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

by Earl Swift

  On a panel led by Thomas MacDonald, this was hardly a surprise. He was as staunchly opposed as ever to big freeways in the boonies and would stay that way. He'd call them " an extravagance" in one 1946 interview, adding: " We can't afford them. We don't need them. And we probably won't ever need them." Two-lane rural highways were " much more useful," in MacDonald's view, though that rule of thumb certainly had exceptions. In places where the terrain made passing unsafe on a two-laner, where a driver couldn't see far enough ahead to safely swing into the oncoming lane at high speed, the committee decreed that an interregional highway would widen and split into two lanes each way, separated by a median at least fifteen feet wide. That would be the standard along parts of the system that saw heavier traffic, too—side-by-side, two-lane, one-way roads, built as independent units so that each followed the topography and the width of the median varied. Along these stretches, all cross traffic would be carried over or under the interregional highway and reached via ramps. The same went for stretches that carried more than fifteen thousand vehicles on the average day and thus warranted three lanes each way.

  As envisioned in 1943, many of the new highways would be laid smack on top of existing roads; all that was needed was to improve what was already in place. The committee didn't have a beef, in other words, with where U.S. 1 or 11 or 60 was; it was how those roads were that needed a fix. Granted, in some places it might prove necessary to build a completely new road, separate and distinct from anything already on the ground, but the committee left unaddressed where either option might be used.

  So the proposed system's mileage—about 29,450 miles in the open country and 4,470 in towns, plus 5,000 or so miles of metropolitan beltways and loops that would be added later—was ballpark, at best. The exact location of its path, the report read, " will be a problem for local reconnaissance study." That was especially true for the urban mileage. Interregional Highways included no maps of routes through cities, and no description of them beyond a catalog of possibilities, because the problems of extending four- and six-lane highways through dense settlement were simply too complicated and too local to generalize—besides which, it was a decision best made by the states and municipal authorities. " How near they should come to the center of the area, how they should pass it or pass through it, and by what courses they should approach it, are matters for particular planning consideration in each city," the committee decided, though it observed that surface streets carrying the heaviest traffic loads generally " pass through or very close to the existing central business areas."

  Fairbank again did most, if not all, of the writing, and this time his passages on urban expressways included a cautionary note. However they were located, the new urban highways would do more than simply carry traffic; they would be " a powerful influence in shaping the city," the report predicted, and " should be located so as to promote a desirable development or at least to support a natural development rather than to retard or to distort the evolution of the city.

  " In favorable locations, the new facilities, which as a matter of course should be designed for long life, will become more and more useful as time passes; improperly located, they will become more and more of an encumbrance to the city's functions and an all too durable reminder of planning that was bad."

  That warning was resounded by the Chief's boss, retired army major general Philip B. Fleming, who pointed out that highways had " built cross-roads communities into thriving cities" but had " just about wiped out other towns.

  " So it seems to me that the highway planner needs to approach his task in a prayerful attitude," Fleming said. " He is building not only for the present but for the long future, and thereby helping to shape the coming pattern of our civilization."

  ***

  The committee didn't finish its 184-page report, Interregional Highways, until January 1943. FDR submitted the document to Congress a year later, urging prompt action to " facilitate the acquisition of land, the drawing of detailed project plans, and other preliminary work which must precede actual road construction."

  It received a warm reception on Capitol Hill. By then, it didn't take an engineer to see that America's streets and highways desperately needed a boost. The war effort had diverted materials and manpower from construction and maintenance, and all about, concrete and asphalt crumbled. New highways won approval only in short stretches, and only if they directly served military installations or suppliers—in places such as Charlestown, Indiana, where in the space of weeks a cornfield sprouted a mammoth DuPont gunpowder works; and San Diego, where the population had leaped by fifty thousand in a single year; and Norfolk, a great knot of harbor, shipyard, and military base that became a factory of war.

  Otherwise, road building had simply stopped. In the two years before Pearl Harbor, Federal Aid put more than 20,000 miles of highway under construction. In 1942, it produced just 1,869 miles, and in the first ten months of 1943, a paltry 722. The traffic on this disintegrating network got heavier every year. There now was a registered vehicle for every 4.5 people; if it so chose, the entire population could go for a drive at once. Congealed streets turned the simplest midday errands into ordeals in Boston and Philadelphia, in Chicago and Denver, even in Honolulu.

  Over several months in 1944, lawmakers incorporated the committee's recommendations into the annual highway bill. They did so with little drama, making only one significant change: Republicans chucked the system's " interregional" name for " interstate," after inferring that the original had been coined by planners whom they regarded as leftist pains in the neck, and after the Chief assured them that " interregional" had " absolutely no significance."

  And so, deep in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, there appeared a section that opened: " There shall be designated within the continental United States a National System of Interstate Highways," and which specified that such a system should not top forty thousand miles in length, and should be " so located as to connect by routes, as direct as practicable, the principal metropolitan areas, cities, and industrial centers, to serve the national defense, and to connect at suitable border points with routes of continental importance in the Dominion of Canada and the Republic of Mexico."

  The bill also cleared the way for Federal Aid money to be used in the cities, as the report had urged—to the tune of a quarter of each year's appropriation. It provided no special financing for the interstate system, and no word on when or where construction would begin. Even so, it committed the interstates to paper. It made them the continent's principal roads. It now remained only to find the money to build them. At congressional hearings on the bill, 110 witnesses testified, the great majority backing the plan. Just before Christmas, it became law.

  Interregional Highways not only called for expressways in the nation's cities, it suggested that they were a logical place to start construction. City fathers throughout America agreed; they were thrilled by the prospect of big roads cleaving the fast-spreading suburbs to bring new life, new business, to downtowns strangled by car and truck traffic—a congestion that grew exponentially worse with the war's end.

  Peace brought an abrupt halt to rationing and an explosion on Detroit's assembly lines. From thirty-one million at the Japanese surrender, vehicle registrations leaped to nearly thirty-eight million in 1947, on the way to an incredible forty-nine million in 1950—an increase of almost 60 percent in five years. The boom showed no sign of slowing. Americans were flush with cash, emboldened by easy credit, and thirsty for speed and wide-open spaces. As one Public Roads official put it, car ownership was headed " upward as rapidly as vehicles can be manufactured."

  Arranged bumper to bumper, the cars produced in 1949 would have stretched more than twenty thousand miles, which vied with the year's output of improved road. America spent more on transportation, $40 billion, than on anything except food, and that exception was a matter of doubt. Its transportation spending trumped that of all the rest of the world lumped together, even topped the total income of Gre
at Britain. Three out of four cars on the planet were in the United States.

  And the great majority of the new cars squeezed into overcrowded cities that had outgrown their streets during the conflict. Baltimore's population grew by 73 percent during the forties; New Orleans's head count doubled; San Francisco swelled to two and a half times its prewar size. With all those new people came traffic that surpassed the wildest imaginings of highway officials and city planners. In 1949, it topped the forecasts for 1960.

  You find your morning commute trying now? In most places, it can't compare to the glacial pace of negotiating the logjammed streets and overstuffed parking lots of the pre-interstate years. The new program shimmered on the horizon, promising relief from the building crisis. " If we are successful in executing the plans now being formulated in practically every large city in the country," the Chief wrote in a magazine essay, " access to the main business districts will be enormously improved. People from the outer portion of the city and the surrounding area will travel safely and without stops or delay of any kind to the downtown area. More traffic than ever will pour into the business district."

  Now came the difficult task of choosing where to put these urban routes. Public Roads wasn't looking to pinpoint them exactly—that could wait until it came time for the states to acquire rights of way—but it did need to decide on approximate corridors in the interest of refining its mileage calculations. Problem was, the tried-and-true techniques used in the highway planning surveys wouldn't work; traffic couldn't be stopped for interviews in the midst of an evening rush hour. The agency tried a number of approaches before it hit on population sampling, then being pioneered by pollster George Gallup. With help from the Census Bureau, MacDonald's people divided a city into squares and targeted a certain percentage of homes in each. " Each interviewer is given a list of the dwelling units in his territory selected for inclusion in the sample, and he is instructed to obtain interviews in these dwelling units and no others," explained John'T. Lynch, who led the effort. " He obtains information concerning all trips made by automobile or by public conveyance on the preceding day, including the means of travel, the origin and destination, the purpose of the trip, the times of starting and arrival, and other information which varies somewhat from city to city."

  The travel patterns that emerged in each square were linked with those in others to form " desire lines" through a city. When Public Roads found that such desire outran the capacity of existing streets, it launched studies of the costs and benefits of bigger, limited-access alternatives.

  Some of the coming construction might be tough medicine. " Admittedly, an expressway through a densely populated area does involve razing numerous buildings, including many dwellings," MacDonald wrote. But " in most instances" the selected routes aimed for " sections where property values are low, and most of the buildings are of the type that should be torn down in any case, to rid the city of its slums."

  MacDonald's boss, General Fleming, went so far as to propose that Truman assign him the nation's entire urban renewal effort, arguing that highway and housing officials would be able to better choreograph their efforts. The president wasn't interested; he instead backed what became the Housing Act of 1949, which replaced decrepit slums with often-bleak public housing projects.

  Still, the Chief threw Public Roads into its part of changing the cityscape. Surveys were under way in Little Rock and Tulsa even before the 1944 act was put to a vote. In six years, they spread to eighty-five major cities. By August 1947, the agency could announce that it had nailed down rough locations for 37,681 miles of the system, including 2,882 miles that ran through urban areas. That left 2,319 miles unassigned, under the system's 40,000-mile cap. The Chief reserved that mileage for future beltways, spurs, and loops off the main routes.

  In retrospect, the surveys were self-fulfilling—their yardsticks were motorist safety, travel time, gasoline use, and incidence of repair, all facets of the driving experience. The effects on those not using the roads were neither as easily tallied nor as eagerly sought. And they rested on a fundamental assumption that would soon prove flawed: that in the years to come, white-collar jobs would remain clustered in downtown office buildings, along with most retail shopping and nighttime entertainment, and blue-collar work would stay concentrated in well-established industrial zones. Most urban traffic, then, would continue to move back and forth between these few defined destinations and a city's residential neighborhoods.

  The Chief failed to grasp that his roads would change the old patterns, that in addition to addressing traffic that already existed, they would spawn new centers for business and entertainment, and farther-flung subdivisions—that they would explode the traditional city built around a nucleus, something resembling a cell, into a blob sprinkled with smaller nodes of activity. But in the first years after the war, that wasn't yet apparent. On paper, the highways came off as almost unassailable.

  That didn't, however, get them bankrolled in a hurry. The highway community had met Harry Truman's ascension with excitement, for the new president was a roads man of long standing. He'd sought his first office, a county judgeship, on a better-roads platform, had led the Kansas City—based National Old Trails Road Association, was a card-carrying member of the American Road Builders Association, and had logged thousands of miles behind the wheel while campaigning for the Senate. Truman loved cars, loved roads, and loved to drive.

  But he did not usher in the expected windfall for highways. No money was earmarked specifically for the interstate program; the states were expected to build it from their regular Federal Aid handouts, matching the federal contribution dollar for dollar. Few could afford the arrangement.

  Framing the interstates as key to the national defense didn't shake loose any cash—not even when, in an appendix to a March 1949 Public Roads report, defense secretary James V. Forrestal made an Atomic Age pitch for urban superhighways, noting that " methods of modern warfare . . . may require movement of much of [a city's] civilian population and industry." Those " methods," of course, meant nuclear attack; interstates radiating from America's downtowns would be an important tool for herding populations away from ground zero—assuming they were built wide, which " in event of bombing would reduce to a minimum the rubble that would fall on at least a portion of the traveled way." Forrestal's comments, among the few on the subject in any Public Roads document of the period, evidently didn't resonate with the president; Truman gave the report only a distracted nod.

  By the time they met in December 1950, state highway officials worried that the nation's " vast transportation systems" were " now in a seriously weakened condition." Because the interstate system would " greatly contribute to the execution of the defense program," the officials urged Congress and the states " to do everything possible to expedite the construction" of the network.

  Nothing happened. The existing highway system, already pounded by overloaded trucks and curtailed maintenance during the war, slipped into further disrepair, even as auto plants disgorged new models by the millions. New York State figured it would take nearly a billion dollars to restore its highways to the efficiency they'd enjoyed in 1930. On the Federal Aid system, fifty-two thousand bridges were rated as " below standard." Half the nation's busiest rural roads remained less than twenty feet wide. " On each such mile of highway," the Chief complained, " over sixty times per hour, or once each minute, a vehicle is encroaching upon the left lane when meeting an oncoming vehicle."

  With no federal help on the horizon, several states turned to building their own expressways, all of them—the bureau's warnings be damned—financed through tolls. Maine opened a turnpike from Portland to the New Hampshire line in 1947. New York created an authority in 1949 to build and manage a " thruway" linking New York City, Albany, and Buffalo. The same year, West Virginia created an authority and Ohio a commission to build toll roads.

  Oklahoma legislators broke ground on a turnpike linking Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and in New Jersey, cons
truction crews got busy on a 118-mile toll highway running the length of the state, with seventeen interchanges and construction standards largely borrowed from the interstate system. Its backers defended toll financing by pointing out that they really had no choice; if they spent all their regular highway money on the turnpike alone, they wouldn't be able to finish it as a free road until at least 1961.

  Metropolitan areas around the country conceived of their own expressways, too, many of them bankrolling the projects with big bond issues. Booming Houston built a six-lane freeway that ended in a spray of ramps into its downtown. Kansas City started work on a belt around its middle, fed by arterial highways, and Washington and Baltimore planned to do the same. Los Angeles began to lay down its great tangle of concrete. And in Boston, which had made few accommodations to the automobile and seemed to take odd pride in the foulmouthed logjam that each rush hour brought to its crooked, narrow streets, state highway men started work on an elevated expressway that would chew a curving path straight through the city's heart.

  Frustrations over worsening congestion aside, Thomas MacDonald was a contented man. He was serving his sixth president; only the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover would outlast him as the head of a federal bureau. Truman had awarded him the government's Medal of Merit for his " energetic leadership" and " exceptionally meritorious service" during the war—not least, for overseeing the breakneck construction of the Alaska Highway across more than a thousand miles of Canadian wilderness. He'd achieved an almost unrivaled respect in the capital, his integrity and expertise held in such esteem that his testimony was unquestioned; lawmakers of both parties assumed that if the Chief told them a highway was needed in such and such a place, he had the research, the figures, to back up the statement.

  Of even greater note, in the years since Bess's death his relationship with his secretary, Caroline Fuller, had deepened into a formal, pragmatic brand of love. She had much in common with the late Mrs. MacDonald. Like Bess, Fuller had been a schoolteacher before going into secretarial work, and like Bess, she brought a prim efficiency and a sharp intelligence to her work; not only was she authorized to exercise " her own judgment in disposing of" visitors, she contributed to bureau policy and procedure to a degree matched by few others in the organization, deputy commissioners included.