The Post-Interstate Era

In June 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and members of Congress approved construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Journalists and ordinary Americans named those roads the Interstate Highway System, or simply the Interstate. Whatever the exact name, those roads, now some 42,800 miles in length, included several finance, design, and construction features in common. Motorists and truckers financed construction of those roads from gasoline and other taxes that went directly into a trust fund—to be used for road building and never for mass transit, airports, seaports, and certainly never for schools, parks, libraries, or bikeways. Engineers designed the Interstate as a freeway, which meant that drivers could only enter and exit the road at designated points. In larger cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, Interstate routes included multiple lanes in each direction. Sometimes, these limited access and extra-wide roads obliterated nearby homes, parks, and businesses. In general, state and federal engineers proved intolerant of local residents, environmentalists, and others who sought to move a route, save a neighborhood, preserve a wetlands, or impose any other conditions on the road that were not consistent with the engineers’ goal of improved traffic flow. Congressional leaders and their engineer allies went out of their way to insure that city and regional planners and other would-be challengers to traffic service and to engineers’ authority would not get far in local or regional politics. Yet those road engineers were not overtly political, in the usual meaning of the term. Rather, for those engineers, getting highways built and serving traffic represented their highest form of political ambition.

In retrospect, the period between 1956 and the early 1960s was the golden era for road engineers—they experienced rising salaries, growing prestige, and the sense of accomplishment that came with completing massive projects. As each segment opened, politicians offered hearty thanks to engineers, who, in turn, experienced the thrill of watching the first day’s traffic come roaring through. Years later, senior engineers enjoyed talking about the traffic and commercial growth that accompanied completion of the Interstate, as for instance the growth around suburban Chicago, Tysons Corner, Virginia, and the equally remarkable growth that surrounded booming cities in the south and west such as Atlanta, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

Beginning in the early 1960s, that golden era of highway construction was ending. In cities such as Baltimore, residents organized to stop construction of planned Interstate segments; and, surprising to engineers, politician allies endorsed the protestors rather than the highway builders. Race comprised part of that opposition, as African Americans organized to stop roads that, ran the reasoning, served white motorists at the expense of African American neighborhoods. Still, Florida and Miami engineers and politicians managed to drive I-95 through Overtown, a longtime African American neighborhood. But still, highway opponents, now including members of a growing and forceful environmental movement, proved unrelenting in their opposition to the nearly singular focus on highways and freeways as the one and the only solution the nation’s transportation problems. In the late 1960s, lawmakers determined to bring this golden age of highway finance and construction to an end.

The post-Interstate era began in 1973. In that year, for the first time, congressional authors of the Federal-Aid Highway Act opened the Highway Trust Fund to finance alternative transportation, including light rail, mass transit, new buses, and bicycle lanes. Mayors could request and governors approve the “trade-in” of unwanted highway miles for one or several of these other transit types. In the late 1960s, federal officials had begun to devolve authority regarding transportation to local officials. That trend accelerated under the 1973 Highway Act, which empowered metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), as the official transportation planning agencies for their regions. State highway engineers no longer dominated urban transportation planning, as they had in the 1950s, the auto and the highway’s golden era. Now, diverse interest groups—environmentalists, neighborhood activists, small business owners, the elderly, the handicapped, bicyclists, and even hikers and backpackers—excluded in earlier decades, found their voices being heard on transportation issues. In 1991, congressional authors of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, or ISTEA, accentuated the shift of authority from federal and state authorities to those MPOs. In particular, ISTEA substantially increased federal funding for alternative transit modes.

During this post-Interstate era, planners and politicians brought additional and sometimes surprising changes to highway development. At a moment when massive freeway projects were supposed to be passé, planners and politicians still pushed new freeways through city and countryside. At the same time, parsimonious lawmakers launched privatization drives, finding ways to boost current revenues by leasing their toll roads. Leaders in still other cities tore down freeways, seeking to correct past mistakes or open fresh possibilities for redevelopment. When proponents of devolution were in the driver’s seat, they used their new-found authority and prestige to press development projects that would satisfice on the local political scene. The essays that follow illustrate key components of post-Interstate planning, politics, and policy.

Environmental historian Christopher W. Wells’s study of anti-freeway politics in St. Paul provides a lovely illustration of the sometimes strange turns that post-Interstate politics could take. In 1971, Wells reports, Minnesota highway engineers were ready to start construction on I-35E. Suddenly, environmentally minded residents brought pressure on city council members, who, in turn, joined opponents to bring a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) to stop construction. That strategy succeeded for nearly a decade. Yet, council members and others did not seek to stop construction permanently, but only to alter the road’s design to make it more environmentally friendly. Minnesota’s governor allowed the matter to remain in the city’s hands. In 1978, the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities’ regional planning organization, prepared the environmental impact statement required for all new construction projects under NEPA. Wells characterizes members of this anti-highway coalition as “accidental environmentalists.” Pretty soon, road engineers adopted environmental language and an environmental legal strategy that included the idea that courts would approve some environmental alterations. Engineers completed one portion of the road in 1984 and the second and more contested portion in 1990. Environmental enthusiasts secured design and service modifications, as for instance the elimination of heavy trucks and a speed limit set at 45 miles per hour. After 1973, this “parkway” was permissible as a substitute under federal spending rules, as long as it connected to the Interstate Highway System. Although massive freeways were out of fashion and environmental excitement at its peak, the parkway approach had satisficed—the Metropolitan Council approved the route, and state highway engineers still secured their road.

In his study of Huntsville, Alabama, Joshua Cannon analyzes the political and social dynamics of another late developing Interstate highway project. In 1950, Huntsville was a small city of about 16,000 people. Thus, engineers bypassed the city, aligning the new Interstate-65 to connect Mobile, Birmingham, Nashville, and points north. Yet starting in the 1950s, Huntsville emerged as an important site for military research and development, and, later, for the recently created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Consequently, by 1970, Huntsville’s population had exploded to 140,000, creating local demand for an expressway spur from downtown Huntsville to I-65, about twenty miles west. In the 1960s, Huntsville’s leaders had begun to work with the Alabama State Highway Department on plans for the I-565 spur. Yet, Huntsville’s expressway ambitions coincided with a changing political environment for highway building, one that ultimately led to the conclusion of the Interstate era. Now, freeway opponents raised concerns about environmental damage, historic preservation, and the negative impacts of the proposed expressway on black and low-income neighborhoods. Interstate plans were further complicated by Huntsville’s simultaneous program for urban renewal and debates over elevating the road’s inner-city segments. Huntsville’s civic elite and state highway engineers wanted the expressway spur, as did the suburbanizing population dependent on automobiles for travel to work and shopping. Nevertheless, environmental and route restudies, political squabbling, and funding challenges dragged out the I-565 spur project until its completion in 1991.

Michael R. Fein adds greatly to our understanding of a monumental undertaking, that of Boston’s Big Dig. During the 1950s, state engineers promoted plans for an elevated freeway, the Central Artery, routed through the city’s downtown and many of its neighborhoods. That route became part of the Interstate system, I-93. Yet, growing traffic on I-93 turned the daily commute into a daily headache. Still more, I-93 rendered Boston a less edifying place to conduct business and have fun, particularly in an era when hospitals, universities, and tourism replaced factories as the city’s major employers. Starting in the 1970s, a new generation of political leaders, including Governor Michael Dukakis, set out to demolish the elevated section of I-93 and to replace it with an elaborate and expensive underground network of roads and a new harbor tunnel (I-90). Known popularly as the Big Dig, in 1987, Congress approved the project’s funding; and in 2006, engineers finished construction. Fein’s story is less about the details of road alignments and planner expertise and far more about the organization created to manage the Big Dig. In 1997, Massachusetts officials shifted the Big Dig’s management to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, removing the project from regular scrutiny. As well, the contractor assigned employees to the Authority, a move that, Fein reports, made it still more difficult to assess costs and assign clear lines of responsibility. This arrangement, in which a public authority operated in virtual partnership with its lead contractor, indicated the heights to which privatization and public–private partnerships could ascend. Ironically, Big Dig project managers during this devolved era turned out to be just as imperious as the engineers who had managed the original projects during the golden era of the 1950s and 1960s.

In yet another perceptive essay, Louise Nelson Dyble compares the origins and operations of the lengthy and iconic Pennsylvania Turnpike (opened 1940) with the short, little known, and less loved Chicago Skyway (opened 1958). Seemingly an inapposite comparison, in fact, both turnpike and skyway promoters sold bonds to fund their projects; and both dedicated tolls to repay bondholders. As well, Turnpike and Skyway promoters were and remained deeply entrenched in local, hard-edged political maneuvering. Whether in the hands of Chicago’s boodling politicians or Pennsylvania’s often-venal Turnpike commissioners, toll agencies and city transportation authorities exercised substantial clout in local politics. In 2005, however, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley brokered an unprecedented deal to lease the Skyway for ninety-nine years. In contrast, Pennsylvania lawmakers tied themselves in political knots in a failed effort to privatize the Turnpike. These two cases, Dyble shows, “provide evidence that government agencies can be powerful as independent interests, not just utilitarian tools.”

Raymond A. Mohl’s article on the expressway teardown movement illustrates another important policy thrust of the post-Interstate era. In the early years of the Interstate, urban expressway builders often destroyed homes and businesses, and sometimes leveled entire neighborhoods. State highway engineers conceptualized these big new highways on straight lines connecting point A and point B—the fastest way to move cars and trucks to their destinations. Highway engineers built highways, and the community wreckage left behind became the business of other agencies. The destructive effects of elevated expressways that pushed through dense urban neighborhoods stimulated the freeway revolts of the 1960s and early 1970s, as affected residents rose up in protest, sometimes successfully. Now, fifty years later, city officials, urban planners, and community groups in many cities have coalesced around the idea that it is time to correct the mistakes of the past and tear down some of those ugly and crumbling elevated highways. In 2003, in Milwaukee, Mayor John Norquist led a successful campaign to tear down the Park East Freeway, an elevated road that would have required expensive renovation. A former freeway fighter in the early 1970s, Norquist argued the importance of restoring the old street grid as one way to promote redevelopment of the central city. In Seattle, city and state officials have supported tearing down the earthquake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct and shifting automobile traffic to a deep-bore tunnel beneath the central city. Several other cities—New York, Boston, San Francisco, Oakland, and Portland, Oregon—have already replaced inner-city expressways with tunnels or street-level boulevards. As well, planners and politicians located in cities such as Nashville, Providence, Syracuse, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis have planned or discussed expressway teardowns. By 2010, even top officials at the US Department of Transportation endorsed or financed several freeway teardowns, a dramatic reversal of past policy. The recent teardown movement, contends Mohl, represents a modest effort to correct a few of the worst mistakes of mid-twentieth century highway policy.

The engineers, politicians, and planners who control the Interstate Highway System face new challenges in the twenty-first century. Now at peak usage, truckers carry heavier loads at higher speeds, and larger numbers of motorists compete for limited space. Long stretches of rural Interstates have never reached full capacity, but in cities as diverse as Chicago, Los Angeles, and even Austin, Texas, traffic jams just grow worse. The Interstate remains essential to American mobility and to the health of the nation’s economy. One cannot imagine suburban America in the Interstate’s absence. Yet, the highway infrastructure is aging, and most segments have exceeded their estimated fifty-year lifespan. Between 1944 and 1956, political leaders could not reach agreement on how to finance Interstate construction. Similarly, in the 2010s, Congressional leaders debate such time-honored subjects as who will pay for transportation improvements and which states or cities will get the necessary funding. The major difference between that earlier era, and our own, is that now we define transportation more broadly than just adding freeway mileage. We are no better, however, at the most fundamental politics, the politics of allocating transportation costs, benefits, and multiple consequences.

International comparisons highlight the trajectory of American transportation development to the present day. We look at China and other large nations, and observe the construction of high speed rail and complex freeways. The difference between China and the United States, however, is not one of ascendance versus decline, or of savers versus spenders, youth versus age, or energy versus lassitude. Rather, the difference between China and the United States is that of the state’s structuring presence. China’s transportation officials located in Beijing plan for the nation as a whole. Yet, American political leaders as far back as the Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations never created and funded a national infrastructure bank. Since the 1970s, moreover, American political leaders have emphasized local control of infrastructure, including freeway development. Leaders in any one jurisdiction such as Broward County, Florida, endlessly debate whether to make runway improvements or rail transit investments. No one accepts responsibility for how a favored transportation project such as airports and seaports connect to nearby cities or to the nation as a whole. In this devolved political economy, one might more usefully express surprise when new transportation systems, including freeways, actually get constructed.