Interstate Highways
The modern Interstate Highway System dramatically reshaped America’s metropolitan landscape in the mid-twentieth century. Today more than 42,000 miles of limited-access, high-speed freeways link America’s major industrial, military, and urban centers. Nearly three decades of national highway planning culminated in the landmark 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act.
In one of the largest public works projects in history, a grand act of “interstate socialism,” (Goddard, 179) the 1956 Act authorized the federal government to finance 90 percent of Interstate highway construction. The Act not only provided states the means to construct massive superhighways, but its enormous injection of billions of federal dollars spurred rapid development that dramatically changed the neighborhoods and lives of those who lived in freeway right-of-ways. By the end of the 1950s, state and federal highway departments began to lay Interstate superhighways through the heart of metropolitan America.
Popularized Conceptions
The postwar history of American metropolitan planning is tied largely to the proliferation of the automobile. Once reserved for affluent citizens, personal automobiles became accessible to a wider demographic during an era of postwar affluence and spoke to American ideals of freedom and individualism, allowing people and their families to travel at whim. Cars became the primary means of transportation and urban planning soon reflected that—walkable streets gave way to automobile thoroughfares and parkways. Burgeoning suburbs and growing numbers of drivers compelled urban planners to build more efficient roadways to bring people from outlying neighborhoods to inner-city jobs. The former streetcar suburbs of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century ultimately gave way to what could be called Interstate suburbs.
In the 1939 and 1940, metropolitan superhighways fully entered the public’s popular imaginations at the “Building the World of Tomorrow” World’s Fair in New York. Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the General Motors “Highways and Horizons” pavilion showcased a 36,000-square-foot model of the American city to an estimated 25 million visitors. Envisaging America in 1960, the exhibit suggested a not-too-distant future where multilane superhighway networks seamlessly stitched together downtown skyscraper cities and suburban landscapes (Gutfreund, 40).
Futurama and its accompanying Democracity exhibits placed controlled-access superhighways at the center of urban development to eliminate congestion and offer motorists “safety with increased speeds” in excess of fifty miles per hour. Promotional films declared that in this new American city, residential, commercial, and industrial districts would be “separated for efficiency” while superhighway right-of-ways would be intently designed to replace “outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.” Freeways, it proposed, would invigorate central business districts and quickly connect them to growing residential districts on the city’s outskirts. In the gleaming Democracity, where “man continually strives to replace the old with the new,” as the promotional film To New Horizons detailed, urban expressways were linked in the popular imagination with future progress and prosperity.
Federal Planning
While Futurama popularized urban superhighways, the federal government laid plans for a national superhighway network. In 1938, the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), foreseeing future needs, called for an interregional highway network of depressed or elevated routes running through cities with beltways surrounding central business districts. The BPR envisioned such a network for future civilian traffic demands as well as for national defense purposes (Bureau of Public Roads, Toll Roads and Free Roads, qtd. in Weingroff). By 1943, Congress authorized the BPR to study potential superhighway routes, their alignment, and costs. In January 1944, the BPR released its report, Interregional Highways, sparking the 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which mapped a 40,000-mile highway network connecting principal metropolitan and industrial centers. By 1947 the BPR established the future Interstate’s general routes and urban “control points”—the cities the Interstate would be required to serve. Although Congress established general routes, it was not until the mid-1950s that Congress increased federal funding to significant and unprecedented levels to make a modern Interstate highway network a reality. Without substantial federal funding, few city and state planners attempted to build urban expressways.