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Interstate Highways as a Long-Haul Project

A highway in Utah. ENLARGE
A highway in Utah. Getty Images/Vetta

At some point this summer you will find yourself on a distant interstate, staring ahead at rolling miles of brake lights wondering why traffic has inexplicably come to a grinding halt. There won't be anything you can do about it, but those in search of an overall explanation for our national traffic nightmare might want to pass the time reading Earl Swift's "The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways." A more concise alternative to the windy title of this sprawling book might have been "Construction Ahead: Expect Delays."

Without question, America's vast highway system is an engineering marvel. From faint outlines left by Indian hunting parties tracking deer and elk, to Pony Express routes, to westering pioneer trails and railroad lines, Mr. Swift writes, grew a 47,000-mile network that, as a public-works project dwarfs "Egypt's pyramids, the Panama Canal and China's Great Wall" combined.

There may be no better example of a national undertaking that bestowed so many benefits—improved communications, better proximity to educational opportunities, cheaper commerce and greater national security—while simultaneously creating as many liabilities: pollution, rural billboard blight, soaring auto deaths and urban destruction.

The Big Roads

By Earl Swift
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 375 pages, $27

Mr. Swift, a veteran newspaper reporter, selects his trailblazers wisely. The earliest is Carl Graham Fisher, an Indianapolis entrepreneur, race-car driver, publicist and all-round whack job. Fisher's initial interest in clearing the country's streets of mud and horse manure had more to do with promoting his bicycle business than public service, but the "Good Roads" movement he founded would draw in America's new "autoists" as well as eager-to-please politicians nationwide. By 1916 the auto industry had cranked out 3.37 million cars and Fisher's movement launched the Lincoln Highway—named for the "Great Martyred Patriot"—a "rock" thoroughfare planned for coast-to-coast travel. The savvy promoter, now a car dealer, was calling the shots and it was his way or no highway.

As the Lincoln developed, so too did other regions of the country begin building their own versions, like the Jefferson Davis Highway (intended to reach from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco by way of New Orleans but never completed), the Lakes to Gulf Highway (Duluth, Minn., to Galveston, Texas) and the coast-to-coast Old Trails Road. An automobile network began to emerge of mainly dirt and gravel byways, but road trips weren't for sissies. Mr. Swift notes that one engineer recommended that travelers carry, among many other things, "an ax, shovel, and four-foot hardwood planks, fifty feet of rope and sixteen of cable . . . a pile of cooking and camping gear and 'possibly a small pistol of some sort.' "

Another of the author's visionaries is engineer Thomas MacDonald, the brilliant and methodical, but utterly humorless, head of he National Highway Commission. It fell to MacDonald in 1919 to make passable this tangled continental grid that included every kind of obstacle, from snowbound mountains and raging rivers to "gumbo" mud in Iowa and briny tar beneath the salt flats of Utah. Seemingly by a combination of ingenuity and dearth of personality, MacDonald succeeded in bringing about the Federal Highway Act of 1921, the first, coherent plan for the nation's future roads.

The plan also eventually brought trucks and tourists by the millions, many of whom set up shop along the new roadsides. Filling stations, hot-dog stands, campgrounds and "mo-tels" by the hundreds flourished. Which, naturally, attracted more traffic. "By late 1920s," Mr. Swift writes, "you measured your progress by obscenities more than miles."

Over the next decades urban planners, including Robert Moses, and their critics, such as Lewis Mumford, would argue over how best to fight the blight of Stuckey's shops, "motor slums" and suburban sprawl. One New York traffic jam in the 1950s extended 84 miles, from the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson to Monticello, N.Y. "With all those new people came traffic that surpassed the wildest imaginings of highway officials and city planners," the author writes. "In 1949 it topped the forecasts for 1960."

The solution, as always, was to keep building more roads—and faster. Neighborhoods were wiped out or bifurcated to make way for expressways in New York, Chicago and New Orleans, displacing thousands. (Mr. Swift pays particular attention to Baltimore's uprooting of a vibrant African-American community.) In 1963, the California State Division of Highways proposed setting off 22 atomic bombs in the Bristol Mountains to make way for the I-40 to Barstow—a 36% savings over normal engineering methods! Leveler heads prevailed.

As Mr. Swift's book shows, there was no one grand ribbon-cutting highway act that launched the great family station-wagon trips many of us remember. Development was far more complicated, and perhaps duller. It is not to this book's advantage that the history of the American highways is often the history of bureaucratic squabbling, between state governments, between states and their own municipalities, between the federal government and just about everybody. One can only admire Mr. Swift's diligence at combing through decades of endless highways bills. But caution: The results may induce highway hypnosis in some readers.

The author also does not make altogether clear why Americans kept buying cars at such a phenomenal rate, particularly in the 1920s, when the nation's roads were still so deplorable that there really wasn't anywhere to go. Finally, it's hard to imagine why the book's editors would release it without a sequence of maps to help the reader navigate this circuitous history. It's a book about roads, right?

Still, Mr. Swift's style is easy-going, his outlook politically unbiased: He is as much appalled by the sterile sameness of American interstates today as he is in awe of the ease they provide. He can be a funny writer as well, particularly on the topic of the official name for the U.S. transportation network, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. It turns out that Ike had almost nothing to do with any of it.

The American road has a life cycle of its own. Route 66, the storied 2,400-mile Chicago-to-Los Angeles route, is largely bypassed now and season-by-season slips deeper into the weeds. The newer superhighways, with their thousands of bridges, overpasses and vast cloverleaf ramps, are crumbling from neglect, according to Mr. Swift. Ironically, the coming generation of fuel-stingy green automobiles will be as tough on roads as conventional cars but won't contribute enough in federal gas taxes to maintain the surfaces they use.

In 1915, the first Lincoln Highway guidebook warned the fledgling autoist that "one must expect and put up cheerfully with some unpleasantness" on the road. For anyone inching along in traffic this summer, that may still be the best advice.

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