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

by Earl Swift

  Most highway departments were ready to do so; they'd been planning those urban routes for the better part of a decade. In September, the bureau had released the results—a slim book titled General Location of National System of Interstate Highways Including All Additional Routes at Urban Areas. That title was nearly as long as the text, which consisted of three sentences; the pages were otherwise devoted to simple maps of every major city directly served by the network, with the approximate routes of interstates through and around them rendered as thick black lines. Its title being too much of a mouthful even for engineers, it became known by the color of its jacket: the Yellow Book.

  It was not intended to be a landmark document. Turner later dismissed it as " a kind of routine scratch pad memorandum to ourselves," an exercise " to diagram these routes that we had reserved for the urban areas, even before we got around to actually locating them on the ground.

  " They were never intended, never thought of as being designated routes," he said. " You couldn't tell within a mile of where a route was going to be on the ground."

  Indeed, the renderings were ballpark. Fort Worth, for example, was partially circled by a beltway that doesn't much resemble the full loop of today, and the crisscrossing highways coming into town from north, east, and west didn't correspond closely with reality, either; only the freeway over Turner's parents' house was depicted close to its actual line.

  Still, you can figure out which interstates the 1955 lines represent, and in similar fashion most other maps—those for St. Louis, San Antonio, and Richmond, for Tulsa and Des Moines, Norfolk and Portland, Rapid City and Roanoke—were simplified, stylized versions of what we got.

  Big deal or no within the bureau, outside the agency the Yellow Book packed a wallop, especially among elected officials who for the first time saw how the talk of urban interstates would translate into steel and concrete. To them, the imprecise maps read like wonderful promises.

  No doubt Turner had understood as much. Late in 1955, after the defeat of that year's highway bills, the bureau had sent the Yellow Book to every member of Congress.

  12

  THE AMERICA OF 1956 was a baby factory. American women of the period bore an average of 3.7 children, and families were outgrowing their cramped urban quarters. The American dream had morphed in the postwar years to include a rectangle of lawn and a split-level rambler, a patio and a grill, and to slake the nascent demand for this ideal, builders were buying up cropland at every city's fringe and putting up cookie-cutter houses on quarter-acre lots, one beside the next, by the thousands. The tools with which Americans commuted between work and these far-flung new subdivisions were not up to the job. Aside from a few short, overloaded expressways in a handful of cities, the main drags to the edge of town were narrow and glutted with machines that bore little resemblance, beyond the basics, to those we drive today.

  Consider that today's new cars routinely cover a hundred thousand miles without a spark-plug change and are expected to achieve double that mileage over their useful lives; engines are computer-timed to the thousandth of a second, the better to ensure clean ignition, maximum compression, optimal power; bodies are crash-worthy, aerodynamically clean, rustproof. Contrast all of that with the spindly, underpowered, brittle confusion of moving parts that Carl Fisher drove home from the New York auto show in 1900—its horsepower measured in single digits, its steering by tiller—or the stripped-bare Winton in which Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson lurched across the country three years later.

  The halfway point between those pioneer horseless carriages and today's cars can be found in the models for sale the autumn after Eisenhower signed the 1956 act: the '57 Ford, the '57 Plymouth, the year's DeSoto and Caddy and Chrysler, and in particular the iconic '57 Chevy. They're now as far in the past as the first wheezy buggies to ply American roads were when work began on the interstates, and as different from modern cars as they were from Carl Fisher's first ride.

  Behold the Chevy. It didn't come in different models of compacts, mid-sized cars, or land yachts in 1957. Besides the Corvette, the company's only model was simply the Chevy; distinctive nameplates such as Impala, Chevelle, and Nova didn't come along until later. A buyer was instead bombarded with variations on a single theme. That one Chevy came as a two-door or four-door sedan, a two-door hardtop, a four-door hardtop, a two-door or four-door six-passenger wagon, a four-door nine-passenger wagon, a two-door Nomad "sports" wagon, and a convertible. Within most of those styles were three trim levels: the economical 150, with a bare-bones interior and little chrome decoration on the skin; the midline 210, with nicer seats and more bling; and the Bel Air, the top-of-the-line, all-luxe version, with shiny aluminum inlays along its flanks and golden accents.

  Just among wagons, one had more than a dozen options, what with the available six-cylinder engine, the 265-cubic-inch V8, and the Turbo-Fire 283 introduced with that year's model—which came with a two-barrel carburetor, a high-performance four-barrel, or the first fuel-injection system ever offered on a production car.

  Every variation was a stylish machine. Most memorably, the Chevy had fins—gargantuan, chrome-edged things that jutted a foot aft of the trunk or hatch, so Jet Age and out of scale that they'd have been dismissed as ridiculous, as whimsy run amok, had they not looked so damn great. They weren't the car's only Buck Rogers touches. The taillights resembled fighter plane exhausts. Chrome gun sights were fitted into the curving hood. The bumper guards bore crosshairs, unless covered with optional rubber warheads.

  The Chevy line shared weaknesses, as well. By today's standards, the cars were primitive—unreliable, quick to wear, blundering, dangerous. Chevrolet boasted that its small-block V8, married to a new Turboglide automatic transmission with "triple-turbine-takeoff, "was "as quiet as a contented cat and as smooth as cream," and "cat-quick in response when you ask for action!" But it wasn't uncommon to see a '57 pulled to the roadside on a hot summer day, hood up and radiator steaming; thermostats of the period were notoriously untrustworthy, radiators too, and even new cars boiled over. It was no rare event to find the car stranded in an icy driveway, either, immobilized by a frozen fuel line or balky mechanical fuel pump. Tires had tubes prone to catastrophic blowouts. Nylon-ply models were leaky, quick to bald, weak at the sidewalls.

  Carburetion, the blending of gasoline and air on which combustion depends, called on a choreography of twitchy parts. Generating the spark necessary to begin the process relied on points, gaps, and a battery that had to be watered like a fern. The Chevy jounced along on heavy springs and relied on Stone Age brakes that quit working when wet. Rust set in at the faintest hint of sea air or road salt. The car was middle-aged at thirty thousand miles; flipping the odometer into six figures was a rarity.

  The Chevy was unforgiving, too. In a collision, the '57 didn't absorb energy; it was a battering ram a foot longer than a Hummer H3, nearly two tons of dumb metal strapped to a big-assed engine, its steering column a spear aimed at the driver's breastbone, its beltless passengers free to carom about an all-metal cabin softened only by a thin layer of paint.

  Imagine this car by the millions crowded onto the narrow U.S. highways linking city and country, too heavy and big and loose to handle unexpected curves or come to a fast, safe stop, flanked by driveways and intersecting streets that at any moment might spit cross traffic the Chevy was ill equipped to evade. Imagine a long, wearying vacation trip in such a car, stoplights confounding your attempts to maintain a reasonable pace, tractors and slow trucks hogging and clogging even the biggest and best roads: four punishing days from New York to Miami; close to two weeks to go coast to coast. And imagine how strange and wonderfully liberating it must have been to steer that lumbering beast up a new interstate entrance ramp.

  It didn't take long for the states to jump on the program. Barely a month after the president signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, they had more than $800 million worth of projects in the planning pipeline and a slew ready to advertise for bids. Eisenhower dec
lared himself "gratified."

  Cap Curtiss, the bureau's top man, tried to cool expectations that work would start so swiftly everywhere. "A few drivers will see actual construction beginning in their particular areas within the next few months," he told an interviewer, but though the interstates would "spread rapidly in terms of a national total... the sheer magnitude of the job and the thousands of individual projects mean that there will be no magical overnight relief."

  Ike was among the impatient, however. He decided it might goose things along to put a new boss in charge of the project—a presidential appointee who'd be confirmed by the Senate, and who'd be able to use his higher national profile to better herd the states. At the president's behest, Congress created the post of federal highway administrator, who'd be top adviser to the White House on roads policy and oversee the interstate program while Cap Curtiss ran the bureau's day-to-day operation.

  That October, word came that the job would go to "one of the world's greatest builders of roads," as the newspapers knighted him—Bertram D. Tallamy of New York, architect of the 562-mile New York Thruway, the longest toll superhighway in America. The tall, mustachioed Tallamy had spent several successful years in contracting before chucking his private-side career for public service, helping devise New York's highway design standards, working with cities to develop regional plans and arterial routes, and eventually overseeing all of the state's public works. Tallamy was an avid driver, averaging 40,000 miles a year behind the wheel. He'd planned and built the limited-access Thruway in six years, during which he'd demonstrated a passion for walking, too; he'd covered all of the expressway's 427 miles between New York City and Buffalo on foot.

  Tallamy wanted the job but had obligations in New York that would keep him there for several months. For the interim, Eisenhower appointed another well-known engineer, John A. Volpe of Massachusetts, who'd built an international construction company from scratch before serving three years as his state's public works chief. Volpe was sworn in with Ike holding the Bible and thus became the first person in what remains today the nation's highest highway post, the equivalent to an assistant secretary. Consulting all the while with Tallamy, Volpe rejiggered the bureau to better shoulder its new, unwieldy responsibilities. More decisions would fall to the field offices, ensuring limber response to state needs. Departments were split up, functions shifted. And on January 1, 1957, Frank Turner got a promotion.

  He was now deputy commissioner and chief engineer, second only to Curtiss among the bureau's career employees and in essence the agency's chief operating officer. Officially speaking, responsibility for the interstates might fall to the federal highway administrator, but as a practical matter, it was Turner's hide on the line. As an official description of his duties reported, he had "specific responsibility for evaluation and progress" of the largest highway program in history—an undertaking that "involved new concepts of design and construction, right-of-way procedures, financing, recruitment and utilization of engineering manpower, and the coordination of and cooperation with the nation's entire highway plant."

  Turner's new title and responsibilities had no discernible effect on the man. He rode the bus to and from work most days, for all appearances a midlevel functionary—a quiet, short guy in a dark off-the-rack suit lugging an overstuffed briefcase, one among faceless thousands in the capital.

  As the first concrete was poured on widely scattered bits of the system, AASHO adopted, in July 1956, the major design features that would govern its form. They were lifted straight from the bureau's work in the thirties and forties: divided highways of at least four lanes and with access limited to grade-separated interchanges, except in lonesome western stretches; lanes twelve feet wide; grades, banking, and sight distances to permit speeds of seventy miles per hour on the flat.

  The bureau and AASHO also mulled how they might label the new highways to distinguish them from the existing numbered grid. They received a lot of advice. One New Mexico official, convinced that a new arrangement of numbers laid over the old would ask too much of drivers, pitched the idea of using letters. "This would allow as many as twenty-six route designations by single digits," he pointed out, "and at the same time, avoid confusion." Once the twenty-six were exhausted, the system could move to two-letter combinations.

  But Edwin W. James's 1925 system had worn well for more than thirty years. Following numbered highways was simple, logical. The public understood them and appreciated that a driver could discern much about his location simply by the number of the highway he drove. The nation's highway engineers weren't much for replacing something that worked.

  So AASHO's Route Numbering Subcommittee proposed recycling the old arrangement. As in James's system, east-west interstates would be even-numbered, with the longest and most important ending in zero, and north-south freeways would carry odd numbers, the principal routes ending in 1 and 5. Only this time the order would be reversed—the lowest interstate numbers would be in the far Southwest, where the U.S. highway system had its highest. Interstate 5, running from San Diego to Blaine, Washington, would be the westernmost major north-south interstate, occupying roughly the same corridor as old U.S. 101. I-95 would be the easternmost, alongside U.S. 1.

  The only places where you might encounter numbers that overlapped with those of the older highways were a broad strip across the country's waist, and another running a couple of hundred miles either side of the Mississippi. To stave off having both areas crowded with too-similar numbers in the fifties and sixties, AASHO ditched the use of I-50 or I-60 and proposed that there be no interstate and U.S. highway with the same number in any state.

  All of the numbers would be one- or two-digit. It wasn't until more than a year later that three-digit numbers came along, identifying auxiliary interstates—beltways and loops, which have an even-numbered prefix tacked onto the number of the interstate to which they connect at both ends, and spurs, which are connected to the main line at just one end and bear an odd-numbered prefix.

  Not only did the numbering run from west to east and from south to north, but the roads themselves did, too. Mileposts, borrowed from Frank Turner's boyhood, would begin at zero on a state's southern or western borders and climb as the road headed north or east.* Thus, the mapped system runs left to right and bottom to top; Bostonians might think of I-90, at 3,099 miles the longest interstate, as starting near their city's airport, but you could argue it actually ends there and starts in Seattle.

  Under the new system, I-90 and two other principal east-west routes ran all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I-10 would stretch from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida; and I-80, from San Francisco to New York, for the most part shadowing the Lincoln Highway. A fourth, I-40, would come close to going the distance, beginning a couple of hours northeast of L.A. in the desert outpost of Barstow and ending in Wilmington, North Carolina.

  Interstate 20 (Kent, Texas, to Florence, South Carolina) and I-70 (Denver to Baltimore) would cross a fair piece, but not all, of the continent. As for I-30, well, it didn't fit the mold of principal highway at all, covering only the 367 miles from Fort Worth to Little Rock. Like the numbered U.S. highways, the interstate system was peppered with exceptions to its rules.

  On the same day they unveiled the numbers, highway officials also introduced Americans to the system's jazzy new logo. The AASHO subcommittee had received scores of ideas for a new interstate sign, in a slew of shapes and colors; one, for instance, displayed the route number within an outline of the contiguous states; another, inside a rather Teutonic eagle; a third surrounded the number with a fat letter I.

  The subcommittee whittled the pile down to four and had them erected on the side of an Illinois back road, so that they could be judged in all weather, at all times of day. The winner was mostly the brainchild of Richard Oliver, a senior traffic engineer in the Texas Highway Department. It was, of course, the universally recognized red, white, and blue shield still used with only slight alteration today: a sleeker, simpler
shape than that used on the U.S. highways, bordered and lettered in white, a thin strip of red across the top bearing the word Interstate, the balance a field of blue on which the state's name and the route number were printed.

  AASHO was picky about the colors, dictating that the white be "relatively free of yellow or silver hues," and that the red have "a slight orange tint that is better for color-blind people." The dominant color would be "a true blue without excessive purple or gray hues" and "essentially the same color at night under incandescent headlight illumination as during the day." AASHO eventually had the design trademarked.

  Turner and his colleagues devoted considerable discussion to the network's other signs, such as those announcing exits and the mileage to upcoming cities. The bureau had been experimenting with sign technology for a couple of years. In March and April of 1955, it had hired a corps of volunteers to drive 1951 Pontiacs across a darkened parking lot, peering at signs containing six words—BALK, FARM, NAVY, STOP, ZONE, and DUCK—in different combinations of typeface and spacing; the experiment showed that some fonts were easier to read than others, and that as distance increased between letters, so did the distance at which a driver could make out the words.

  Now it had to decide what color the signs should be. Tallamy favored blue, the color used on his New York Thruway. Others in the bureau liked green. The question was settled with another experiment, a two-week trial in which signs in blue, green, and black were posted along an unfinished leg of Washington's Capital Beltway and eyeballed by hundreds of volunteer drivers. Nearly six in ten voted for green, and most were partial to up-and-down lettering versus all caps. Tallamy approved the white-on-green design in January 1958.