The Rise Of The Interstates

To see the dream, you could visit General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. As visitors glided through a scale-model world, a recorded voice murmured compelling promises in their ears. By 1960, it said, fourteen-lane expressways would carry traffic “at designated speeds of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles an hour.” The cars would enter and leave at high speed via sleek interchanges. “One marvels at the complete accord of this man-made highway with the breathtaking scenic beauty of its route,” the voice proclaimed. Futurama quickly became the fair’s most popular attraction.

Such highways hardly seem far-fetched today—even if the speed limit was set too high—but the reality in 1939, and for a number of years thereafter, was worlds different. It could be seen along a stretch of U.S. 1 between Baltimore and Washington. There the road was a four-lane highway, built as recently as 1930. Even though widespread use of turn signals was still years in the future, not only was the road undivided but cars were allowed to make left turns across traffic along the route’s entire length. This deficiency reflected the demands of local merchants, who had insisted that a center barrier and a ban on left turns would cut their business in half. The result, through the years, was a large number of collisions.

Nor was this all. Approximately a thousand driveways ran directly onto the main road, so drivers had to watch out for cars slowing unexpectedly for a turnoff or entering the highway without warning. The lanes were only ten feet wide, and the lack of a median barrier caused many head-on collisions on curves. Motels, hamburger joints, nightclubs, used-car lots, and the occasional house stood virtually at the roadway’s edge, often with signs that ran to the edge itself, tending to squeeze motorists even farther inward. Twenty-ton trucks added to the dangers. Yet this stretch of highway was part of the best America had to offer.

Between the reality and the dream lay new opportunities in road building that were already demonstrating their worth. The basic elements of Futurama’s freeways had been in use for more than a decade. These were the cloverleaf interchange, first built in 1928 at Woodbridge, New Jersey, and the parkway with a separating median between opposing directions of traffic, which dated to New York City’s Bronx River Parkway in 1922. In 1939 America’s first true freeways, the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway, were already under construction (part of the Merritt had already opened). An even more far-reaching venture abroad, the 1,260-mile network of German autobahns, offered roads of similar quality and had been under way since 1929. There was little doubt by 1939 that a similar array of highways could cover the United States. What was lacking was the money.

The obvious place to look for it was in Washington. The federal government had a longstanding record of involvement in road building. As early as 1916 Congress had authorized spending an initial $75 million for the purpose, with the proviso that state governments were to match the outlays dollar for dollar. In 1921 a congressional act allocated another $75 million for the next year alone, aeain to be matched fifty-fifty. The act’s language mandated “such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character.” These would include such routes as U.S. 1 up the East Coast, the legendary Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, Highway 61 northward from New Orleans, and U.S. 30, the transcontinental Lincoln Highway. But through the 1920s and 1930s there was still no hint of a national network of roads that could accommodate large volumes of traffic at high speeds. Long-distance travelers had to contend with whatever the various states and localities along their routes had managed to come up with, and conditions in some places were virtually unchanged since the dawn of the automobile.

The first stirrings of interest in a major system of multilane divided highways arose during the Depression, when their construction was touted as a public-works effort that would provide jobs. In 1938 the Senate considered but rejected a plan for an $8 billion network of toll highways. Then, during the following year, Thomas MacDonald, chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, began promoting a plan for a 30,000-mile system of expressways. Two years later President Roosevelt appointed the seven-member Interregional Highway Committee to work with MacDonald and to plan for road construction after the war.

MacDonald and his committee drew up a proposed interstate-highway map, whose roads ran to 32,000 miles. It bore an extremely close resemblance to today’s network of interstates. All the major north-south routes were on the 1941 map, very nearly where we see them now. Their designations then lay decades in the future, but we would recognize them as I-15, 25, 35, 55, 75, and 95. The same is true of the principal east-west routes, today’s I-10, 40, 70, and 80. The path of the future New York Thruway showed clearly, as did a triangle joining Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston, along with another triangle linking Atlanta, Birmingham, and Montgomery. There is even close correspondence in some of the fine detail: the future I-4 as a spur route to Tampa, the eventual I-25 jogging eastward near Albuquerque.

Some sections were missing, to be sure. There was no Massachusetts Turnpike. Today’s I-25 was to run only as far north as Cheyenne, instead of extending across Wyoming to meet I-90; I-70 was to go west only to Denver, instead of joining I-15 in Utah. But in a nation with barely half its current population, and concentrated far more than today in the Northeast and Midwest, the 1941 map would prove a remarkably accurate guide to the highway routes of the next half-century.

Congress made no immediate move to fund the ambitious plan. Then, in 1943, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) began lobbying for a bill that would provide a billion dollars a year for road construction. The AASHO called for a network of expressways similar to MacDonald’s totaling 40,000 miles, with Uncle Sam to provide three-fourths of the construction cost not only for this new system but for a host of other roads as well. The final bill, passed late in 1944, indeed took note of this network, which it christened the National System of Interstate Highways. But the bill provided only half the money the AASHO had sought and divided it entirely among conventional road projects. If any of these new interstate highways were to be built, then, the states would have to do the job.

The war was not long over before several states began to take the necessary initiatives. The preferred approach was the tollway, to be built with funds from the sale of state-issued bonds, with the bonds’ principal and interest to be paid from the tolls. Maine was the first; in 1947 the 47-mile Maine Turnpike opened between Portsmouth and Portland. During the next two years Pennsylvania sold bonds to finance eastward and westward extensions of its own turnpike. That route had originally covered only 160 miles; when the extensions were completed, in 1950 and 1951, it reached 327 miles to span the entire state. Also in 1950 a bond issue launched what would set the pace for postwar tollways: the New Jersey Turnpike.

This $255 million, 118-mile route took shape with remarkable speed, even though parts of it ran through cities and swampland. In Elizabeth some 240 buildings were torn down or moved to clear the needed swath, with little opposition. In crossing the Passaic River, the highway soared to a height of 110 feet above water level. Near Linden the builders had to move tanks and pipelines within an oil refinery without hindering plant operations. One of the biggest challenges came in hundred-foot-deep marshland near Secaucus. Engineers drove forests of twenty-inch pipe into the muck, through several layers of silt and down to the bottom of the soft clay. They filled the pipes with sand, then covered the right of way with dirt and pulled out the pipes. This left free-standing columns of sand, which acted as wicks. The weight of the dirt squeezed water from the bogs, causing the land to settle by as much as twelve feet. With the water removed, the sand columns and the layer of dirt provided a solid foundation for the roadbeds. The result was a highway with no grade greater than 3 percent, curves designed to be handled at speeds up to 70 mph, and, to combat drowsiness among motorists, no straight-away longer than three miles.

The turnpike opened early in 1952 and was an immediate success. It cost $1.75 in tolls for its full length, roughly matching the cost of gasoline for the trip. But it cut the time to drive its route, New York City to Wilmington, Delaware, from five hours to two. It eased the wear and tear on autos and drivers alike while boosting gas mileage. Within months turnpike officials found to their delight that traffic was 51 percent higher than expected, and revenues were 21 percent higher. Soon these officials would be proceeding with improvements they had not expected to pursue until far in the future, while making plans to pay off the bondholders years ahead of schedule.

This success was highly encouraging to people in other states who were promoting or pursuing similar tollways. In June 1952, with the success of New Jersey’s project clear, Ohio floated a $326 million bond issue to finance its own turnpike. The New York Thruway, another toll route, was already seeing its first concrete, and Indiana commissioners soon announced that they would build their own route to link up with Ohio’s. In a matter of months, then, motorists could see a dazzling prospect: Through a combination of routes already completed, under construction, and planned, they would be able to drive from New England to Chicago without encountering a single stoplight.

Tollways were by far the most striking achievement of the road-building trade during the first postwar decade. But even their proponents knew they could not be more than a small part of a total system of interstate highways. Because they were financed by bonds, they could be built only where traffic was heavy enough to generate the needed revenues, and in the mid-1950s traffic engineers estimated that no more than 9,000 miles of highway could pay for themselves through tolls.

Since tollways could represent only the cream of the nation’s highway routes—the most heavily traveled and the most quickly constructed—the prospect of financial disaster lurked in any route that might fall outside the golden miles. That is what happened in West Virginia, where an 88-mile turnpike was initially planned as a four-lane divided highway. When investment bankers balked at the proposed cost, the state’s commissioners cut back the project to a two-lane road, sold $96 million in bonds, and began construction. The design change quickly brought protests and a lawsuit, which mercifully was resolved in months rather than years. Even so, the two-lane route soon demanded another $37 million in bonds.

The turnpike opened amid great fanfare in November 1954, with proponents hailing it as a link between the Midwest and the Southeast. The engineering firm of Coverdale & Colpitts, which had carried out numerous surveys of toll-road traffic, estimated that in 1955 the turnpike would bring in $5.24 million in tolls. Actual revenue for that year fell short by $2.5 million, mostly through the reluctance of truckers to go out of their way for the privilege of paying a toll. By the end of that year, West Virginia Turnpike bonds were trading at nearly thirty points below their offering price.

But while West Virginia’s unhappy story was unfolding, a far more significant set of events was taking place in Washington, D.C. In April 1954 President Elsenhower directed two of his top officials—his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, and Arthur Burns, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers—to find ways to speed up the federal highway program. The Korean War had ended, and the time was right for such an initiative. Ike’s intention was to pursue a program that would cost as much as a war; in his words, he was seeking “a ‘dramatic’ plan to get 50 billion dollars worth of self-liquidating highways under construction.” These roads would pay for their construction through motorists’ taxes.

The entire federal budget in 1954 was $71 billion, and people spoke of $50 billion somewhat the way we would speak of a trillion dollars today. So Ike picked as a key adviser on highways a man who was accustomed to thinking in sweeping terms: Gen. Lucius Clay, one of his wartime commanders in Europe. Clay would head up a committee to develop a specific plan.

Late in 1954 Clay was ready with his proposal. The interstate highways would receive $25 billion, with their construction to take place during the decade 1955-64. Substantial sums would also be allocated for other roads. The $25 billion would be raised largely through a sale of bonds, with interest at 3 percent, to be issued by a new Federal Highway Corporation. Their principal and interest, in turn, would be covered entirely through income from existing gasoline taxes. Indeed, because traffic would increase, this arrangement would prove so lucrative that the federal government could cover 90 percent of the construction costs. State governments would have to put up less than $3 billion.

The plan drew opposition from Harry Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who saw the proposed bonds as a trick to allow the government to borrow money while keeping the borrowings separate from the national debt. Deficit financing of any type was anathema to Byrd, much more so if its nature was concealed. Faced with such opposition, a bill incorporating Clay’s plan went down to congressional defeat in July 1955.

However, Byrd was quite willing to support an alternative: pay-as-you-go financing. This had long been the favored approach at the federal level; the 1944 highway act had been pay-as-you-go, as had a host of other such enactments. The funds collected for allocation under such laws had always gone for legislators’ favorite conventional roads and highways, which often turned out to be pork-barrel projects. But the flood of new tax money accompanying the expected increase in traffic would be enough to pay for not only conventional roads but the new interstates as well.

This idea was the basis for what became the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the work of Representatives George Fallon and Hale Boggs. In the words of the historian Mark Rose, “the key to success was promising something for everyone without imposing high taxes on truckers.” A principal feature of the act was the establishment of the Highway Trust Fund, which would receive all federal gasoline and automotive taxes. By law, all money in this fund was to be spent on roads and highways, thus addressing a long-standing complaint: that the federal government received more income from these taxes than it spent on roads, with the balance being diverted into general expenditures.

The taxes would rise under this act: from two to three cents a gallon on motor fuel, from five to eight cents per pound on tires, from 8 to 10 percent excise tax on new trucks, buses, and trailers. But these, along with other minor imposts, drew little opposition. In return there would be abundant sums for roads of all types. For the new interstates Washington would pay 90 percent of the cost. Yet state highway departments would have the right to choose their routes, with no fear of being overruled by a federal agency. And the entire package would indeed be pay-as-you-go. The combination was irresistible; in June 1956 the bill swept to passage by voice vote in the House and by an 89-1 margin in the Senate.

The phrase interstate highways was already in use. It referred to a set of existing U.S. highways designated in 1947 as a result of recommendations from state highway departments. These routes served 209 of 237 cities with populations of more than 50,000 and had a total length of 37,600 miles. Outside the cities they included only a little more than 1 percent of the nation’s total mileage, yet they were carrying 20 percent of all rural traffic. In the cities the designated roadways constituted 2 percent of all streets and avenues while carrying 11 percent of urban traffic. These highways, the nation’s major trunk lines, would represent the point of departure for the new system.

Contemporary accounts stated that these existing routes would be “modernized completely” or “largely rebuilt” or would undergo “reconstruction.” Such phrases reflected the expectation that much road building would consist of upgrading existing two-lane routes and then building another set of lanes on the other side of a median strip. The Clay report, however, had stated that “on a considerable portion of the interstate network, especially in urban and suburban areas, it will be more economical to relocate than to acquire the additional land necessary to permit control of access.” This meant that the new interstates would largely replace the old system, reducing those U.S. highways in many cases to little more than local roads.

Indeed, the new interstates would differ dramatically from any of America’s existing roads other than major tollways. The Baltimore-Washington stretch of U.S. 1, for instance, ran for thirty miles and had cost $1.76 million to build. The new interstates soon would cost an average of more than a million dollars a mile. This was mostly due not to inflation but to the fact that they represented a very different type of construction. Old-style highways had pavement 4 to 5 inches thick. It cracked and degraded under heavy traffic. The new ones would have pavement 9 to 10 inches thick, atop a prepared roadbed that by itself could be as much as 50 inches deep. Rights of way would be up to 300 feet wide, to provide ample room for future expansion. Earth moving would take place on a heroic scale. Along the route from San Francisco to Sacramento, for instance, designers wanted to link up with an existing bridge across the Carquinez Strait. A 500-foot hill lay in the path, and an existing highway and railroad ran meekly along its base. For the new route, however, engineers boldly ripped out a gash 360 feet deep and nearly half a mile long. This was described in 1957 as the biggest man-made cut since the Panama Canal.

The construction equipment itself was on the same scale. Some two dozen types of heavy machinery were in standard use: power shovels, excavators, large-capacity dump trucks, bulldozers, graders, mobile plants for mixing materials. There also was a paver that straddled an entire roadbed and laid down concrete at a rate of eight to ten feet a minute. It would scoop up paving material dumped in its path and spread it in a layer up to eight inches thick over a grid of reinforcing steel rods that itself sat on several inches of concrete. One witness described the paver as a “giant, ungainly spider … spinning its strand of highway.”

The work sped along. No Golden Spike ceremony marked the date, but slightly more than a century after completion of the first transcontinental railroad, it became possible to drive from New York to San Francisco without encountering a stoplight. The new freeways, however, were not entirely free. Existing toll roads such as the New York Thruway had been incorporated into the system, giving it an instant 2,100 miles of completed interstate. And freeways were not uniformly popular in rural areas. Farmers sometimes found themselves driving miles out of their way to find an interchange merely to get to their acres on the other side of the right of way. If their inconvenience was great enough, as determined in lawsuits or other proceedings, highway commissioners would often build a small underpass.

People who lived near interstates were also mollified by rapidly escalating prices for their land, which they could sell to developers. This represented a turnabout from earlier days, when a railroad had a “wrong side of the tracks” downwind of its soot and when buildings adjacent to the line deteriorated. Instead, the new freeways emerged as major catalysts for growth and development. Property values soared: by a factor of 87 during 12 years along a route near San Francisco and by a factor of 20 during a 28-year period along New York City’s Grand Central Parkway.

Industrialists also were quick to appreciate the freeways’ advantages. Near Boston one stretch of what would become 1-95 had 39 firms in June 1955; by September 1958 there were 209. By 1959 a syndicate was planning to build 200,000 houses along New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway. At about the same time, a state report declared that at least $650 million in new development had resulted from the construction of the New York Thruway, including a $28 million electronics center built by General Electric in Syracuse. Company officials said the thruway would act as a pipeline, bringing in raw materials and taking out finished products to the markets of the Northeast.

Motels sprouted alongside the new routes. The columnist Raymond Moley, writing in 1964, recalled that only a few years earlier “in certain seasons, too often after 4:00 P.M. , there were ‘No Vacancy’ signs. This meant more miles, even hours, of driving after a long day before there was room for the night. Practically none had restaurants and this meant another trip, after checking in, for supper in a nearby town.” The new motels—some 20,000 were built between 1951 and 1964 —came with restaurants attached and often with the opportunity to make reservations through a central office.

Freeways also reduced corruption in law enforcement. As late as 1965 two dozen states still permitted a “judge,” who might be a grocer, a farmer, or even the local beautician, to be paid from traffic fines. Some of them were earning $20,000 a year meting out “justice,” at a time when wages and salaries averaged a third of that. Towns set their own speed limits and often operated speed traps with ridiculously low limits that gave the police wide opportunities to pick their victims. The freeways, by contrast, maintained uniform limits across entire states, with 70 mph a standard before the gasoline crisis of 1974. This drove the speed traps out of business.

In the cities freeway construction became highly controversial. This was ironic, for cities had been early centers for the building of major expressways. Los Angeles had set the pace during the first postwar decade, leading with its 1940s-era Arroyo Seco Freeway. After the war the city launched a total of seven other expressways, linking five of its routes at a four-level interchange. During the 1950s the city plan grew to project 1,200 miles of such routes by 1980, with the major ones spaced every four miles to form a grid.

Chicago was another early starter, with its Edens and Calumet freeways in use by 1952. Another one, the eight-lane Congress Street Expressway (now called the Elsenhower Expressway), was routed through a 120-foot-wide tunnel in the main post office, thoughtfully provided by its builders in 1933. Boston built its Central Artery, Detroit its Edsel B. Ford and John C. Lodge freeways. Cleveland, Dallas, and Portland, Oregon, were also among the pioneers. All had routes open or well along in construction by 1955.

In a few years, however, a number of city officials were having second thoughts. Los Angeles in 1960 was blithely assuming that its 1,200-mile grid would be completed by 1980, though in fact the actual construction fell well short. Even under that sanguine assumption, however, S. S. Taylor, general manager of the Los Angeles traffic department, declared in 1961 that “by 1980, the traffic in excess of what the freeways can handle is expected to be greater than the total present traffic. Unless we provide relief on our surface streets, and with mass transit, by 1980 metropolitan Los Angeles may well have worse traffic conditions than exist today.”

Other cities’ forecasts were equally gloomy. In Atlanta the Metropolitan Planning Commission predicted that “without rapid transit by 1970, we would need 120 express lanes radiating to and from central Atlanta, and a 28-lane downtown connector.” A similar study in Washington, D.C., predicted that if the city tried to follow the lead of Los Angeles, by 1980 it would need an 18-lane superhighway leading out of the central business district, along with many 10-, 12-, and 14-lane routes crisscrossing the city.

Such studies gave new heart to the freeway builders’ opponents, who deeply resented the disruptions the roads brought to their lives and communities. If cities could not build themselves out of traffic jams, if freeways could never solve the traffic problem, why build them at all? At the end of the 1960s, when opposition to freeways was particularly rampant, Francis Turner, chairman of the Federal Highway Administration, listed sixteen major cities where freeway construction was meeting serious difficulty. All told, only 134 miles were under challenge, but just as a single large pothole can shut down a road, a single uncompleted mile could disrupt an integrated system of urban routes.

Among freeway opponents, San Francisco and New York City would emerge as particularly fierce battlegrounds. As San Francisco’s mayor in 1966, John Shelley, later recalled, his city’s Embarcadero Freeway, the focus of the opposition, “was first conceived as a one-deck, six-lane elevated.” Later estimates of traffic demand “forced the six-lane structure to be expanded into an eight-lane structure, which had to be double-decked to avoid taking of more land for right-of-way. The structure was so large that it was soon known amongst its critics as the concrete monster.”

The Embarcadero was to be built along the waterfront, and critics, incensed that it would block views not only of the bay but of historic buildings, launched what came to be called the Freeway Revolt. In 1959 the city’s board of supervisors bowed to their demands and invoked a California law that permitted a city to veto such construction. That left the partly completed Embarcadero literally hanging in midair. Then in 1966, faced with the issue of approving two other proposed freeways, the supervisors scheduled what Time magazine called “the wildest freeway hearing in memory at City Hall.” As forty-one protest groups made their voices heard, the board debated and then voted 6-5 to keep the views and let the traffic pile up.

The city and East Bay by then were well under way in the construction of an alternative: the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. The result of the 1966 vote meant that San Francisco would have no freeway link to its Golden Gate Bridge. Instead, motorists would continue to make their way through city traffic. San Francisco thus achieved a curious kind of distinction among freeway opponents: It was the only city in the United States to say no to freeways and to embrace alternatives to the automobile.

In New York the situation was different, for the issue of a new freeway was thrust upon the city in a most sudden and unpleasant way. In December 1973 the West Side Highway, a six-lane elevated route that had been in service since before World War II, collapsed near Twelfth Street, pitching two vehicles to the street below. The city shut the highway down south of Forty-sixth Street, later demolishing that stretch of roadway. To replace it, developers proposed a massive project called Westway, which would feature a vast landfill along the Hudson River, four miles long and up to six hundred feet wide. Some of this would be made into a park, and a large part would be valuable riverfront land. A new six-lane interstate, replacing the West Side Highway, would run beneath the landfill.

Opponents were quick to gather, protesting that Westway would increase air pollution and use money that might be better spent on improving the city’s subways. They filed suit, and as the litigation proceeded, it became apparent that they would lose on these issues. But lawsuits often take on a life of their own, and Westway supporters found in time that they were vulnerable on an entirely different issue. The landfill was to replace Manhattan’s rotting piers, which by themselves would draw few supporters. But those piers proved to be highly significant as a habitat for the striped bass, described by Sports Illustrated as “the most glamorous game fish on the northeastern coast” and “the basis of a $100 million-a-year recreational industry.”

The trial judge, Thomas Griesa, concluded indignantly in 1982 that the two government agencies chiefly responsible for Westway had fudged data to play down the piers’ significance. At one point in the trial he declared, “I have sentenced people to prison for securities fraud where the content was less blatant than the drafting of these instruments.” Westway, as proposed, was prohibited by court order.

With Westway headed for defeat and the Freeway Revolt fresh in mind, it was easy for pundits in the early 1980s to conclude that freeways were dead and an era had ended. It was certainly true that few city networks would go through without major changes, as route sections were relocated in the plans, redesigned, and often dropped altogether. It was equally true that many cities might follow San Francisco’s example by building new mass-transit systems, and the resulting mix of freeways and subways would often work much better than either alone. Yet the controversies over freeways tended to obscure a central point: They had been proposed to solve cities’ transportation problems, and by and large they had at least made those problems manageable. The burgeoning high-rise districts in dozens of downtowns were ample rebuttal to those who were proclaiming the decline of cities.

Moreover, the basic concept of the freeway proved flexible enough to be adjusted to meet changing demands. Some of that flexibility had been built in at the start, with wide rights of way to provide for future expansion and basic designs that would readily allow the conversion of a two-lane route into one with four lanes or, in Chicago, allow subway tracks to run down a median. Other modifications emerged as a response to the critics.

Was it true that freeways were, in the words of the National Urban League, “white men’s roads through black men’s bedrooms”? This complaint reflected the tendency to route expressways through minority areas of cities, where land and buildings were least expensive. People along the routes often faced difficulty in finding affordable replacement housing.

An early federal response, before 1970, provided above-market payments for condemned dwellings. Replacement housing that would provide hot water, adequate plumbing, a refrigerator, and a working heating plant had to be available. U.S. News & World Report slated in 1969 that for some innercity dwellers, “relocation means better housing than they have ever known, and for the States it means bills that some claim they can’t afford.” Then in 1981 the builders of Los Angeles’s Century Freeway went further. In a consent decree that settled issues raised by opponents, these officials agreed to implement a $300 million program that would build, relocate, and rehabilitate a total of 3,700 homes and apartments. This meant that the builders would not merely provide funds with which people could seek new housing but would take responsibility for providing it outright.

Were freeways an affront to the environment? In New Hampshire I-93 provided a dramatic example of how engineers could reach a compromise even in a highly sensitive area. The route was to pass through scenic Franconia Notch, which features a natural granite profile called the Old Man of the Mountains, so much a symbol of the state that it appears on its license plates. A standard four-lane design would have meant cutting into the side of the mountain. The compromise involved upgrading an existing three miles of two-lane road that already ran through the Notch, while adding parking lots for sightseers. The state got its freeway, and the environmentalists won full protection for one of their most cherished treasures.

Did freeways encourage individual drivers to use their cars wastefully while discouraging buses and car pools? This issue has been addressed, near Washington, D.C., and in California, by building high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. These are restricted during rush hours to multi-passenger vehicles, and those who use them often find themselves proceeding at full speed while single-passenger traffic in adjacent lanes remains badly clogged. Indeed, I-66 near Washington is set aside entirely for high-occupancy traffic during hours of heavy use. For many commuters it is the most convenient route into northern Virginia, but they cannot use it unless they join a car pool.

Thirty-five years after passage of the Interstate Highway Act, then, the nation’s freeways can be counted among America’s successes. Even the opposition they drew, in San Francisco, New York, and other cities, was in a sense part of this success, for it showed that transportation problems were sufficiently well in hand that citizens could pay more attention to neighborhood preservation and the protection of scenic views. Across the decades these expressways had recapitulated the achievements of the railroad builders of the previous century. They were what the nation needed, what we paid for and built. And they worked.