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

by Earl Swift

  Never one to gloat, Wiles did not speak of the freeway struggle unless someone else brought it up, never reminisced about his quiet but persistent leadership of the Rosemont resistance. There was little time or reason to bask; Rosemont was still standing, but even so, the expressway had left it battered. The sense of community Wiles and his neighbors had worked so hard to build, the pride and cohesion, the willingness to work for the common good—all of that was gone. The shabbiness that the condemnation had ushered in lingered; although 425 of Rosemont's emptied homes were rehabbed and resold, the old spit-and-polish neighborhood did not return.

  Not for lack of trying, however. Wiles continued to lead the improvement association, continued to write letters. He continued to devote meticulous attention to his yard and to help his older neighbors with theirs. After he retired from the arsenal, in 1979, he volunteered at the YMCA and his church.

  In 1987, the neighborhood slipping despite his efforts, he and Esther finally moved out at their daughters' behest and into a retirement community a little west of Leakin Park in Baltimore County. Wiles petitioned the management to let him plant a garden and tended it as faithfully as he had the yard on Ellamont Street; he tended it right up to the first of his strokes, which eventually brought his death in November 1998.

  In June 1996, Frank Turner was one of four "founding fathers of the interstate," along with Al Gore Sr., Hale Boggs, and Dwight Eisenhower, honored at a dinner hosted by Gore's son, then the vice president, to mark the system's fortieth anniversary. The meal and speeches took place under a tent in the Ellipse, the spot from which the army's 1919 motor convoy had departed Washington.

  In truth, it was just the 1956 act's birthday; the men most responsible for the system's actual birth, the Chief and Herbert Fairbank, went unmentioned. But the dinner correctly recognized that the interstates had turned out to be more than fancy roads—that, often in ways unanticipated by their creators, they had been agents of far-reaching change and had reordered the American landscape. That we could thank the interstates for shrinking the distances between our cities, and the untidy growth of those cities beyond Lewis Mumford's worst nightmare; for the "Edge City" of shopping and office space springing up on beltways in any number of metropolitan areas, and the "big-box" stores that were fast becoming ubiquitous features of suburban interchanges.

  They'd tamed rivers and bays, high plains and remote reaches of blackwater swamp where earlier roads dared not venture. You could set your cruise control (an automotive feature that would have been needless had the interstates not come along) and at seventy miles per hour, in climate-controlled comfort, summit the Sierra Nevada pass that claimed the Donner party.

  The year after the Ellipse dinner, his health failing, Turner sold the Arlington house and went to live with his son Marvin's family in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He had developed cancer and, as he neared and passed ninety, a slowly progressing dementia; still, when in January 1999 the Transportation Research Board named him the first recipient of its Frank Turner Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Transportation, he made it to Washington. Speechmaking was beyond him by then. When he took the mike, Turner could muster just one sentence to summarize his life's work: "It's been fun."

  In his lucid periods, it was plain that an engineer continued to lurk in his head. Later that year, he read of plans to rescue the Outer Banks' Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which teetered at the ocean's edge on fast-eroding beach. He was fascinated by the notion that a twenty-story brick tower could be picked up and moved, and talked Marvin into taking him to see it.

  No interstates link Goldsboro with the barrier islands; the trip, over undulating U.S. highway, took four hours. Turner slept most of the way. Once on Hatteras Island, Marvin found a place to park near the lighthouse, which had been jacked onto rollers that edged at a glacial pace across the sand, and Frank, thin and frail, got out and shuffled nearer. He studied the process intently for a few minutes.

  "Well, I see how they did it," he told his son. "I think they're doing it right."

  Then: "I'm ready to go home now."

  22

  WHAT AMERICA GOT with its $130 billion investment in the interstate highway system can be summarized, for good and ill, in a summer's drive west across Tennessee on I-40. For the most part, it's a lovely trip, its demands minimal, the views inspiring. You descend from the mists of the Great Smokies into rolling pasture and cropland, pass distant towns and bisect a couple of small cities, watch the road's swells and declivities gradually flatten as you near the Mississippi. The unpocked asphalt invites high speed; the surface is smooth and steady, and meets tires with a quiet, unvarying hum. Tractor-trailers abound, but not so many that you feel hemmed in. Driving is close to effortless.

  Between Nashville and Memphis lie the half-dozen interchanges serving the city of Jackson, among them Exit 82-A. Its ramp injects you onto southbound Highland Avenue and into a triple-canopy jungle of neon signage that for sheer ugliness, not to mention sensory overload, vies with the worst of the system's roughly fifteen thousand exits. You're surrounded by Waffle House, Taco Bell, Shoney's, Dairy Queen, Exxon, Pizza Hut, a Super 8 motel, Raceway Gas, LaQuinta Inn, an Executive Inn and Suites, and a Travelers Motel advertised with a flashing red neon arrow aimed at its roof. Strip-mall businesses hawk furniture, pet grooming, guitars; billboards and power lines fill the interchange's few visual blanks.

  Sight unseen, in 2008 I booked a room at Exit 82-A's Ramada Limited, a minimalist concrete and cinder-block inn perched on a bluff on Highland Avenue's east side, just behind the Shoney's. It was an awful place, with stained walls and cheap, mustard-yellow bedspreads and an overpowering bouquet of spray air freshener, and to its disadvantage, it offered a commanding view of the surroundings. My second-floor window looked onto the Shoney's rooftop air conditioners and satellite dishes; farther away, beyond the immediate craze of lights and traffic and the expressway's rumbling blur of red and white, lay the mercantile glut served by Exit 82-B, along northbound Highland—strip malls, chain restaurants, big-box stores.

  Jackson itself was a mile or two away. South on Highland, past the Old Hickory Mall and a mammoth hospital, a compact, red-brick downtown clustered around a dignified county courthouse. When I visited, a live band's country-rock covers were spilling onto a street busy with pedestrians, a good many of them, no doubt, students from Jackson's Union University.

  But that Jackson was invisible from I-40, and most of my fellow boarders at the Ramada Limited would miss it. Their impressions of the place would begin and end with 82-A—with a gateway that advertised not what set Jackson apart, but what made it indistinguishable from a thousand other towns: a no man's land of out-of-town brands in hideous profusion, at what could be any exit, on any interstate, in any part of the country.

  Thomas MacDonald and Herbert Fairbank didn't see it coming, but the system of interregional highways they envisioned is today a place unto itself, divorced from the territory through which it passes. With rare exception, a sense of place, of uniqueness, is undetectable from the off ramp. In place of a local barbecue joint, an exit in the Carolinas is likely to offer an Arby's or a Chik-fil-A. Southern greasy spoons are miles off the main line, shouldered aside by Waffle House and Cracker Barrel. The loathed hot-dog stand of the thirties has been replaced by McDonald's.

  We patronize these cookie-cutter enterprises without hesitation, for they perform the same function as the highways along which they cluster: they offer a predictable experience, devoid of surprise, pleasant or otherwise. We know the McDonald's coffee is good, so why go elsewhere? We know a Wendy's salad will satisfy, so why take the time and effort to find a homegrown restaurant? We know that Hampton Inn has clean rooms, good beds, and free self-serve breakfasts, and more often than not a chain restaurant just a short walk across the parking lot, so why hassle with a locally owned inn that isn't a sure thing? Why venture to a bona fide Mexican restaurant, when there's Taco Bell—which is certainly fast and filling, if nothing else?

&n
bsp; Interchanges have more in common with each other than any one of them has with wherever it happens to be. The twain have met; exit a California interstate, and you'll find what you left in Connecticut—and very little that you didn't leave in Connecticut. The interstates take a distillation of the broad American culture—a one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator reading of who we are and what we want—wherever they go.

  This may sound like a lament, and I suppose it is. But it's coming from one of the guilty. Faced with a cross-country drive, I'll almost always opt for the interstate, knowing that whatever I sacrifice in local flavor, in soul, I'll recoup in speed and safety. And at the end of a long day behind the wheel, I'm not much in the mood to reconnoiter a strange town in search of a decent mom-and-pop restaurant, if an Applebee's is aglow a few steps from my motel.

  I know that such a journey offers only a distant view of the America through which I pass. But it's easy; and some days, many days, that counts.

  For all of its flaws, which over the years have received no shortage of attention, the interstate system represents an epic achievement, which doesn't get nearly so much ink. In scale, for one thing. It includes fifty-five thousand bridges, all of them ambitious projects in their own right, some almost inconceivably so. The Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel carrying I-664 over the James River's mouth at Hampton Roads, Virginia, is 4 miles long and includes two man-made islands, a 3.2-mile trestle that rises 45 feet above the river's surface, and 4,800-foot twin tunnels that dive 45 feet below. A causeway carrying I-10 across Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp tops 18 miles in length. Florida's 5.5-mile Sunshine Skyway Bridge soars 175 feet over Tampa Bay.

  As engineers in Baltimore observed nearly fifty years ago, the interstates offer breathtaking vistas, particularly in America's cities. No views of Providence, Richmond, or Atlanta, of Dallas or Oklahoma City, top those from the elevated expressways skirting the business districts, and few skylines are as dramatic as that of St. Louis from I-70/64/55's Mississippi crossing, or of Pittsburgh from I-376.

  The system's nearly forty-seven thousand miles represent the greatest single investment that the American people have made in public works. The most expensive single project in the interstates—not part of the original network at all, but a correction of its mistakes—is Boston's "Big Dig," a monumental array of tunnels and bridges that replaced the elevated and justly maligned Central Artery. I-93 now courses under the city's middle, at a cost—interest included—of about $22 billion. That's more than twice what it cost to build the Panama Canal, in today's dollars.

  And we'll be pumping more money, a lot more money, into the network in the years to come—not so much to build new interstates as to maintain what we have. As Frank Turner observed in a 1986 speech, "Highways grow old and wear out at fairly predictable ages and life spans, and therefore must be replaced or restored."

  Case in point: In March 2008 a highway inspector discovered a crack, six feet long and growing fast, in a concrete pillar supporting I-95 on its winding, elevated course through Philadelphia. The wound was so deep and wide that it exposed the concrete's rebar guts, and it so alarmed state engineers that they promptly shut down two miles of the East Coast's principal highway in both directions.

  For two days, the eight-lane interstate's 184,000 daily users were detoured onto a couple of two-lane streets, a disruption so profound that the state urged travelers all through the East to find another route. Problem was, I-95 takes an awful lot of people where they want to go, and the alternate routes were ill equipped to handle the flood of cars and trucks that sought them out. The jams were titanic.

  The interstates are showing their age, and not just in Philly. Like America's streets, highways, and bridges in general, the roads have fallen victim to creeping neglect and the pounding of traffic unimagined by their builders. Frank Turner saw the dilemma coming. "The highway system has to be continually improved and replaced every minute of every day, and that is a large project in itself," he observed in 1996. "There is a life to a mile of highway, about thirty to thirty-five years, I would say, and the average age of the interstates' miles is getting to the point where overloads, cracks and other deterioration are all really showing."

  Even as he spoke those words, cash-strapped state governments were backing off the system's prescribed maintenance. They started letting cracks in concrete pavement go unpatched, and more time pass between resurfacings, and took to limiting the loads on weak bridges instead of overhauling or replacing them. They did this even as the demands placed on the system grew ever heavier. The interstates account for about 1 percent of the nation's road mileage but host a quarter of the nearly three trillion miles that Americans travel each year. More of the vehicles plying them are heavy trucks, which hammer bridges and pavements.

  It isn't difficult to find examples of slipping state maintenance. In the summer of 2008 I drove east across Iowa on I-80 and found the highway's pavement smooth and unblemished; the moment I crossed the Mississippi into Illinois, I encountered a road so badly cratered and cracked that "lunar" is only minor hyperbole for its condition. The steering wheel jerked and the suspension thumped; I felt compelled to drop my speed to below the limit. Ironically, this wasn't far west of the AASHO Road Test, the last remaining track of which lay just off the highway's south shoulder.

  Pretty much all of the interstates in Illinois are in rough shape. I can cite dozens of examples from other states, as well. I-95 from Philadelphia to Boston is potholed and debris-strewn. I-10 across Louisiana is a roller-coaster ride on buckled concrete. I-40 in Oklahoma, the midpoint of a major east-west trucking route, is disintegrating. All of Michigan's interstates are in rotten repair.

  "We're in pretty bad shape, frankly," former AASHTO president Tom Warne told me. "We're neglecting a system in which we've invested a great amount. We've been lulled into thinking it's always going to be here, always going to function for us. And it won't."

  One in four of the country's nearly six hundred thousand bridges is structurally deficient or obsolete. Most were designed to last fifty years. In 2008, they averaged forty-three years old. Most are on state and county routes and are subjected to relatively small loads. But not all—a fact brought into sharp focus on August 1, 2007, when an I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi at rush hour, taking thirteen lives and injuring hundreds. The accident resulted from a design flaw, not deterioration, but it came as a jolt, nonetheless. This wasn't some little country bridge. This was an interstate.

  Bringing the system into full repair, and keeping it there, will cost us dearly. One federal study suggested that all levels of government should spend a combined $225 billion a year for the next fifty years to rehabilitate surface transportation. They're currently spending just 40 percent of that, in a country that does 96 percent of its traveling by car and truck.

  What's at stake, ultimately, is a foundation of America's safety, economy, and mobility. And not making the fixes will wind up costing more. Left unaddressed, needed repairs balloon into needed reconstruction. "If we can get this work done now," said John Horsley, AASHTO's executive director, "it will cost one-third of what it'll cost if we put things off."

  Mary E. Peters, secretary of transportation under George W. Bush, likened the need to pony up serious money for highways to "what you and I would do with our homes. We're not going to wait to fix the roof until it's open to the weather."

  Compounding the challenge ahead is a slide in highway income. The Highway Trust Fund, shared among Federal Aid projects, mass transit, and a host of new uses since Frank Turner's retirement, remains largely dependent on the federal gasoline tax, and the nation's automotive mileage—and thus the gas it uses—has been falling since 2006. Part of the explanation for this decline is higher gas prices, which have curtailed the population's desire to roam. The fund's income also has been affected by more efficient cars, which though good for the environment have proved bad for roads—the cars cause as much wear as regular gas suckers
but don't contribute as much to the kitty. In any event, in the fall of 2008, for the first time in decades, the fund needed an $8 billion infusion to stay in the black.

  State highway officials thus are hunting for ways to do their jobs with less. One approach: Missouri transportation boss Pete K. Rahn reinvented the way his state planned and built highways, and found it's possible to both lower standards and preserve quality. Rahn's "Practical Design," which has been copied outright by two states and is being eyed by several others, aims "to not build perfect projects, but to build good projects that give you a good system," he told me, explaining: "The typical approach is to start a project with highest design standards, and you build as much to those standards as you can afford. Practical Design says start at the bottom of the standards and go up to meet the need, and when you meet the need, you stop."

  Put another way: "We wanted to see if we were building Lincolns when Fords would do," Rahn said. On some projects, old and new approaches achieve identical standards. On others, the differences are likely to be invisible. A highway through mountains might have a thinner bed of concrete where it rests on bedrock, for instance. A worn road might be patched, rather than reconstructed.

  In Pennsylvania, officials are beating the drum for "Smart Transportation," a program that calls on engineers to reexamine all of their assumptions about road building. "The old style was that if we had a road that was congested, we'd project the traffic out twenty-five years and add lanes to accommodate that future traffic," said Allen D. Biehler, the state's transportation secretary. "Well, guess what? We don't have enough money for that approach anymore."

  Thus, when Pennsylvania couldn't afford a long-planned, $465 million freeway in the northern Philadelphia suburbs, Biehler sought a cheaper alternative—and found it after brainstorming with communities along the 8.4-mile route: a smaller and more leisurely parkway, bordered with lawns, trees, and bike trails, and costing less than half as much.