Interstate Highways
Federal-Aid Highway Acts
By the late 1940s and early 1950s, America’s limited highway network strained under growing traffic demands. The states were not willing to shoulder the Interstate’s construction costs. A succession of Federal Highway Acts beginning in 1952 established a fifty-fifty federal-state funding ratio and set aside $25 million for states to update highways between 1954 and 1955. The 1954 Act adjusted that ratio to sixty-forty and increased funding to $175 million between 1955 and 1956. However, it was the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, commonly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, that dramatically propelled Interstate construction and brought the system into rapid fruition.
The 1956 Act did three things. It established the Federal Highway Trust Fund to finance Interstate construction through increasing taxes on gasoline, tires, and other automobile goods. The Act also increased the federal government’s share of Interstate financing to ninety percent and appropriated $25 billion over a twenty-year period to construct 40,000 miles of interstate highways, 2,400 miles of which were reserved for urban highways. The 1956 Act also approved the urban control points established in 1947 and granted priority funding to construction in those cities.
By the late 1950s, Interstates soon began to connect rural and urban communities. In hindsight, the promotional films exhibited at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair were prophetic in their depiction of modern American cities. The films projected that superhighways would change American cities, replacing old neighborhoods and dated business districts while fueling the expansion of and access to a new suburban reality.