Airplanes occasionally land on Interstates when no alternative is available in an emergency, not because the Interstates are designed for that purpose. Interstates are intended to serve only traffic going from State to State.
The Interstate System serves interstate, regional, and intra-State traffic, and was always expected to do so. In fact, many routes, including beltways and spurs, are located entirely in one State and serve primarily intra-State traffic. Beltways are designed to carry Interstate traffic around cities. Beltways do help traffic avoid cities, but also are intended to serve metropolitan traffic moving from main highway to main highway.
Congress should have put the money into transit instead of the Interstate System. This was not an option in and when the congressional debate took place.
At the time, transit was provided mainly by private companies. No one in the industry, in State and local governments, or in Congress imagined that the Federal Government would support these companies financially. In fact, the only thing the American Transit Association asked Congress to do was exempt buses from the gas tax.
With the coming of Interstate, whole architectural genres were driven to extinction by abandonment Liebs Fast Interstate travel also sounded the death knell for short-haul train travel Kaszynski and completed the process of intimately linking Americans to the personal auto for local and regional transportation Hayden New roadside development near Interstate Highways was focused at interchanges because design of these limited access highways prohibits businesses from having direct access to the highway itself Lewis ; Liebs Such interchanges are unique to highways and have evolved into three-dimensional engineered structures quite distinct from the grade-level junctions of traditional roadways Hayes ; the goal is to keep traffic moving and with cloverleaf designs no-one ever needs to make a left turn across traffic Hayes With so little space available around the interchanges, land there became extremely valuable limiting the diversity of business to only those with deep pockets: oil company gas stations, shopping malls, national and regional chains Liebs The result - uniform, cookie-cutter architecture replaced regionally distinctive vernacular designs Kunstler Perhaps it's no coincidence that the rise of the destination shopping mall usually located at a highway interchange , the demise of Main Street, and the construction of the Interstate Highway system all occurred in the same 25 year period Kunstler ; Lewis The automobile and the roads it required, clearly shaped the built environment of 20th century America Liebs ; Hayes The "Galactic City" of Lewis Over the last century, American society has reorganized its culture around the highways and byways and its vehicles need Vale and Vale ; Liebs ; Hayden Some would argue that the Interstate Highways both encouraged and were the result of the commuting lifestyle, the loss of a land ethic, and the divorce of the workplace from the home Kauffman What would once have been an intolerably long commute on winding country roads became doable on the Interstate, psychologically opening up huge tracts of agricultural land, now within driving distance of American cities, for development Kunstler ; Lewis ; Boynton In urban areas, Interstate Highway construction destroyed entire neighborhoods Kaszynski and isolated others, creating physical ghettos Kunstler 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.
US Congress. The roots of the interstate system go back to the s, 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 s, 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. Those terms were officially enshrined in a 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. 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. 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 map , followed by a 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 A desert metropolis built on gambling, vice and other forms of entertainment, in just a century of existence Las Vegas has drawn millions of visitors and trillions of dollars in wealth to southern Nevada. The city was founded by ranchers and railroad workers but quickly found Initially colonized by French fur traders, Ohio became a British colonial possession following the French and Indian War in At the end of the American Revolution, Britain ceded control of the territory to the newly formed United States, which incorporated it into the Except for Hawaii, Indiana Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. The Alcan Highway. The Interstate System The System of American Slavery.
Las Vegas A desert metropolis built on gambling, vice and other forms of entertainment, in just a century of existence Las Vegas has drawn millions of visitors and trillions of dollars in wealth to southern Nevada. See More.
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