Thursday marks the 50th Anniversary of the US highway system. Newspapers and television reports are all a flutter with how great highways have been. True, being able to get to California in a few days rather than weeks is a good thing. But, our highway system encouraged sprawl and ravaged our cities. We are sill paying for these mistakes today.
The main focus of a Post-Dispatch article from this weekend was which state could lay claim to being the first to have a new interstate highway following the passage of the authorization act in 1956. Basically Missouri let the first contract, Kansas opened the first section and Pennsylvania had a divided highway that became the model for our interstates. Thomas Gubbels, a MoDOT historian in Jefferson City, was quoted in the article as saying,
“Arguing over which state is first isn’t as important as the fact that interstates benefited everyone: all Missourians, all Kansans, everyone throughout the country.”
Everyone? Well, not exactly. Still, it doesn’t surprise me the MoDOT historian would turn a blind eye to the victims of the highway projects. First, we have all the people that lost their property through eminent domain. Their families were uprooted, their businesses relocated, their neighborhoods ripped apart. Massive quantities of the population in all our cities were disrupted for highway construction and slum clearance. Cities are great at managing natural change and evolution but this scale was simply too much.
I did learn something new in the article about Eisenhower’s plan for the highway, a distinction between a failed 1955 plan and the adopted plan of 1956:
The Clay Committee report, “A 10-Year National Highway Program,” suggested the project be paid for with bonds. Congress nixed the approach, and the president’s plan died in July 1955.
Eisenhower, though, was as driven as a Honda on the New Jersey turnpike. He campaigned for interstates the following year. Only this time, it included the addition of urban interstates and a new tax-based financing plan with the federal government picking up most of the construction costs. Congress went for it.
For a good 20 years prior to the passing of the highway act, officials debated by-passing cities or going through the dense core. Many references were made at the time how Germany’s Autobahn by-passed their major urban centers. Sadly, it was felt our cities needed to have interstate highways to help them get workers to the employment centers (keeping people working was a key issue during the depression era). In reality highways were a major contributing factor to the dismantling of cities. If the interstates had by-passed our cities development still would have left the center for the new outer areas but at least we would not have sliced through our effective street grid and destroyed so many homes, businesses, churches and schools in the process. Highways through cities were seen as an important adjunct to the slum clearance programs gaining traction as early as the 1930’s.
Earlier federal road programs helped create jobs during the depression. Still, these roads paled in comparison to the scale envisioned by the 1956 Act. Had congress approved original financing in 1955 without urban interstates our cities might have turned out quite different.
The Post-Dispatch included a short myth & fact section. The myth is shown in italics:
President Eisenhower supported the Interstate System because he wanted a way of evacuating cities if the United States was attacked by an atomic bomb.
Eisenhower’s support was based largely on economic development and safety. Still, the system can evacuate people fast and efficiently.
Fast & efficient? I’m guessing the reporter missed the footage of people trying to evacuate Houston last fall. Interstates have led to more cars which led to more congestion which calls for more highways and so on. It is a never ending cycle. We know this yet we continue to feed the highway beast. Our highways cannot handle rush hour much less evacuating our urban areas.
And yes, defense was a big part of the original plan, the system is called the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Defense highways! I guess you had to be there to fully understand the fear during the cold war.
When I take the interstate back to Oklahoma to visit family or up to Chicago for a fun weekend I am thankful for their existence. As I see them snake their way through once dense and thriving neighborhoods I get a feeling of sickness and anger. The interstate system could have avoided going through the middle of our old and established cities. The planners of the day hated cities and deliberately wanted to alter them in a big way. the interconnected street grid, so beloved by old & new urbanists, was viewed as archaic. They envisioned remaking cities around the automobile.
They succeeded alright, nearly every major city in North America followed the status quo and sought to remake themselves so they would easily accommodate the car. This plus the many urban renewal projects were intended to bring new life to cities by making them, well, no longer cities as the world had known them to be up to that point.
Our city’s Zoning, from the 1947 Comprehensive City Plan, is a relic of the time when society hated true urban cities yet it is still our model nearly 60 years later. Only time will tell if we have the wisdom and will power to undo the mistakes of the past. So much work remains to be done.
– Steve
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Further Reading: Highway History from the U.S. Department of Transportation.