ROADS ARE ONE OF THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF CIVILIZATION itself. The first roads date back more than ten thousand years, but the earliest ones were strictly for either two- or four-footed walking. The real history of manufactured roads begins with the invention of the wheel by some anonymous Sumerian engineer about seven thousand years ago. Since wheeled carts are a lot more useful on smooth roads than the alternative, stone-and-brick-paved roads followed elsewhere in ancient Mesopotamia and in India and Egypt. Roads paved with cut timber and logs are regularly unearthed in prehistoric England. The tree-ring patterns in the logs of such roads can be very precisely correlated with calendars, enabling scientists to demonstrate, for example, that the mile-and-a-quarter-long “Sweet Track” was built in Somerset in 3807 and/or 3806 BCE. The Roman Empire built flagstone roads that eventually covered more than fifty thousand miles and are still used in parts of Europe.
For obvious reasons, though, most of the world’s manufactured roads appeared first, and lasted longest, within towns and cities. The streets of London and Paris were paved with cobblestones in the Middle Ages; Baghdad had boulevards made of a primitive kind of asphalt in the tenth century. New York got its first cobblestoned street in 1657, when it was still known as New Amsterdam.
Those urban roads were built for transportation, but they were used for recreation and commerce as well. Until the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, horse-drawn carts trying to negotiate a road like Bedford Avenue would have had to dodge pedestrians who filled the street. Peddlers and other tradesmen were as entitled to the street as wagons. Children played in the middle of those roads, and adults met one another there. The one thing Bedford Avenue wouldn’t have seen frequently was the automobile. Even during the first years of the twentieth century, cars were so rare that seeing one was still newsworthy.
All that changed in 1908, when the first Model T rolled out the doors of Henry Ford’s Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit.
The Model T didn’t just change America’s street culture. It’s one of the few machines in history that actually deserves to be called world changing. Before the T, cars were a novelty item for the upper classes and, occasionally, a genuinely useful aid for farmers. Still, the revolution that Ford’s “car for everyone” ignited wasn’t immediate. From December of 1908 through the end of 1910, only twelve thousand Model T’s were sold, at an average price of $850—relatively inexpensive, but still out of the reach of most Americans. In 1911, though, Ford moved manufacturing to a new state-of-the-art plant in Highland Park and turned out seventy thousand T’s.
It was only the beginning. In 1912, Highland Park made 170,000 cars; in 1913, more than 200,000. In 1914, not only did the factory’s laborers churn out 308,000 cars, but they did so at a salary that Ford had doubled, to the famous “five-dollar day.” By 1915, when Highland Park produced more than half a million Model T’s, the price had dropped under $300 each, which meant that Ford assembly-line workers needed to work only nine weeks or so to earn enough money to buy a brand-new car. And they did. As did millions of others. By 1924, more than half the country’s seventeen million automobiles were Model T’s.
All those Fords, along with Dodges, Packards, Buicks, and forgotten models like Brewsters, Biddles, and Westrofts, produced, for the first time, a conflict over the ownership of America’s roads—what became known to historians as the “battle over right-of-way.” Only a year after the introduction of the Model T, the pioneering city planner Daniel Burnham created a plan for the city of Chicago that was explicitly “providing roads for automobility.” In 1922, the professional journal Engineering News–Record called for “a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for.” In 1923, the Providence Sunday Journal observed (in an article titled “The Jay Walker Problem”) that “it is impossible for all classes of modern traffic to occupy the same right of way at the same time in safety.”
They weren’t kidding. Throughout the 1920s, motor vehicle crashes in the United States killed more than twenty thousand people a year—more than two-thirds of them pedestrians. Campaigns against reckless drivers appeared everywhere, accompanied by graphic stories of auto collisions, usually featuring children and young women. Editorial cartoons vilified drivers. Mobs attacked drivers who hit pedestrians. One Philadelphia paper urged (tongue-in-cheek—I think) that in order to be “in the height of fashion” when they were hurt or even annoyed by a car, “don’t ask whether the victim was wholly or in part to blame. Suggest that the driver of the motor-car be lynched.”
Against the protestors a coalition of new interests emerged: automobile manufacturers, rubber companies, the petroleum industry, car dealers, and the auto clubs found in every city and state (fifty of them had formed the American Automobile Association back in 1902). By the 1920s, the coalition had started to call itself—I’m not making this up—motordom. Motordom wanted streets converted from open spaces available for commercial and recreational uses to one thing and one thing only: arteries for motor vehicles.
In the middle of this battle were local merchants, who just wanted to buy and sell in peace, and who saw the reduction of traffic jams as a priority. In service of that goal, they hired engineers to come up with solutions, such as traffic signals and restrictions on curbside parking. This, to the automobile coalition, was heresy. The merchants and their engineers were attacked by motordom, which regarded any restriction as a violation of some newly hatched fundamental right. “There are already too many laws,” wrote the engineering service manager of the Kelly-Springfield Tire Company in 1923. Alvan Macauley, the president of Packard Motor Company, called traffic control “a burdensome tangle of restrictive legislation.”
You have to give those early automobile advocates credit. They saw, as their opponents did not, that only total victory would do. In 1926, they recognized an opportunity for a key victory in the battle over right-of-way, when President Herbert Hoover empaneled a hundred-member committee to draft a Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance—one that would, in the fullness of time, be the blueprint for traffic regulation all over the United States. The head of that committee was William Metzger, director of the Detroit Automobile Club. The Packard Motor Company’s Alvan “Burdensome Tangle” Macauley served as well. So did nine delegates from other auto clubs, and eight from various automobile companies, tire and rubber companies, and auto insurers, along with four presidents of local Yellow Cab companies and the head of the National Automobile Dealers Association. On the other side were five representatives of the railway industry, and exactly one person who could properly be said to be an advocate for pedestrians: Howard S. Braucher, secretary of the Playground and Recreation Association of America. With the deck stacked so heavily, it won’t come as a surprise that the committee’s final product codified the principle of “streets for cars.” Pedestrians would, thereafter, be confined to sidewalks and crosswalks. The Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance of 1927 transformed city streets from a mixed-use public space into thoroughfares for the exclusive use of cars (and, by the way, underlined the deficiencies of streets like those around Ebbets Field in a new, car-friendly, world).
The real target of the Model Ordinance, though, wasn’t the pedestrian. It was the streetcar.
Horse cars—horse-drawn railways—in America date from 1832, when the first one opened in New York, connecting Prince and 14th Streets, but they really got going in 1852, when Alphonse Loubat developed the familiar grooved rail set flush with the pavement.
Loubat’s cars were pulled by horses, but not for long. Hayburners were a pretty unattractive power source in a world that had discovered how to turn boiling water into mechanical energy. The first successful use of steam power in interurban transport was in cable cars—vehicles that were connected by a releasable grip to a constantly moving steel cable that was operated by steam engines at the end of the cable line, a technology that San Francisco wire-rope manufacturer Andrew Smith Hallidie perfected in the 1870s. In the 1880s, Chicago had more than 1,500 grip-and-trailer cars operating on 86 miles of track. At their peak, during the 1890s, America had 283 miles of urban cable track carrying 373 million passengers annually.
In the end, however, cable cars proved too expensive, as laying cable and track could cost up to $100,000 per mile. They were also inefficient: most of the steam power generated to operate the system was used just to move the cables themselves.
Luckily, another innovation appeared just in time: electric streetcars. In 1887, Frank Sprague, a one-time assistant to Thomas Edison, started building the world’s first electric transportation system, in Richmond, Virginia, using flexible overhead cables. The small device that rode atop the electrical cable was known as a “troller,” soon enough corrupted to “trolley.” Electric trolleys were faster than cable or horse cars, running at between ten and twenty miles per hour, and, since they weren’t attached to a cable traveling at a constant speed, the trolleys were also able to accelerate. Maybe more important, they were also far cheaper than laying underground cables.
Electric trolley construction exploded in the years between 1890 and 1905, when American cities featured thirty thousand miles of electric street railway. Because one of the objectives of trolley lines was to bring shoppers into the commercial centers of American cities, they tended to be laid out like the spokes of a wagon wheel; all routes inevitably led downtown, which is one reason that central business districts grew so rapidly during the peak trolley years.
But electric streetcars deposited those shoppers on shelter islands in the middle of city streets—streets that automobile interests regarded as theirs by right. Motordom waged an unremitting campaign against electric streetcars from the 1920s on, arguing, for example, that streetcar passengers were punished by the need to walk across half a street’s worth of traffic to reach their destinations. In this, they were aided by almost dizzyingly bad management by the streetcar companies, which were frequently both poorly capitalized and corrupt. Even those that were well run had severe handicaps in the battle against automobiles and buses: streetcar companies usually owned the six to eight feet of right-of-way required for their electric cars to operate and were therefore obliged to pay property taxes on them. They also had to pay for snow removal and even, in some cases, for streetlights along the trolley tracks. Meanwhile, public streets were, well, public. They were effectively a huge, though hidden, subsidy to cars and buses.
Worse still, streetcar companies depended on franchises granted by municipalities, and frequently got them by guaranteeing to hold prices steady for an irresponsibly long time. In 1897, the Boston Elevated Company agreed to maintain a five-cent fare, including free transfers, for twenty-five years, during which inflation cut revenues in half and the company’s expenses doubled.a As a result, the electric streetcar industry peaked by the early 1920s, when probably nine city trips in ten were still made on more than thirty thousand miles of track on twelve hundred different urban transit systems and interurban railways. The number of electric streetcars actually topped out in 1917 at 72,911; annual ridership hit 15.7 billion in 1923 and started to decline thereafter.
It’s not too much to say that the streetcar industry was on life support by the 1930s, when the combination of a new federal law and an illegal corporate conspiracy administered the coup de grâce.
The law came first. One reason for the streetcar industry’s boom was that America’s streetcar companies were usually subsidiaries of local electric-power generating companies. Power companies built the early streetcar lines, then sold the electricity to operate them. Everyone made out: the electric company had a reliable buyer of its product, and the transit company could count on a dependable supplier. Or could until the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, which saw the collapse of fifty-three public-utility holding companies. When a single group of them, headed by Samuel Insull, the president of Consolidated Edison, went bust, it took with it the life savings of more than six hundred thousand investors. Twenty-three other utilities defaulted on interest payments.
Washington’s response was the passage of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, popularly known as the Rayburn-Wheeler Act. Rayburn-Wheeler provided that public utilities would be confined to single states, that they could offer integrated service only to a limited geographic area, and—especially—that regulated businesses (like power generation) would be prevented from subsidizing unregulated ones (like transit). The practical result was that more than half the country’s transit companies, carrying 70 percent of America’s streetcar passengers, were sundered from their electric-power generating parents. Utility holding companies declined from 216 in 1938 (when the Act went into effect) to 18 by 1950.
The objective of Rayburn-Wheeler wasn’t to enrich the competitors of America’s streetcar companies. It was to reduce the potential for abuse. And the potential was definitely there. Unregulated streetcar companies that were owned by electric utilities were a classic moral hazard: whenever the parent company needed to improve its own bottom line, it could require its transit subsidiary to buy electricity at higher-than-market rates. If the streetcar company operated at a loss, no one cared. Even the automobile companies didn’t care about the accounting tricks that utilities were able to play on the public, and there’s no record that any of them lobbied for the provision in Rayburn-Wheeler that forced utilities to sell their streetcar companies.
They were, however, prepared to buy them.
At the heart of the 1988 Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a nefarious plot to close down the Pacific Electric’s “Red Car” mass transit system and to replace it with freeways. At the last minute, the story’s villain, Judge Doom, the head of Cloverleaf Industries, is foiled in his plan to swindle the rightful owners of the property known as Toontown and evict its residents, lovable animated characters like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Betty Boop.
The animated characters were invented. The rest? Not so much.
For more than a decade beginning in 1936, two shell companies—National City Lines and Pacific City Lines, owned by General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and other huge companies with what you might call a strong bias in favor of gasoline-powered transportation—bought more than a hundred electric train and trolley systems in at least forty-five American cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Newark, and, of course, Roger Rabbit’s hometown of Los Angeles.b
In 1946, a former streetcar engineer and retired naval officer named Edward J. Quinby exposed the owners of National City Lines, writing a thirty-six-page open letter to America’s mayors and city councils. Quinby’s letter began, “This is an urgent warning to each and every one of you that there is a carefully, deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your most important and valuable public utilities—your Electric Rail System.” The letter worked—sort of. In 1947, National City Lines was indicted by the federal government for engaging in a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
That same year, the Schwartz family welcomed a new member. Me.
By then, my folks, emigrés from Poland, had been living in Brooklyn on and off for a little more than twenty years. The apartment where they were living when I was born, 170 Tapscott Street in the Brownsville neighborhood, was no roomier than the shtetl house they had left behind: two-and-a-half rooms—a kitchen and two bedrooms—for my parents, my two older brothers, one older sister, and me. Even after we moved to Bensonhurst when I was four years old, things were a little cramped. I shared a bedroom with my parents until I was eleven, which was when my oldest brother, Harold, got drafted into the army and my other brother, Brian, left for Brown University to get a PhD in physics.
The nearest parks of any size were nearly a mile away. One of them, Dyker Beach Park, was mostly a golf course, anyway. And membership in the Jewish Community House on Bay Parkway, where Sandy Koufax had once played ball, cost money. So our little corner of Bensonhurst had no choice but to preserve the kind of city street that had predated the automobile. Eighty-third Street, between 19th and 20th Avenues, was our playground, ball field, and hangout. The street was where we played punchball, football, a local baseball-like game called triangle (it was hard to fit a rectangular diamond on a street that was thirty feet wide), Ring-o-leevio, Johnny on a pony, box ball, and hit the penny. Stickball is probably the best remembered of the street games, one in which a pitcher would throw a rubber ball—a spaldeen—to a batter who’d hit it for distance.c Home plate was a manhole cover, which we called a sewer, second base was the next sewer, first and third were usually the back tire of the Plymouth and the front tire of the Chevy parked on either side of the street, which was about the only time we needed cars for anything. My father’s grocery store was only three blocks from our apartment.
We didn’t realize it, but Bensonhurst was already more like a museum of a long-forgotten way of life—a kind of ethnic Colonial Williamsburg—than a picture of America’s immediate future. Quinby had been too late. Four years later, when the conviction against National City was upheld on appeal, more than half of America’s electric streetcar companies had been shut down, and most of the rest partially eliminated. GM, Firestone, Mack Truck, and National City Lines’ other investors were fined $5,000; a few individuals were fined one dollar each. Fewer than eighteen thousand streetcars remained in service. Public transit traveled over and under city streets—New York’s first subway line opened in 1904—but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine.
While cars and buses were taking over the streets of America’s cities, another and equally important battle was going on for the roads outside them.
Country roads are very different from urban ones. For one thing, they appeared far later in history. Until the nineteenth century, in fact, roads outside cities were virtually certain to be made of packed earth: rough, flood-prone, and very unreliable.
The first method for improving them in a cost-effective way appeared around 1820, when a Scottish road-building obsessive named John Loudon McAdam figured out how to lay out a level road with proper drainage, using nothing but broken stone. His innovation—an eight-inch roadbed made up of stones “not to exceed 6 ounces in weight or to pass a two-inch ring,” topped by two inches composed of stones with no dimension greater than three-quarters of an inch, the whole thing compacted with iron rollers into a sturdy aggregate—was simple, brilliant, and, most important, economical. “Macadamized” roads spread throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, where the “National Road” that connected Cumberland, Maryland, with Vandalia, Illinois, was gushed over by an English visitor in this way:
It is covered with a very thick layer of nicely broken stones, or stone, rather, laid on with great exactness both as to depth and width, and then rolled down with an iron roller, which reduces all to one solid mass. This is a road made for ever.
Macadamized roads may have been made “for ever” but they weren’t made for cars. How could they be? Even in 1895, fewer than five hundred automobiles were operating regularly on US roads, mostly on those stone-paved city streets. Ten years later, in 1905, only about seventy-eight thousand had been registered in the entire country. The impetus for building those first macadamized roads did not come from cars, but bicycles.
The League of American Wheelmen was founded in 1880 in Newport, Rhode Island. By 1900, it was America’s largest special-interest group. And the interest with which it was specially concerned was roads. Bad as dirt roads were for slow-moving horse carts, they were basically impassable for bicycles, which were then taking America by storm. In 1891, the League published a pamphlet, the Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer, as the manifesto for the National League for Good Roads. A year later, they started publishing Good Roads Magazine. The campaign was explicitly intended to build a coalition of bicyclists, farmers, and railroad companies, each of which had an interest in road improvement: the cyclists for obvious reasons, and the farmers not just because they depended on those very undependable dirt roads to get perishable goods to market, but because a macadamized road allowed a two-horse team to pull the same amount of freight that had earlier required six horses. For their part, the railroads, which had laid more than two hundred thousand miles of track by the end of the nineteenth century, were aware that the value of their network could be multiplied many times by improving access to it. They even dispatched hundreds of “Good Roads” trains to rural stations, where they would build a few miles of macadamized roads using steamrollers, as a taste of what real road improvement could look like.
Those new-and-improved roads looked a lot different outside cities than inside. One reason was that the rise of automobile culture tracked, almost exactly, with the beginnings of the movement known as American Progressivism, and the first automobiles were embraced as a Progressive solution to the widely accepted notion that cities were basically incubators of immigration, crime, and tenements. To Progressives, cars provided an escape from cities, though the escape they provided was pretty rocky—before the twentieth century, there were virtually no paved roads between cities in the United States—and confusing, since no one had come up with a naming or numbering system for intercity roads. Rand McNally’s first road atlases guided travelers by listing turns, landmarks, bridges, and forks in the road.
Those roads that did exist were built to handle—in descending order—bicycles, farm vehicles (horse drawn and gas powered), and the occasional recreational automobile. So important were bikes that by the end of the 1890s, the so-called sidepath movement had its own magazine, accurately though predictably titled Sidepaths, that advocated for protected bike lanes that “shall not be less than three feet or more than six feet wide . . . constructed within the outside lines and along and upon either side of . . . public roads and streets.” No wagons, carts, or horses: bike paths.
But by the 1920s, America’s cars had multiplied to the point that they were literally destroying simple macadamized roads. The rocks that composed the roads were relatively light, which meant that the millions of rubber tires kicked up a dangerous amount of dust and caused the roads to deteriorate rapidly. The immediate answer was found in the same long-gestating hydrocarbons that fueled all those new cars: mixing tar with macadamized stone, later to be replaced by the petroleum byproduct known as asphalt. By 1925, seventeen million cars rode on twenty thousand miles of concrete-paved roads—and more than two hundred thousand miles of “improved” macadamized roads.
However, while engineers learned how to improve intercity roads, they weren’t much good at figuring out how to pay for such improvements. The railroads that had been the great transportation innovation of the nineteenth century had been built by privately owned corporations (though on public land, which was given to companies like the Union Pacific). Private capital for roads was available. The Long Island Motor Parkway, the first thoroughfare in the world restricted solely to cars and buses, was completed by William K. Vanderbilt at a cost of $2 million in 1908.d The Lincoln Highway, begun in 1913 as America’s first transcontinental road, was the brainchild of the Indianapolis industrialist Carl Fisher, as was the Chicago-to-Miami Dixie Highway. But private dollars were limited. The logic that regarded urban trolley tracks as a private enterprise, but city streets as a public responsibility, was more and more appealing to advocates of an intercity/interstate road system.
Those advocates were compelled to fight against a long history of opposition to national road building. The original Articles of Confederation, hostile to anything that might result in tyranny by a national government, explicitly prohibited any such activity. It’s a little easier to understand the suspicion that the eighteenth-century founders of the United States had for national road-building enterprises if you remember that highways—the word comes from the defining characteristic of such roads, which was that they were raised, usually a foot or two, from the surrounding land—were so expensive to build and maintain that they had historically been a royal asset. In fact, for centuries “highway robbery” was a capital crime because thievery that occurred on the king’s roads was the next thing to treason.
The conventioneers who spent the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia changed all that. Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution that they wrote empowered the new federal government to establish “post offices and post roads,” which provided a loophole through the ban on federal road building. Eventually. It took another 125 years or so before the Sixty-Fourth Congress managed to pass America’s first federal roads bill, the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916.
The 1916 Act provided $75 million in federal funds for rural “post roads” so long as they were free to the public. It was expanded and amended by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1921, which offered states matching funds—50 percent from the state, 50 percent from the federal government—for building roads deemed “militarily necessary.” A fair number of roads still in use today were built using federal matching funds. The New Jersey Expressway, on which construction began in 1929, was an FAHA project. So was the very first freeway in Los Angeles, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which opened in 1940. It seems likely that more and more intercity and interstate roads would have been constructed using the fifty-fifty formula of the FAHA had the Second World War not intervened. The final link in the chain of events that got the Dodgers to leave Ebbets Field was forged, not in Los Angeles, or even Brooklyn, but in Germany.
After Germany’s surrender in May of 1945, the most powerful man in Western Europe was the supreme commander, Allied Forces in Europe: General Dwight David Eisenhower. He was, by all accounts, a fine soldier and a gifted administrator, but his true brilliance was logistics: matching resources to objectives. In 1919, Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower had been part of the US Army’s Cross-Country Motor Transport Train, an attempt to show the entire nation just how fast and impressively a modern mechanized army could move. It took sixty-two days to travel from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to San Francisco, California, on Carl Fisher’s Lincoln Highway. It was predictable that he would be hugely impressed by the roads built by Adolf Hitler’s inspector general of German Road Construction, Fritz Todt: the Autobahn.e
The story might have ended there, except that seven years later the general was elected president of the United States. He had written in his postwar autobiography, “Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land,” and he was now in a position to do something about it. The “something” was the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, better known as the Interstate Highway System.
The Interstate Highway System was and is an extraordinary achievement, fully deserving of the superlatives that appear regularly in every account of its construction. The construction industry trade fair known as CONEXPO-CON/AGC named the IHS one of the “Top 10 Construction Achievements of the 20th Century.” So did the American Society of Civil Engineers. In July 1999, Engineering News-Record celebrated its 125th anniversary with a list of the top projects for each year of the magazine’s life. The entry for 1996 was the Interstate Highway System, on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary. It remains the largest and most expensive public works project in the country’s history, one that changed literally every aspect of the way Americans live, work, and, especially, travel.
Like anything of such magnitude, it didn’t appear out of nowhere. The 1921 Act—the one that funded “militarily necessary” roads—required the newly appointed head of the Bureau of Public Roads, an engineer named Thomas MacDonald, to create a map with more than seventy-eight thousand miles of roads “of prime importance in the event of war.”f Eighteen years later, a 1939 report to the US Congress, titled “Toll Roads and Free Roads,” called for a new highway system “designed to meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war and the needs of growing peacetime traffic of longer range.” In 1947, MacDonald, still head of the BPR, produced yet another new map, this one containing “only” forty thousand miles of highway.
What was missing in all earlier attempts was a method of paying for the new roads. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 fixed the problem by creating the Highway Trust Fund: a bucket of federal money with a designated source of revenue—a federal gas tax of three cents a gallon. Every penny collected in accord with the Act was required to be used for building the new highway system, with 90 percent of the costs coming from Washington and the remainder from the states that would, once completed, own the new roads. The Act budgeted a total of $25 billion, to be spent in roughly equal increments in each fiscal year from 1957 through 1969.g
The Act also specified just what sort of roads were to be built. Interstate highways were to have no crossings at grade; that is, any intersecting roads were to transect the new highway either by tunnel or bridge, with overpass clearances of at least fourteen feet (later increased to sixteen feet) to accommodate military vehicles. Each new highway was to have at least four lanes, each one twelve feet wide—some rural routes were allowed to be smaller—and to be designed for safety at speeds of not less than fifty miles per hour in mountains, sixty in rolling terrain, and seventy everywhere else. “Primary” Interstate highways would be designated with two digits, secondary roads that looped around them with three.
It’s not as if no one had ever built such roads before. The Pennsylvania Turnpike had opened in 1940 and would form big chunks of two different primary Interstate highways: I-70 and I-76. The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, which opened in 1927 and 1937, respectively, represented the state of the art in tunnel engineering. The George Washington Bridge (1931) and the Golden Gate Bridge (1937) were models for long-span bridges. The railroad engineers of the late nineteenth century had left behind a vast library of technical knowledge about soil, drainage, and grading, which is one reason that many of the highways that formed the IHS followed railroad rights-of-way. The challenge of the Interstate Highway System was one of magnitude, not technology: no one had ever built so much so fast, or to such inflexible specifications.
To maintain the schedule required by the 1956 Act, huge numbers of new engineers were urgently needed. And, since the Act essentially required that every one of the 42,500 miles originally specified (the number would eventually grow to 47,700) would look exactly like every other mile, those engineers needed a system of uniform training, and a method for sharing best practices. By 1956, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill of Rights, had put more than two million one-time soldiers through college, and thousands of them graduated from new but largely identical programs in traffic engineering at schools like UC Berkeley, Yale, and Northwestern.
Waiting for them were the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Highway Research Board, which served both as a clearinghouse for data collected elsewhere and a source of new research. A single example: in 1958, the AASHO built seven miles of two-lane road just outside Ottawa, Illinois, consisting of six loops and one long straightaway plus sixteen short-span bridges. Its pavement was made up of 836 test sections, each one a different sandwich of surface, base, and subbase, using different recipes of concrete and asphalt. Road tests at the Ottawa “lab” consisted of driving vehicles weighing anywhere from two thousand to thirty thousand pounds around the track and measuring road wear. AASHO engineers ran such tests continuously for two years before finally reporting the ideal balance of thickness and ingredients.
It was only one of the remarkable engineering achievements of the builders of the IHS, which invented new road-building techniques on virtually a monthly basis: huge finishing machines that could pave two lanes at once; steel rollers that vibrated while pounding pavement down; techniques for turning existing concrete roadways to rubble on site, as a base for a new highway (the formal terms are rubblization and crack-and-seat). Other machines made sections of concrete nine feet wide by six inches deep—slip-form pavers—that could be manufactured in factories and transported to building sites like enormous LEGO blocks. The IHS also featured safety innovations like reflective road markers, new guardrail designs, and reflectorized signs. The United States spent 2.6 billion person-hours to build the system. Most of those hours were well spent, indeed.
Most of them.
A clue to the great failing of the IHS is found in that 1939 report to Congress, which called for a “system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities” (emphasis added). The IHS is a marvel for transporting people and goods between cities. But wherever it is routed “through . . . cities” it is almost always a disaster.
It wasn’t intended to be. The system’s original planners always imagined routes through metropolitan areas—though President Eisenhower was evidently so confused about his namesake project that the first time he realized it included urban highways was when he saw the construction on what would become the sixty-four-mile-long Capital Beltway. The engineers of the Bureau of Public Roads weren’t evil. They actually believed that the Interstate system would reinvigorate America’s cities, representing as they believed it did the “chance of a century to make our cities sparkle brightly among our Nation’s brilliant collection of really wonderful cities . . . probably the greatest single tool” in solving the problems of urban blight.
They maintained their belief in the progressive character of reinforced concrete, even in the face of opposition to building eight-lane-wide, limited-access roads that would slice through existing cities, leaving hundred-foot-wide scars at each interchange. In September 1957 (the same month that Walter O’Malley announced that the Dodgers would be leaving Brooklyn) the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company sponsored a symposium it called “The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region.” In attendance was Bertrand Tallamy, Thomas MacDonald’s successor as head of the Bureau of Public Roads, now renamed the Federal Highway Administration. So was Lewis Mumford.
Mumford, a sociologist, historian, and the author of The Culture of Cities and The City in History, wasn’t exactly full of admiration for the planners and builders of the Interstate Highway System. “If they had any notion of what they were doing, they would not appear as blithe and cocky over the way they were doing it.” He blamed the “inclination to favor anything that seems to give added attraction to the second mistress that exists in every house right alongside the wife—the motor car.”
Mumford was right in his criticism but not in his reasoning. It wasn’t a love for cars that brought limited-access roads into American cities. It was love of money. To local politicians, the clinking sound of the Highway Trust Fund paying ninety cents out of every road-building dollar was sweeter music by far than the sound of any V8 engine roaring down the highway. A $100 million highway for $10 million? Or, sometimes, since state governments offered their own subsidies, only $4 or $5 million? With hundreds or even thousands of new construction jobs in your district?
No surprise that city planners and state transportation commissioners designed and redesigned their municipal road-building projects until they could qualify for Highway Trust Fund largesse.
The problem with all that “free” money wasn’t just that limited-access roads by definition are the enemies of the street culture in neighborhoods where people actually live, like the Bensonhurst blocks where I grew up. If the only purpose of a road is to get from one place to another, the stuff that goes on in and around that road becomes not just unnecessary but dangerous: a distraction from safe, high-speed driving. Even worse, though, is that local city planners, who still had to pony up 5 to 10 percent of the cost of even HTF-funded roads, had a big incentive to do so where the cost of removing the residents was lowest. As a result, instead of arresting the decline of cities, the IHS paid billions of dollars to accelerate it, in precisely those neighborhoods with the least political clout and money. Families that might have been inclined to stay in a metropolitan area now had another, compelling reason to move to the suburbs that were sprouting like toadstools everywhere in America where a new Interstate could carry commuters from home to work and back again.
There were, of course, many reasons that suburbs looked attractive to America’s post–World War II generation. Suburban living has had its appeal ever since some anonymous commuter took a stylus in hand to write four thousand years ago, “Our property seems to me the most beautiful in the world. It is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.”h Brooklyn itself was widely known as a “ferry suburb” in the early nineteenth century.
But there were special reasons for the 1950s explosion in suburban emigration that took the Cohen, Politik, and Pepper families out of Bensonhurst. The same GI Bill of Rights that educated the engineers who built the IHS also provided, through the new Federal Housing Authority, low-cost housing loans to veterans. But since the law was explicitly drafted to promote employment in the building trades, qualifying families could get thirty-year loans for purchasing new, single-family housing, but only five-year loans for repairing or renovating existing structures. Even worse, the manual used by the Federal Housing Authority to decide whether to underwrite home loans in the first place taught that “crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability” and that “older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy.” By design, the law effectively made it cheaper to buy than to rent, and a lot easier to move to the suburbs. As taxpayers flowed outward from existing cities, money followed, first in a trickle, then in a flood. And since the places where the money stopped had streets, but neither streetcars nor buses and sometimes not even sidewalks (not that there was anything much worth walking to), a car was an absolute necessity. And once you could afford it, two cars, or more.
Cars, and especially multiple cars, were not a necessity for everyone, of course. The Schwartz family had managed to get along very nicely without depending on cars for much of anything. From the time I was born until I left for graduate school, we had owned cars for fewer than ten years.
We never really needed one. My father walked to work from our apartment to his grocery store. While I was in high school, I walked too, saving my five-dollar-a-week salary plus tips. Like my brothers and sister, I walked or biked to school. Even after I entered Brooklyn Tech—Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, one of New York City’s hyper-competitive scientific and technical high schools—in the fall of 1961, I got there by subway.
When I graduated high school, I applied only to the public colleges in what had just recently become the City University of New York—basically City College, Queens College, and Brooklyn College. Today, the city’s system has seven four-year colleges, along with grad schools and community colleges, all of them charging tuition, but in 1965, they were all tuition-free. In my family, the idea of paying for college was a foreign concept. My brothers never paid for college: Brian even got a fellowship to Brown after getting his undergraduate degree for free at Cooper Union and City College. Why would I? I got into my first choice, Brooklyn College, and began commuting to classes in the fall of 1965.i
Ask anyone: 1965–1969 was a great time to be a college student. I was a member of a fraternity, partied, took part in student demonstrations, and dated. Though I still had to work part-time in my father’s store, I did my best to make sure I worked there as little as possible. The best excuse for avoiding the grocery store was another job, so I took jobs anywhere I could find them. I was a mailman, movie projectionist, and—my favorite—cabbie. It’s not that I had authority issues, exactly. But I loved being my own boss, and driving a cab was a pretty good simulation. As long as I brought back at least $60 at the end of each shift, I was allowed to keep 49 percent, plus tips. In a good week, I could clear $300—and since I was still living rent-free at home, by my senior year I was rich. Also stupid. I made the mistake of trading in my ’60 Chevy for a very cool ’64 Pontiac Grand Prix with white bucket seats. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought it was cool. Within a year, it was stolen off the streets of Bensonhurst and I was reduced to riding a bike: in 1969, the opposite of cool. My stupidity, by the way, wasn’t limited to making trade-in decisions. My embrace of driving—while I had a car to drive, that is—was contributing to the demise of something smart—walkable city streets—though I didn’t realize it for years.
I did attend classes, too. In New York State high schools, students take standardized tests, known as Regents Exams, in a variety of subjects, and at Brooklyn Tech I had scored the highest grade in the school on the physics exam. I wasn’t particularly interested in physics, but I thought it was my calling, so when the time came to choose a major, physics was it. It was a good thing I did. I did well enough in my classes to get by but my grade point average tended to hover just below a B. It would have been a lot lower but for physics and math.
In the fall of 1968, after I entered my senior year, I started getting brochures from universities trying to lure me to apply to graduate programs in physics. It wasn’t my grades that made me so attractive, but the fact that US colleges were producing so few physics graduates. I was flattered anyway. My plan was to put off life for another four to five years while I got a PhD in physics.
So I went to visit my brother Brian, who had graduated from City College with his own undergraduate degree in physics nine years before, had earned his PhD at Brown, and was then on the faculty at MIT. I wanted his advice about grad schools. Instead Brian told me, “You’re twenty years old and you haven’t been discovered yet. At best you will get admitted to a mediocre graduate school and spend the next seven years working on your PhD. Then you’ll get a job at some obscure university and study the spin on the twenty-seventh electron of a copper atom.”
I was deflated. Also scared. The Vietnam War was raging, and I had to go to grad school to stay out of the draft. (Little did I know that, because of the war, the Selective Service Administration was just about to reclassify grad students, even those studying physics, 1-A.) What was I going to do?
Over the weekend my brother peppered me with questions. “What do you like to do?” Party, I said. Girls. Music. He kept pressing. I disliked the suburbs, even the Boston suburb where Brian lived, which eventually reminded me that I liked cities. I told Brian. He mulled it over in his mind. “Well, you’re good in math and science. Not physics good, but good compared to others.” This is how Brian’s brain works. He put math + science + cities in an equation, for which the solution was one word:
“Traffic.”
It was a replay of the memorable scene in The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, receives sage advice about the future from his father’s friend in one word: “Plastics.”
I was just as articulate as Benjamin. “Huh?” I replied. (I wasn’t a very smooth talker.) Was that even a field? Brian told me MIT had been studying traffic and maybe that’d suit me. I did have an interest in traffic safety after my friend’s brakes failed on his ’55 Chevy and we crashed into a tollbooth. I had read Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.
So I investigated graduate programs in the study of traffic and transportation and discovered them hidden away in the departments of civil engineering. I applied to a few schools and was accepted by MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. The choice wasn’t especially difficult: Penn offered me a full fellowship, plus a stipend of $75 a week.
I promptly went out and bought a “new” 1970 Chevelle. Ten-plus years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I did the same, and headed south on Interstate 95. Destination: Philadelphia.
Fifty years after Henry Ford’s Model T had transformed cars from luxury items to necessities, the victory of the automobile looked complete. It also looked, to a lot of people, inevitable: a historical tidal wave that could have taken no other form than the one it did.
But it wasn’t really inevitable at all. The revolution that transformed America’s roads, the one that really got under way in the 1950s, was the result of a sequence of decisions—to draft the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance, to pass the Rayburn-Wheeler Act, to collude in the National City Lines conspiracy, to build the Interstate Highway System, and to fund the suburbanization of America through the GI Bill—that pushed an entire country in one automobile-rich direction.
By the time I started studying transportation, some people were already pushing back.
a A nickel in 1897 was worth only 2.4 cents in 1923.
b It wasn’t the first time this particular tactic had been tried. In 1933, General Motors set up a subsidiary known as United Cities Motor Transport with the stated objective of buying transit companies in order to replace streetcars with GM-made buses. UCMT was shut down after the American Transit Association censured GM for using pressure tactics to get the city of Portland on board.
c A home run was two sewers on the fly. I’m told Willie Mays, when he played for the New York Giants, was a regular three-sewer hitter.
d Vanderbilt, a racing fanatic, built the parkway as a racetrack that could be used by the public on non-race days—for a toll of $2, or about $45 in current dollars. The parkway, which was built as a rich man’s toy, was eventually acquired by New York for nonpayment of taxes, and only a few miles survive, as a portion of the Meadow-brook Parkway.
e The Autobahn’s reputation considerably exceeded its real value, as either military asset or transportation system. Fewer than 2,200 miles of Autobahn had actually been built before the war began, and no more were built until well into the 1960s.
f What this meant, in practice, was a network that connected coalfields, foundries, and iron ports in order to maximize the nation’s ability to build armaments.
g Put as charitably as possible, the numbers were a little optimistic. The “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” would end up costing more than $110 billion (more than $400 billion in current dollars) and the final leg wouldn’t be completed until 1991.
h This is an excerpt from a letter to the King of Persia, describing the “suburb” known as Ur.
i My first semester I walked three long blocks (about a half mile) to Bay Parkway and caught the bus to Brooklyn College. By my second semester I had enough saved from the grocery store work that I could afford the $450 needed to buy a six-year-old 1960 Chevy Impala—the one with huge fins. After that, I always drove.