Interstate Highway System: 50th Anniversary

Steve Melito writes "This week, CR4: The Engineer's Place for Discussion and News, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, "a giant nationwide engineering project" that transformed a nation. In 1994, the American Society of Civil Engineers described the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System as "one of the Seven Wonders of the United States". In 2006, this network of roads includes 46,000 miles of highway; 55,000 bridges; 82 tunnels, and 14,000 interchanges. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), excavation for the interstate system has moved enough material to bury the State of Connecticut knee-deep in dirt. The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon. The lumber used would consume all of the trees in 500 square miles of forest. The structural steel could build 170 skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building, and meet nearly half of the annual requirements of the American auto industry. Check back with CR4 all week as we cover the 'Roots of the Road,' 'the Politics of Passage,' 'Adventures in Civil Engineering,' and 'The Road Ahead.'" One of the things that's interesting about why Eisenhower pushed for the highway system was that he saw the Autobahn system in Germany during the occupation post-WWII and knew that that was one of the things that the United States needed to develop.

Comments

Pennsylvania

[mkw87]

I hope they didnt count the roads in Pennsylvania, most of them (at least in NW PA) are in such bad shape, they shouldn't count as being part of a 'paved highway' system.

Bridges galore?

[Penguin Programmer]

In 2006, this network of roads includes 46,000 miles of highway; 55,000 bridges...

Wait a minute, that would be more than one bridge per mile, on average. Is that actually correct? I don't remember there being that many bridges on any of the interstates I've driven on.

Both WWI and WWII

[Old Grey Beard]

Eisenhower was a Lt. Colonel in WWI. Shortly after that war he participated in an Army experiment: moving a motorized convoy across the U.S, East to West. It took something like 68 days, with innumerable breakdowns and washouts. In his report, Ike mentioned there were some roads that had been well-built but not maintained, and had thus deteriorated badly.

After the Normandy invasion Ike's troops were again slogging, this time through French hedgerows. Finally when he got to Germany and could use the Autobahn, well, you know the rest of the story...

Re:No, no it wasn't

[david.given]

In Europe, they've got it all. Their intercity highways are better than ours. And for commuting, they have train networks that actually work and are pleasant enough that people want to use them. Saves gas, saves time (the high-speed trains are faster and you don't have to park them), and you can still drive your car just fine when you are going somewhere the trains don't go or don't reach effectively.

I live in the UK. We used to have the best railway network in the world. Hell, we invented them. Then we had Margaret Thatcher, who loved cars, and we had decades of apathetic state-funded railway management, and then we sold the whole lot off to Railtrack, who didn't maintain the network for ten years and caused several huge railway crashes, and as a result the rail network these days is expensive, unreliable, and slow.

And it's still orders of magnitude better than the US system. The last time I went there --- it was to North Carolina, and I'm quite aware that North Carolina is not the US's best point --- it was like visiting a third world country. Where any European airport is smoothly integrated into a quiet, cleanly running mass transit hub, we got out at Raleigh into a dirty, smelly car park full of honking horns. We had to hire a car to get to the fairly large town where we were going simply because we couldn't find out any other way to get there. (There may have been buses, but we were all completely unable to find any kind of centralised bus timetable system.) It was a hell of a culture shock.

This April I went skiing in Austria. I got the bus from my house to Reading railway station; got the bus there to Heathrow; flew to Munich; got on the mass transit from the airport to central Munich; got a long-distance train to Jenbach; got on the Zillertalbahn mountain railway to Mayrhofen; and then got on the Postbus from Mayrhofen to the guest house where I was staying; I got dropped off at the door. Sounds complicated? I went to the Deutschbahn website, told it I wanted to go from Reading, UK to Juns, Austria and it routed the whole lot for me. Through three countries. Everything was on time, too.