You know the Smiths song "I want to wish you an unhappy birthday"?

The San Francisco Chronicle reminds us, in the piece "The United Interstates," that the U.S. Interstate Highway system is 50 years old. From the article:

The act, which envisioned a 41,000-mile network of smooth, wide, fast and intersection-free superhighways from San Francisco to New York City, promised to reimburse states for 90 percent of the cost of building the new thoroughfares. It set off a highway building boom that produced nearly 47,000 miles of interstate highways as of 2004....

"The interstate highway system was the most important public works project in United States history," said Kenneth P. Jackson, a Columbia University history professor. "It has made life and travel easier for tens of millions of Americans. You can drive from New York to Memphis without hitting a red light."
In addition to making it easier and quicker for average Americans to drive, interstates also made it faster and cheaper for businesses to move goods around the nation and led to a huge boom in the trucking industry. Today, 2 million trucks travel the interstates and move more than 10 billion tons of goods, compared with 120,000 trucks hauling half a billion tons when Eisenhower signed the bill.

The interstate boom brought with it an economic boom, particularly for the highway construction, oil and automotive industries. But it also benefited the tourism industry and helped drive the growth of fast-food outlets, national motel chains and business districts built around off-ramps -- even in the middle of nowhere. ...

The network also brought suburban sprawl. Suburbs had existed, even flourished, before the advent of the interstate. But the new, wide-open interstates made it not only possible, but also enjoyable, to live a significant distance from work. "It seemed so easy," said Amanda Brown-Stevens, field director for the anti-sprawl Greenbelt Alliance in the Bay Area. "We could live here, and we could work there. People didn't think of what the impacts would be."

The nascent ease of travel brought new, more-distant suburbs, which lured residents and businesses from central cities, leading to the decline of many downtowns and creating communities that required driving to get to the supermarket, the park or the shopping mall.

"The positives (of the interstate system) are balanced by the negatives," Jackson said. "The decline of the sidewalk, the decline of walking, the decline of the front porch -- you can't put all of these on (interstate) highways and the automobile, but it was encouraged by all those ribbons of concrete."

Today, with the ribbons of concrete often clogged with commuters, the travel is no longer easy. That hasn't stopped the development of far-flung suburbs or the willingness of people to live in them while working far away.

But the biggest impact of the interstate system, historians and some critics say, it that it has created a nation in which a car is necessary and public transportation is often dismissed as an undesirable alternative to driving, and an economy that is dependent on oil. And even with rising gas prices, the mentality that drove the interstate boom is hard for many people to shake, say critics of sprawling development.
I-69 in Michigan. You can imagine as a teen, I found this moniker pretty interesting, although I never made the tee-shirts for sale that I thought about creating. There is a proposal to extend this road from Michigan and Indiana southwest to Mexico (through Texas) and east through Michigan to connect to Canada.
Photo from ValleyNews.

Index Keywords: car-culture; urban-revitalization