The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
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"In the utopia that highway engineers have been busily bulldozing into existence, no precinct of the city and no part of the surrounding countryside are to remain inaccessible to automobile traffic on a large scale," he wrote. "As a formula for defacing the natural landscape and ruining what is left of our great cities, nothing could be more effective."
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The most surprising critic of the new urban highways was the man who'd spurred their financing. It's hard to imagine how Dwight Eisenhower could have been unaware that the interstate system was designed to venture into cities, what with all the fuss in San Francisco, the controversies unfolding in Baltimore and other towns, and newspaper chatter on the paths of proposed freeways just blocks from the White House—not to mention that he'd signed the 1956 act and presumably read something about it beforehand.
But it wasn't until the spring of 1959, so the story goes, that the president got his first inkling that the highway system he'd envisioned differed in major respects from the one he would get. He was in the back of a limousine headed out of Washington for Camp David when the car bogged down in a highway construction snarl. Ike asked what was going on and learned that the highway in question was an interstate. This was far too close to Washington to comply with the president's notions of a largely rural, intercity system, an American take on the autobahns. Riled, Eisenhower demanded an explanation—and so, according to one school, discovered that "his" highway program wasn't.
Another version of his discovery process is less dramatic: Ike learned of urban interstates during a presentation by Harland Bartholomew, a St. Louis planner who'd served on the Chief's interregional highway committee and who was now involved in planning in the capital. Whatever the case, the president wasn't pleased. And so, at the same time that Blatnik launched his probe and Mumford's allies were poised to become an army, another major threat to the interstates blossomed within the executive branch.
In mid-June 1959, Eisenhower received a letter from his old friend and tolls advocate John'S. Bragdon, suggesting they meet to discuss the "road situation." Now Ike's coordinator of public works planning, the retired major general had been exchanging letters with Bert Tallamy in recent months and related their back-and-forth to the president. "Mr. Tallamy agrees that the Interstate System is not designed to solve all the principal highway traffic problems of cities," he wrote, "but maintains it has always been the intention since the Interstate Highway System was conceived to extend those highways into and through as well as around metropolitan areas and cities."
Bragdon recommended the creation of a committee to revisit urban routing and other possible problems. He got it; Ike replied in early July that Bragdon was to undertake a "broad review of the Federal highway program" to ensure that its "policies, methods, and standards" were in sync with national objectives. Specifically, he and his committee were to eyeball the urban routes and drum up ways to ensure that highway officials worked in harmony with city planners. If they found that the interstates needed redirection, they were to suggest actions that would bring that about.
Bragdon apparently viewed this as license to rethink the whole program, down to its most fundamental assumptions, and he seized on the task like a pit bull on flank steak. He hired a full-time staff of nineteen and drew up a list of ideals he believed the system should meet. To start with, it should serve intercity traffic, not local; only beltways would be acceptable incursions into metro areas. The general also wondered whether Congress had been fully apprised of the system's urban character when it approved the 1956 act, and asked the administration to scour its files for documents that spoke to this "legislative intent." The answer: Interregional Highways had made it "perfectly clear" in 1944 "that the Interstate Highway System would penetrate the cities," and the wording of subsequent acts left no doubt that Congress had known what it was approving.
Maybe so, Bragdon responded, but the system OK'ed in 1944 had been enlarged by Public Roads; surely Congress never intended urban interstates in the numbers and sizes now contemplated. He convinced commerce secretary Frederick H. Mueller to suspend work on any planned city interstates until the bureau devised a way to incorporate them into formal urban planning efforts. Tallamy and the bureau were deeply unhappy at this. Bragdon was acting in opposition to the will of Congress. Every study on which the program was based had been explicit: the country's highway needs were sharpest in the cities. Congress had read those studies. Congress had seen the Yellow Book's maps. Congress wanted urban routes.
The general was just hitting stride. In October 1959, he suggested a few of his own guidelines for urban routes. Outer beltways would get top priority. Inner beltways would have to be financed from regular Federal Aid money. Before the month was out, he'd decreed that the entire system should be scaled down; only with a reduction in mileage would it be possible to build a basic intercity system within the budget Congress had authorized in 1956.
Now the general's people started showing up in the bureau's field offices, amplifying the sense among longtime highway men that their most cherished program was under siege. They might have been even more alarmed had they realized that Bragdon and the president were reading from the same page. In a November "memorandum for the record," Bragdon wrote, after a meeting with Ike, that "the President confirmed the fact that his idea had always been that the transcontinental network for interstate and intercity travel and the Defense significances are paramount and that routing within cities is primarily the responsibility of the cities. The President was forceful on this point." Come December, an emboldened Bragdon wrote that the interstates should avoid centers of congestion and should never be larger than six lanes wide, and rarely more than four. A few weeks later, he resurrected the idea of using tolls to help meet the system's expenses.
The shape of the entire program was on the line when, on April 6, 1960, Eisenhower hosted a meeting on the committee's findings at the White House. Bragdon showed up with seventeen large easel charts, which an underling flipped at his signal; Tallamy spoke for the bureau. The adversaries emerged with varying accounts of what was said. In an interview decades later, Tallamy recalled that Bragdon was chugging through a lengthy presentation when he was interrupted by a wearying Ike, who gave the floor to the highway administrator. Tallamy "could see that the president was getting nervous about the time he was spending on this," so he jettisoned any formal remarks and instead whipped out a copy of the Yellow Book. This, he explained, was on every congressman's desk when the vote came in. He showed off several of its maps, the cities radiating thick black lines. The president, surprised, asked whether he was sure the book had been on every desk. Tallamy replied that he was as certain as he could be. Eisenhower snapped: The meeting's over, gentlemen. So ended the general's bid to reinvent the interstates.
Bragdon remembered the meeting differently, and unlike Tallamy—who was an old man by the time he related the story—he committed his version to paper just two days after the fact. He quoted the president as saying that he now realized that the promise of federal money in the cities, along with the Yellow Book, had sold the program to Congress. "He went on to say that the matter of running interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way," Bragdon reported. "He pointed out that when the Clay Committee Report was rendered, he had studied it carefully, and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored."
Tallamy "interjected that the interstate concept was nothing new—that it had been developed as far back as 1939. The President stated that, while that might be so, he had not heard of it and that his proposal for a national highway program was his own.
"In conclusion," Bragdon wrote, "he reiterated his disappointment over the way the program had been developed against his wishes, and that it had reached the point to where his hands were virtually t
ied."
Accepting that Eisenhower was ignorant of the highway program even as he stumped for it, it's difficult to fathom how he'd managed to remain oblivious in the years since. Yet if Bragdon is to be believed, here was the evidence, from Eisenhower himself. Here was Ike saying he knew nothing of the highway plans predating his arrival in the White House. Here he was, saying that he hadn't understood the bill he signed. Here he was, admitting that he'd been in the dark until just recently. Again, he wasn't much of a detail man.
Bragdon left the committee not long afterward for the Civil Aeronautics Board. His replacement filed a twelve-page report in January 1961, days before John F. Kennedy moved into the White House. Nothing came of it. But the general's work was not for naught. His committee's consultants complained that the interstates were a "highway program rather than a transportation program" and couldn't possibly solve problems "much bigger than just highways." That view would gain widening favor in the coming years, and Bragdon's insistence that planning be an important part of highway conception, that the roads integrate well with their surroundings and with community needs, would very soon become law.
17
ONE LATE SUMMER dawn in 1981 I pulled off Interstate 44 at the exit for Conway, Missouri, and steered my MG Midget, a demonic assemblage of pot metal, bad wiring, and rust, into a Texaco station at the top of the ramp. My college girlfriend and I had been on the road from Los Angeles for three days, and I was feeling pretty cocky about having nursed the roadster across the desert and over the southern Rockies, what with its well-earned reputation for mechanical caprice; our destination, St. Louis, lay an easy four or five hours ahead.
McShane's Texaco was a big place, with a full garage and a café next door that advertised itself as "Home of the Little Round Pies." It hadn't opened for the day when I pulled up to the pumps; except for the lone Texaco cashier, the interchange was empty of life. I paid for my gas, fired up the MG, crossed back over the highway to the entrance ramp, and broke down.
Twenty minutes of pleading with the MG didn't restart it. Neither did a long witless stare under the hood, nor pushing the car down the ramp, jumping in, and popping the clutch; the engine sputtered for a moment but failed to catch. We left it on the shoulder and trudged back up to the Texaco, where we learned the mechanic wouldn't report to work for a couple of hours. So we sat on a curb ringing the station's parking lot, waiting. The sun rose in the sky. The temperature leaped. Before long, the gas station's concrete apron burned the skin. Cars and trucks and campers filed into the Texaco, filling the air with the smell of gas and the sound of the pumps' ringing bells, the shouts of vacationing families.
Eventually the station's full staff showed up and towed the MG onto the lot, where a young mechanic looked under the hood and made an announcement that I sincerely did not wish to hear: "I ain't never worked on one of these." He agreed to try his luck, however, and spent what remained of the morning at it, until he diagnosed the problem as a bad fuel pump and apologized that he couldn't find a replacement. I did what I had to do. I called for my mom, in St. Louis, to come get us.
That sentenced us to several additional hours in the parking lot. We were on high ground and from the curb had a fine view of pastureland sloping away to the east, thick copses of hardwoods, and farther off, the wooded hills and ridges of the Ozarks; no human activity, however, aside from the interstate, which issued hisses and jake-brake burps throughout the day. So we watched people in far more reliable vehicles roll up and down the ramps, stole into the café for brief respites from the heat, sampled the Little Round Pies, and fell into numb silence.
Years later I learned that the Little Round Pies were the invention of a café in Conway proper, back in the days when U.S. 66 was the principal route in southwest Missouri and ran through the settlement. The concoctions were a hit and earned Conway some small renown among the Mother Road's travelers. Had we broken down back then, our wait would have been far more tolerable. Pleasant, even: we would have been stranded in a community, among its people, rather than a long hike away on an outpost geared to momentary pause, to strangers.
But with the coming of the interstate, tourists and truckers didn't happen through Conway anymore. As the appetite for Little Round Pies had always been sharpest among folks passing through, in time the pies moved out to the interchange. The same went for the filling station. By 1981, pretty much all of Conway's commercial bustle, such as it was, lay out beyond the burg's edge, in a spot both heavily populated and oddly remote.
From where we sat the town proper was off to the east and out of sight. I'd driven that stretch of 44 a few times before my exile at McShane's, and I've traveled it many times since, and still, I've never seen the place.
So it was for towns throughout the States. Mom-and-pop businesses on superseded U.S. highways watched their customers vanish as the interstates continued their crawl across the continent. As Florida Trend magazine would cry in 1965, the interstate system "diverts traffic away from former arteries of travel, drains the life's blood from established firms which are situated on the old highways and leaves them to die." Anyone visiting Quapaw, Oklahoma, a once-hale Route 66 stop-off bypassed by I-40, found a Main Street of vacant shops, closed service stations; a bankrupt motel, bought a few years before for $28,000, was now on the market for $5,000 and finding no takers. The owner of a gas station on U.S. 80 in east Texas lost 80 percent of his business immediately after I-20 opened nearby. A long stretch of the Lincoln Highway in Nebraska saw three-quarters of its traffic evaporate after I-80 opened a little to the south. Connecticut's neon-lined Berlin Turnpike, packed with traffic for years, lost nearly half of it when Interstate 91 opened, killing a regiment of small motels and marooning two full-service Howard Johnsons.
A great many towns, sharing Conway's fate, were both winners and losers in the new economy of high-speed travel. Income from passers-through didn't dry up, but it certainly left Main Street. The experience of Bertha Amick of Boonville, Missouri, was repeated a thousand times over. Amick was proprietor of the Kit Carson Motel, one of several businesses rendered superfluous when I-70 was built on the far side of town. She had to shutter fourteen of her twenty-two rooms. Her son Hugh bought 21/2 acres of land out by I-70, where he put up the Atlasta Motel. His place was full every night.
Small-town shopping districts weren't just losing business to the exits, but to bigger towns suddenly made closer by the new highways' speed and convenience. Why shop for back-to-school clothes in Conway, when much bigger Lebanon was now half as far away as it had been, in terms of driving time? Why settle for the meager pickings in Eagle Rock, Virginia, when the malls of Roanoke were a quick jaunt down I-81?
Towns that had been bypassed decades before by the U.S. highway system now fell off the map altogether. Remember Lida, Nevada? It found itself some 165 straight-line miles from the nearest interstate. Few settlements are farther off the most beaten of beaten paths; today, Lida is 223.4 miles from the nearest Cracker Barrel.
Yes, for every place experiencing a gain in population and prosperity, it seemed, there was another to which the new roads carried hardship. The interstates eased the path of meat and produce from farm to market, but rights of way cost farmers and their spreads dearly, for each mile of interstate devoured 30 to 40 acres of ground; in Iowa alone, officials reckoned that their 710 miles of freeway would devour 26,000 acres of productive cropland, or more than forty square miles. And interstates didn't thread carefully among adjoining properties. They blundered through them, dividing farms, isolating pieces beyond four lanes of impenetrable concrete and rebar. A 1964 Kentucky State Highway Department study found fifty-four cases of "severance"—the department's term for splitting farm property—along eighteen miles of Interstate 64. The highway was sufficiently disruptive that in three out of four cases, farmers sold off the stray parcels; in one case, relatives whose properties had adjoined now had to drive seven and a half miles to reach each other's homes.
By the summer of 1962, about 12
,500 miles of the system were open to traffic, and another 34 miles were opening, on average, every week. The economic impact of this effort was stunning. Each billion dollars spent on construction provided the equivalent of forty-eight thousand full-time jobs for a year and consumed an almost inconceivably vast pile of resources: sixteen million barrels of cement, more than half a million tons of steel, eighteen million pounds of explosives, 123 million gallons of petroleum products, and enough earth to bury New Jersey knee-deep. It also devoured seventy-six million tons of aggregate—so much aggregate, some in the business have surmised, that the United States could not mine enough rock to rebuild the interstates today.
The new highways were studies in sameness. AASHO and the bureau collaborated on a standard for virtually every feature of the highways—guardrails, rest stops, even the grass along their borders; on the medians, it was to be mowed to a height between three and eight inches, and on the shoulders, three to ten.
Turner took great pride that the system was "so uniform you can't tell what state you are in except as you look at the sign," that a driver from one part of the country would not confront "a totally different way of doing things" in another. Safe roads offered no surprises, required no sudden moves.
And indeed, the roads were far safer than practically any others in existence. A 1961 bureau study showed that the fatality rate on urban interstates was half that of conventional highways, and that an even bigger gap separated rural interstates from their predecessors—3.3 deaths per 100 million miles traveled, versus 8.7. Overall, the system was about two and a half times as safe as the highways it replaced; its completion, "conservatively estimated," would save at least five thousand lives a year.*