19 June 2008
Federal-State Partnership Creates Transportation Success Story
Highway system considered wonder of modern world marks 50th anniversary
Washington -- At twilight on a Friday, millions of vehicles stream from U.S. cities on ribbons of asphalt laid in graceful curves and loops as the workweek ends. The following morning, many Americans will vacation at beaches or mountains, join distant family gatherings or attend far-flung sporting events – some traveling hundreds of kilometers as casually as they get bread from the local bakery.
The U.S Interstate Highway System -- formally the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways -- offers Americans personal mobility unmatched in any other large nation. The system means no American is more than a few days’ drive from any other American, even though the United States encompasses 9.3 million square kilometers.
Signed on June 29, 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act launched one of the world’s largest engineering projects. It profoundly altered U.S. life by increasing Americans’ willingness to travel, changing how freight moves across the nation, stretching the distance between homes and jobs, and closing the gap between city and countryside. From 1957 through 2005, motorists traveled more than 25 trillion kilometers on interstates, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration reports.
The idea for the system arose in military exercises that demonstrated the need for good roads and inspired a young officer -- later president -- to champion the necessary federal legislation.
In 1919, a young lieutenant colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower helped staff a coast-to-coast convoy of 81 military vehicles and learned firsthand the need for a U.S. highway system. The 5,200-kilometer trip between Washington and San Francisco -- hampered by heat, breakdowns, bridgeless river crossings and unpaved roads -- took 62 days, averaging speeds less than 10 kilometers per hour. Eisenhower’s conviction that the United States needed a highway system was reinforced when, as a general during World War II, he used Germany's autobahn system to move U.S. troops into Nazi Germany.
Although the Roosevelt administration had discussed a U.S. highway system, Eisenhower was the first U.S. president to make it a key part of his domestic agenda. When Congress rejected his proposal in 1955, Eisenhower, with strong support from Tennessee’s Senator Al Gore Sr. and Maryland’s Senator George Fallon, persevered and secured passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Unfortunately, Eisenhower was unable to celebrate the legislative victory – he quietly signed the bill in a hospital room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as he recovered from surgery.
As a result, nearly 75,000 kilometers of highways at least four lanes wide and designed to carry vehicles traveling 80 kilometers per hour or more now crisscross the United States. In contrast, China, with slightly more land, has 30,000 kilometers of similar roads; Russia, covering 17.7 million square kilometers, had no such highways in 2003, according to the U.S. Library of Congress.
The U.S. Interstate System includes 55,500 bridges, 15,000 interchanges and 82 tunnels. It carries an average of 1.9 billion vehicles each day, including nearly 245 million trucks -- 40 percent of total U.S. truck travel.
The federal government paid for 90 percent of the construction costs of the Interstate System; the remaining costs were apportioned among the states. The federal share was funded by the federal gasoline tax and other motorist taxes paid into a highway trust fund created by the 1952 legislation. This approach allowed all segments of the system to be completed on a “pay-as-you-go” basis without contributing to a federal budget deficit.
CREATING A MODERN MARVEL OF TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING
The 1956 legislation’s goal of a safe, efficient high-speed highway system is unchanged, but the design for that system evolved as architects, engineers and builders learn, adapt and respond criticisms.
Despite the system’s benefits, it has been blamed for a range of U.S. societal ills, including urban sprawl, racial tensions and what President Bush recently termed America’s “addiction to foreign oil.” Interstate highways cause noise, air and light pollution, detractors say, and disrupt life and divide communities.
Partly in response to such criticisms, federal and state agencies have worked to ensure highway standards are updated as conditions and technology change, while engineers have adapted highway designs and construction techniques to meet geographic challenges and address local sensibilities. The criticism also sparked increased attention to noise reduction, aesthetic enhancements, historic preservation and environmentally sensitive siting.
The United States now enjoys a national system of roads built to uniform standards but incorporating unique elements, like Boston’s Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge (the largest cable-stayed bridge in the world) on Interstate 93 and the twin Windward Viaducts on Interstate 3 in Hawaii’s Koolau Mountains.
In 2006, with the system substantially complete, it is difficult to travel more than a few miles in the United States without encountering the distinctive red-white-and-blue shields directing drivers to the nearest interstate. Those signs and the roads to which they point have changed where Americans live and the places they visit, the food they eat and the goods they buy. It has turned trucks into rolling warehouses that allow even the largest items to be shipped across the continent.
The system has expanded the American vocabulary with terms like “beltway” (a highway around a city), “cloverleaf” (the pattern of curved ramps to enter and exit highways) and “motel” (for the “motor hotels” built near highways).
But the greatest achievement of a system that Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta describes as “essential to America’s prosperity and way of life” likely lies in bringing the diverse population of a vast nation closer together.
