's flow might be eased, its capacity boosted, its useful life extended.

  The surveys also fulfilled their first mission. They instructed the bureau and the states as to where the public's money was most in- telligently spent. In a word, the answer was: cities. The data showed, in Fairbank's words, " traffic that moves in great volume into and out of cities, but dwindles to much smaller proportions as cities are left behind."

  In fact, the surveys showed that there was precious little demand for the open roads that politicians and automakers had pushed for since the Lincoln Highway's debut. Americans seldom drove long distances; journeys of 29.9 miles and less accounted for 88 percent of all trips. Those of more than 500 miles, on the other hand, made up less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.

  The bureau's philosophy began to shift to meet the new data. Far from being townless, the new thinking held, highways should mostly serve towns. The Chief would come to advocate " free-flowing highways" in the cities, and even extending them " well into the country," and to allow that in a few corners of the forty-eight states, it made sense to
further extend them " until they connect with those radiating from other large centers of population to form continuous routes wholly disconnected from our present system of highways."

  But such places were the exception, MacDonald believed. Ironically, the man who would be most responsible for building America's modern highway network reckoned that a uniform grid of expressways crisscrossing the nation would be a huge waste of money.

  8

  IT WAS WHILE his bureau was immersed in the surveys that MacDonald lost his wife. Bess fell ill with ovarian cancer, and on August 6, 1935, after two years in decline, she suffered a pulmonary embolism. Always one for long days at the office, the widowed MacDonald now passed the bulk of his waking hours there.

  He became more a loner than ever, an unsmiling enigma to most of his coworkers. Few could claim to know him, and even fewer dared to describe him as a friend. MacDonald's circle of adult confidants had just three members. Besides Fairbank, there was Charles D. " Cap" Curtiss, well educated and six years younger than the Chief, who had worked for MacDonald in Iowa before joining the army, making captain, and acquiring a nickname for life. Curtiss was among the few visitors to the MacDonalds' Chevy Chase home on weekends, who could speak firsthand of the Chief's prowess at his backyard grill, and who accompanied the family on Sunday drives into the country. Even so, MacDonald never strayed from addressing him as " Mr. Curtiss" or " Captain Curtiss."

  And there was Caroline L. Fuller, MacDonald's secretary, good-natured, tireless, and smart. Born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan, Fuller had joined the bureau as a " stenographer and typewriter" in 1916. Now she was not only gatekeeper to the Chief, but his spokesperson and surrogate; everyone recognized that a gentle suggestion from " Miss Fuller" was tantamount to an order from MacDonald himself, and that she had the boss's ear. She was also the only bureau employee who was permitted to step onto an elevator with the Chief. The whole building, even Herbert Fairbank, knew to take that protocol seriously.

  If MacDonald found solace anywhere in the wake of Bess's death, it seemed to be on the road. He wandered for weeks at a time in the Far West, in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, in South America. And most memorably, he twice ventured to Europe, as part of a procession of American engineers drawn to Adolf Hitler's state-of-the-art Reichsautobahnen.

  In 1936, the Chief proclaimed the finished segments " wonderful examples of the best modern road building," and a stretch headed east from Berlin " one of the most delightful drives of the world." Two years later, he had time for a closer study and again was impressed. Even by today's standards, the autobahn was a modern system. Its traffic sped along on parallel, one-way roadbeds, each two lanes wide and separated from its twin by a landscaped median sixteen feet across; it was banked and graded to enable high speeds—no official limit existed, in fact—and passed over or beneath intersecting roads, linking to some of them by ramps and cloverleafs. Road surfaces were smooth concrete. Styling was understated and modernist. The scale of bridges and viaducts was monumental.

  The Chief admired the " plain design of pleasing lines" that he encountered on a drive to Hanover, and the " parking for overnight accommodation of truck drivers," and most of all the Third Reich's conscious efforts to transform highway travel into a celebration of nature and beauty. " This is the industrial area of the Ruhr river—the whole is highly industrialized—coal mining— steel," he wrote in his diary. " But the autobahn has been so well placed it runs thru miles of woods. One might very easily believe he was in a wooded agricultural district, were it not for the glimpse of smoke stacks, and other evidences of a busy, industrial life—at intervals from the road."

  At some points, the roads were " carried to high grounds to give sweeping views about the whole horizon of lovely nearby and distant fields, forests, villages of purely agricultural character— streams," he wrote in his entry for July 6, 1938, when he also had dinner with the system's chief inspector, Fritz Todt. " This policy necessitates high, long viaducts even of the crossing of rather small stream valleys . . . there can be no question that the Germans are setting the highest mark in bold conception of their highway planning and design of very large scale."

  But the Chief saw little about the German system that seemed applicable to American needs. Descended from highways started in the twenties, the autobahns had been appropriated by Hitler on his rise to power, and there was no mistaking that these were military roads. As Time pointed out in February 1939, you could drive up a ramp " at Cologne, near the Belgian border, zip past Berlin and wind up at the Polish frontier," or drive without stopping from the capital " to Falkenburg, within 95 miles of the Polish Corridor; to Hamburg, in the northwest corner of the Reich; to Saarbrucken on the French frontier."

  Indeed, the roads made beelines for the country's borders, rather than serving centers of population—and by the time MacDonald made his visits, the bureau's surveys had left little doubt that such an arrangement ran counter to America's needs. The German roads were lavishly overbuilt for the volume of traffic they carried, which offended the Chief's economic sensibilities. An overbuilt road was every bit as shameful as a deficient one, in his view; unless it was justified economically, it failed, regardless of its engineering. And there was little about the autobahns that he hadn't seen back home, albeit executed on a smaller scale.*

  Still, Hitler's highways made an impact on American road building. They stoked new interest among Washington lawmakers in a homegrown expressway system, and it was during this resurgence, early in February 1938, that the Chief was summoned to the White House to discuss " through national highways" with Franklin Roosevelt. Their meeting included one of the watershed moments in highway history. The president showed the Chief a map of the forty-eight states on which he drew, or had already drawn, a grid of lines in blue pencil. Three crossed the country from coast to coast, and an equal number ran vertically from the Canadian line to the Gulf or the Mexican border.

  Roosevelt told MacDonald that he was intrigued by the notion of building a system of transcontinental roads, and that in doodling around with the idea he'd come up with these six routes. It might be possible, the president said, to make such a system pay for itself through the collection of tolls. Or perhaps the federal government could condemn mile-wide rights of way and later sell off the property fronting the new highways at a profit—an idea exciting a lot of discussion at the time, and about which FDR made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. He asked the Chief to look into the matter and report back.

  MacDonald and Fairbank dived into the assignment, the Chief writing the summary, his assistant the briefing's actual text. Together, they made the case that the president's system was buildable, sure enough, but it would not answer the nation's real highway needs. As Fairbank put it while the work was under way, they hoped to " show that there is nothing to the transcontinental idea, that traffic is highly local in range and that congestion is a city product which exists in serious degree only in the vicinity of the larger cities and where cities are close together."

  A few weeks after they delivered the paper, the Chief received orders from Congress for almost the same thing. He had until the following February to weigh the feasibility and cost of six transcontinental highways, three in each direction, and the prospects of paying for them with tolls.

  But this second report, which he and Fairbank prepared with a supporting cast of dozens, was far more comprehensive, and far more important. It didn't simply answer Congress's questions; it offered the lawmakers, without having been asked, an alternative to the simple transcontinental grid, a far more ambitious system of what it termed " interregional" highways.

  Titled Toll Roads and Free Roads, the document was divided into two parts; the first, on the feasibility of transcontinental toll roads, ran eighty-six pages, or about two-thirds of the total. It concluded " that a direct toll system on these six superhighways, in their entirety, would not be feasible as a means of recovering the entire cost of the facilities." It didn't take long to reach t
his judgment: it came toward the bottom of page 2.

  Again, the bureau found that the six superhighways, wending for 14,336 miles and built to top standards, were " entirely feasible from a physical standpoint" and could be had for about $2.9 billion. Throw in financing, maintenance, and the costs of operating tollbooths and such, and the bill came to just over $184 million each year through 1960. But by the most optimistic reckoning, the grid would earn annual tolls of just $72.14 million, less than 40 percent of its cost.

  The bureau had made a sincere effort to design the best six transcontinental toll roads. It connected major cities and used the most popular and potentially lucrative routes. Three in four miles would be only two lanes wide—not superhighways so much as faster and safer versions of what already existed, with lanes twelve feet across, wide shoulders, easy grades, broad and banked curves, no crossings of road or rail at grade. Even so, they'd lose buckets of money. The 515-mile stretch from Salt Lake City to Reno—the Wendover Road—would earn only 12.3 cents for every dollar it cost, and the long, lonely two-laner from Fargo, North Dakota, to Spokane, Washington, would earn just 9; worst of all was the road from Atlanta to Augusta, Georgia, at 7.5 cents.

  Pieces of road that seemed sure-fire moneymakers were not. Indianapolis to Columbus stood to recover just 40 percent of the government's investment, and Cleveland to Buffalo, 38. St. Louis to Springfield, Missouri, a seemingly busy leg of Route 66, would make back only a third of its cost. Even the sixty-six-mile highway segment from Jersey City, New Jersey, to New Haven, Connecticut, the busiest in the U.S. system, would fail to break even. By 1960, the report said, a smattering of mileage might operate in the black, but it would be a crapshoot. If Congress insisted on experimenting with tolls, it faced the best odds of success with a highway from Washington to Boston. Nowhere else.