On this day in 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, the piece of legislation that led to the creation of America’s current highway system.
Governments had talked about building a network of highways stretching across the country as far back as the 1930s, when FDR wondered about making an interstate network part of his New Deal. “The resulting legislation was the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, which directed the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads... to study the feasibility of a six-route toll network,” writes the Our Documents Initiative. “But with America on the verge of joining the war in Europe, the time for a massive highway program had not arrived.”
Eisenhower was a leader in promoting the interstate system, having seen what could be accomplished by a national system of highways during his career in the military, which took him to Germany. It was one of the biggest public works projects in American history, and it changed the country forever. Here are three key places that happened:
Towns and Cities
“Because of the 1956 law, and the subsequent Highway Act of 1958, the pattern of community development in America was fundamentally altered and was henceforth based on the automobile,” writes the Our Documents project.
America was reorganized around a system of highways that had their own language–for example, odd-numbered interstates run north-south, counting up from west to east.
“Small towns that were bypassed by the highways withered and died,” writes Brandon Keim for Wired. “New towns flourished around exits. Fast food and motel franchises replaced small businesses.”
At the same time, the interstates made travel in and out of American cities simpler, speeding the growth of the suburbs.
Shipping Corridors
Driving down many interstate highways, particularly at night, comes with a familiar sight: a cavalcade of eighteen-wheelers pulling food and goods across the country.
The interstate system, along with the shipping container, which was also invented in the 1950s, helped produce this reality, writes Justin Fox for Fortune. “Thanks to the new road network and containers that could easily be moved from ship to train to truck, overseas manufacturers and domestic upstarts were able to get their products to market in the U.S. more quickly than ever before,” Fox writes. “New distribution networks arose that were vastly more efficient and flexible than the old.”
American Culture
“By making roads more reliable and by making Americans more reliant on them, they took away most of the adventure and romance associated with driving,” writes Fox.
America’s love affair with the car, which begun in the very early 1900s, became a marriage of convenience, he writes. While earlier in American history, driving was portrayed as an excursion that involved skill and might have some degree of unpredictability, the interstates imposed a system of standardized landscape across the country–same wide roads, same rules, for the most part even the same signs.
The ambivalence people felt about this new system is visible in the protests that sprang up to the interstate: "in the 1960s, activists stopped construction on highways in New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans," writes Emily Becker for Mental Floss, "which resulted in several urban interstates becoming roads to nowhere."
But it wasn't just protest: the interstates changed how American lived, provoking a fierce nostalgia from writers and those who loved pre-interstate American car culture.
“When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must,” wrote John Steinbeck in 1962, “it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
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There was once a time when most Americans took streetcars to work every day. Nowadays, 85 percent of workers drive.
And although a few different factors fueled this transition, the biggest one may have been a $425 billion investment over half a century in the world's most advanced network of highways: the Interstate Highway System.
The 48,000 miles of interstate highway that would be paved across the country during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s were a godsend for many rural communities. But those highways also gutted many cities, with whole neighborhoods torn down or isolated by huge interchanges and wide ribbons of asphalt. Wealthier residents fled to the suburbs, using the highways to commute back in by car. That drained the cities' tax bases and hastened their decline.
Downtown Minneapolis in 1953, versus today. (Shane Hampton/University of Oklahoma)
So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them? The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism.
"There was an immense amount of funding that would go to local governments for building freeways, but they had little to no influence over where they'd go," says Joseph DiMento, a law professor who co-wrote Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways. "There was also a racially motivated desire to eliminate what people called 'urban blight.' The funds were seen as a way to fix the urban core by replacing blight with freeways."
How freeways became "free"
(US Congress)
The roots of the interstate system go back to the 1930s, when General Motors, AAA, and other industry groups formed the National Highway Users Conference to influence federal transportation policy.
These groups realized the nation's transportation system needed to be reframed entirely — as a public responsibility. After all, most cities had just ripped up their streetcar networks because they were privately owned systems that weren't making money. The auto industry didn't want the same thing to happen to highways. So "there was a really successful effort by people with a stake in the automotive industry to characterize road-building as a public responsibility," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.
The first step was changing how roads were funded. In the 1930s, there were already privately owned toll roads in the East, and some public toll highways, like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, were under construction. But auto groups recognized that funding public roads through taxes on gasoline would allow highways to expand much more quickly.
They also decided to call these roads "free roads," a term that was later replaced by "freeways." Norton argues that this naming shift was essential in persuading the federal government — and the public — to shift away from tolls. "It started with calling the roads drivers pay for 'toll roads,' and calling the ones that taxpayers pay for 'free roads,'" he says. "Of course, there's no such thing as a free road."
Those terms were officially enshrined in a 1939 congressional planning document called "Toll Roads and Free Roads" that roughly outlined what would become the interstate system for the first time.
Even though gas taxes have never fully paid for highways — a recent Public Interest Research Group report found they've covered between 43 and 74 percent of costs through the interstate system's history — the widespread perception that highways and freeways are somehow self-funding has stuck around.
(US PIRG)
The design of the Interstate system
Around the same time, auto industry groups began envisioning an ambitious network of wide, smooth highways, accessible only by on-ramps, that would crisscross the country.
These highways would link distant cities but also thread through downtowns, allowing people to drive as quickly as possible from home to work and back. This vision was distilled in a massive, one-acre diorama GM built for the 1939 World's Fair in New York called Futurama:
The future, according to GM. (Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images)
World War II delayed progress in this highway system, but policymakers in Washington, DC, began working on a plan afterward.
The paths of the highways that would become the interstates were laid out in a 1947 map, followed by a 1955 Department of Commerce document — often called the "yellow book" — that specified the paths these highways would take through city centers:
The Interstate Highway System, as envisioned in 1955. (Public Roads Administration — Federal Works Agency)
The plan's key contributors included members of the auto industry (including General Motors CEO Charles Erwin Wilson) and highway engineers. Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time.
"Highway engineers dominated the decision-making," says DiMento. "They were trained to design without much consideration for how a highway might impact urban fabric — they were worried about the most efficient way of moving people from A to B."
As a result, the official plans dictated that highways cut directly through the core of virtually every major city in order to bring commuters from newly growing suburbs in and out:
The yellow book planned for several highways to cut across Manhattan. (Public Roads Administration — Federal Works Agency)
This document was the basis for the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which birthed the interstate system. The bill stipulated that the rest of a massive, nationwide highway system be toll-free, with 90 percent of the construction cost borne by the federal government through both gas taxes and other funding sources.
This was an unheard-of amount: previous federal highway bills had the cost split 50-50 or 60-40 between federal and state governments. But this new arrangement had the backing of President Eisenhower, who was especially interested in seeing the system built, partly so it could be used for troop movements and mass evacuations in the event of a nuclear attack.
The new bill essentially gave states highways for free — provided they consented to the paths created in the yellow book, which had highways running through every city center in the US:
The yellow book called for I-80 and 280 to connect near the Golden Gate Bridge. (Public Roads Administration — Federal Works Agency)
The racial politics of "urban renewal"
State and city politicians accepted these plans for a variety of reasons. In an era when suburbs had just begun to grow, DiMento says, "local politicians saw urban freeways as a way of bringing suburban commuters into city." Some local businesspeople supported them for similar reasons.
But an unmistakable part of the equation was the federally supported program of "urban renewal," in which lower-income urban communities — mostly African-American — were targeted for removal.
"The idea was 'let's get rid of the blight,'" says DiMento. "And places that we'd now see as interesting, multi-ethnic areas were viewed as blight." Highways were a tool for justifying the destruction of many of these areas.
Neighborhoods in Southwest Washington, DC, were torn down to make way for I-395. (DC Dept. of Transportation)
The new freeways also isolated many other neighborhoods, ushering in their demise. Combined with federal housing bills that paid developers to tear down existing housing stock and replace it with high-rises, they resulted in the continued decimation of huge swaths of many cities.
"Many neighborhoods, predominantly black, were wiped out and turned into surface parking and highways," Norton says, noting Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit, historical neighborhoods that were torn down to make way for I-375.
Downtown Detroit in 1951, versus today. The historical neighborhood of Black Bottom was on the right side of the image. (Shane Hampton/University of Oklahoma)
The same pattern was repeated over and over, leading to cities pockmarked with empty neighborhoods and destructive highways. People displaced from the destroyed areas moved to others, leading to overcrowding and increases in crime, while most people with the means fled to the suburbs — commuting on the new highways, and siphoning money away from these cities' tax bases.
But not all the highways got built. Many city governments opposed them from the beginning — and in San Francisco, DC, and elsewhere, key segments were blocked by a coalition of local officials and residents. In New York, activists led by Jane Jacobs successfully prevented construction of I-78 through Lower Manhattan, which would have torn up much of Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side.
In DC, highways that would have run through the city's Northwest and center were never built. (Public Roads Administration — Federal Works Agency)
"The explanation, in almost every case, is that the relatively well-off, influential people in those cities were able to stop the urban highways that would have gone through their neighborhoods," Norton says, pointing to Wisconsin Avenue, in DC, which was slated to become a highway but never did due to the protest of wealthy residents of the city's Northwest quadrant.
"The destruction mostly happened in the most disenfranchised neighborhoods," he says. "It's astounding how selective it was."
This article is part of a series about the past, present, and future of commuting in America.