by Earl Swift
[>] Joe Wiles spoke for many...: Reutter, "The East-West Expressway."
[>] Early in 1973, MAD...: James D. Dilts, "Coalition Sues to Block 3-A Expressway Plan," Sun, April 1, 1973.
[>] The final blow came...: Montgomery, "Baltimore's Abbreviated Interstate System."
[>] Public opposition to urban...: Juan Cameron, "How the Interstate Changed the Face of the Nation," Fortune, July 1971.
[>] Such was the rhetoric...: Fred Barnes, "Freeway Critics Come Under Fire," Washington Evening Star, June 1, 1972.
[>] Buses, on the other hand...: Frank Turner, "The Bus in Your Future," (Hackensack, NJ) Bergen Record, February 22, 1971; Frank Turner, "Mass Transit: Rail or Bus?" American Road Builder, January–!February 1973.
[>] And in September 1969...: "Insight: Francis C. Turner," Washington Post Magazine, February 3, 1986; Jack Eisen, "Express Bus Speeds Way to Old Slowdown," Washington Post, April 8, 1971; Fred Barnes, "Shirley Bus Boom Cuts Traffic," Washington Star, April 27, 1972.
[>] The lanes were a tremendous...: Jack Eisen, "New Lane Puts Bus Far Ahead in 'Race,'" Washington Post, June 9, 1971.
[>] "Buses are the answer...": Fred Brown, "U.S. Official Says Buses Solution to Transit Needs," Denver Post, May 26, 1971.
[>] "There is no doubt in my mind...": Turner, "The Bus in Your Future."
[>] The "infinite combinations...": Transcript, Turner speech to 90th annual meeting of the American Transit Association, Dallas, October 6, 1971 (FCT). For more on Turner's doubts about rail-based mass transit see Erich Blanchard, "New U.S. Roads Chief Says Subway Won't Cure Urban Ills," Washington Post, March 16, 1967; and Drew Marcks, "Mass Transit Overrated, Transportation Expert Says," Baltimore News American, October 5, 1973.
[>] His favorite whipping boy ...: Turner speech to the Road Gang, Washington, DC, November 1972. See also Turner, "A Quick Solution to Washington's Commuting Problem," American Road Builder, January 1974.
[>] Turner was almost religiously ...: "FHWA Chief Rips Proposals to 'Rob' Highway Trust Fund," Transport Topics, June 7, 1971.
[>] "I am a firm believer...": Transcript, Turner confirmation hearing.
[>] Back in 1962 ...: American Highways, January 1963.
[>] But even then ...: 2008 interviews with Turner's children and with family friend Gay Wilkes.
[>] In a June 21, 1972 ...: Letter reproduced in FHWA News, October 27, 1972 (FCT).
[>] His letter to Richard Nixon ...: Ibid.
[>] In March 1972 ...: Jack Eisen, "Volpe Urges Use of Road Fund for Improving Mass Transit," Washington Post, March 15, 1972.
[>] The president's reply ...: FHWA News, October 27, 1972 (FCT).
[>] He stumped for the protection ...: FCT papers.
[>] He toured Virginia ...: Ibid.
[>] He was among the organizers ...: Ibid.; interviews with Alan Pisarski and Peter Koltnow.
[>] Its twice-monthly ...: Turner speech to the Road Gang, Washington, DC, November 1972.
[>] As he'd feared ...: "A Breach of Trust," editorial, Dallas Morning News, September 15, 1972; "Senate Takes Historic Step: Highway Funds for Transit," editorial, Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 1972; "Transit Breakthrough,..." editorial, Washington Post, September 21, 1972; and "Highway Trust Fund Takes Off in New Direction," San Diego Union, September 30, 1973. Turner's "free ride" quote is from Geistlinger, "First Person: Frank Turner."
[>] Preserving the system ...: Turner, "Looking Ahead from Milepost 1984 at the Federal-Aid Highway Program," American Transportation Builder, Winter 1985.
[>] Likewise, Colorado officials ...: "Pressure Renewed in I-70 Controversy," Denver Post, April 5, 1971; and R. A. Prosence and J. L. Haley, "Glenwood Canyon Interstate 70: A Preliminary Design Process That Worked," Transportation Research Record 757 (1980).
[>] Never one to gloat ...: Joe Wiles's late years were described by his daughters.
[>] When he took the mike ...: Interview with Beverly Cooke; Pisarski, "The Frank Turner Story."
[>] Later that year ...: Marvin Turner interview. Frank Turner died on October 2, 1999.
[>] Between Nashville and Memphis ...: I visited Jackson, Tennessee, during a road trip with my daughter, Saylor, in late June 2008.
[>] The most expensive single ...: http://www.boston.com/beyond_bigdig/; Seth Stern, "$14.6 Billion Later, Boston's Big Dig Wraps Up," Christian Science Monitor, December 19, 2003.
[>] Case in point ...: The bulk of my discussion of the system's disintegrating infrastructure, including all of the quotes but Frank Turner's, is from research I conducted for a Parade cover story published under my byline on March 8, 2009; some of the quotes made it into the magazine, some didn't. The Turner quote is from a March 4, 1986, speech he delivered to the New Jersey Alliance for Action (FCT).
[>] Men in the auto business ...: Correspondence between Fisher, Roy Chapin, and Henry Joy in the papers of the latter two men (Bentley).
Footnotes
*. He was enough of a personage that when little Blackwell, Oklahoma, learned it had the nation's top roads man in its company, the town fathers treated him to meals and a hotel room, gave him a tour of county highways, and cashed several of his personal checks. Their visitor was long gone before they learned he was a fake.
[back]
***
* What's more, recent scientific papers suggest that Egypt's great pyramids might be made not of carved blocks of stone, as long thought, but of limestone-rich concrete cast in place.
[back]
***
*. Not only did gas taxes seem puny next to the progress they bankrolled, but their arrival coincided with drops in fuel prices. A gallon fell from almost 30 cents in 1920, on average, to less than 21 cents in 1924, and kept dropping; during the Depression, it would dip below 17.
[back]
***
*. An exception to the rule is U.S. 101 in California, which is considered a two-digit highway.
[back]
***
*. And especially " hot-dog stands," which, if you believe the literature of the day, must have occupied a tremendous share of the roadside; virtually every contemporary article on the problem cited the lowly hot-dog stand as a particularly foul menace.
[back]
***
* Which made perfect sense, if you believed some American engineers, because the autobahns relied on Yankee ingenuity. Its particulars, they said, were inspired by or borrowed from Robert Moses's New York parkways, the Woodbridge cloverleaf on the Lincoln Highway, and consultations with the bureau and state highway officials. This became a popular view immediately after the war, when there weren't many German engineers around to refute it. It wasn't heard so much in 1938.
[back]
***
*. Not willingly. Told he would be transferred, Turner listed Denver as his first choice and Fort Worth as his second—but only if he worked in the main office, and not one of the four state branches; life in Austin, Baton Rouge, Oklahoma City, or Little Rock, he wrote, " would not be very satisfactory from my viewpoint." Alas, Public Roads was no democracy.
[back]
***
* Turner argued for years that exits should be numbered according to their mileposts, too. A good many states disagreed, preferring sequential numbering. Not until 2009 did the feds mandate that Turner's approach would be a system standard; the seven states still numbering their exits in sequence were given until 2020 to make the switch.
[back]
***
* This is how senseless and arbitrary some load limits were: A half-dozen states had limits dating to the early twenties, when trucks ran on solid rubber tires. Those tires were thought capable of handling 800 pounds of load per inch of tread width, and the widest tires on the market measured fourteen inches across. That meant the maximum load per tire would be 11,200 pounds, and because an axle had a tire at each end, voilà—the laws capped loads at 22,400 pounds per axle. Unfortunately, while this might have preserved some truck tires, it did noth
ing to preserve roads. And by the 1950s, no truck had run on solid rubber in decades.
[back]
***
* Note that this was the first modern, indoor mall, though the concept of a shopping center ringed by parking lots, its storefronts turned away from the surrounding streets, dates to 1931, when Highland Park Village opened in suburban Dallas.
[back]
***
* Cookie-cutter design made rational budgeting possible, too; after all, how could you estimate the relative needs of the states if their product varied?
[back]
***
* Though the most familiar, Holiday Inn wasn't the first motel chain. In 1928, St. Louis–based Pierce Petroleum had attempted a network of roadside inns for travelers on the U.S. highways. The company operated gas stations at the time, as well as a few combination restaurant–gas station–bus terminals; the new venture seemed a natural progression. The first Pierce-Pennant Hotel opened in Springfield, Missouri, that July, and others followed in Columbia and Rolla and across the border in Oklahoma. But the motels—three or four stories tall, with garage parking and tasteful colonial-revival styling, down to their Currier and Ives prints—hemorrhaged cash, until Pierce came undone and sold all of its assets to Sinclair. That company ran the motels for a brief while until its losses halted the experiment.
[back]
***
* The post-riot period wasn't a proud time for highway men in general. In D.C., surveyors ventured up fire-blackened Seventh Street, in Washington's Northwest, almost before the ashes had cooled. Their thinking: Property values were at an all-time low. Buy real estate now, and the taxpayer got a bargain. As the New Republic shrieked, any agency that "could think, for a moment, of cutting through the heart of an angry black community and across the campus of [traditionally black] Howard University is a measure of its understanding of urban social values and current modes of resistance."
[back]
***
* He could have mentioned that he knew such pain—after all, he'd lost a piece of his house to one highway project, and his parents had lost all of theirs to another. He didn't bring it up, however.
[back]
