Slashdot Mirror
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.
>"The amount of Portland cement could build more than 80 Hoover dams, or lay six sidewalks to the moon"
Wait a minute, nobody told me six sidewalks to the moon was one of the options! I would have totally voted for the sidewalk thing...
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.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
That's what they should have done instead. I'd walk to the moon.
about enough potholes to covers the surface of Jupiter six times and enough roadwork delays to equal 13 years of your life waitng in congested traffic to get to work :/
...of businesses being charge for their customers using the roads. Yes, roads are a good argument for network neutrality.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
And to celebrate, every inch is getting a facelift! Now, everyone please merge over into the right lane and slow to half speed. Be careful of the bright orange barrels; they have to last until the work starts in 6-8 months.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
55,000 bridges on 46,000 miles of highway? More than 1 bridge per mile? Sounds like we should've done a better job of surveying the route before starting to build freeways.
And the worms ate into his brain.
People are always so harsh on the government's ability to do things, and are quick to promote private industry as the better alternative, but this is one of the major public sector success stories.
I think in cases like this, private industry just would not have the resources and coordination to pull it off. Nor the motivation.
But in any case, NOBODY, public or private, wants to do mega-projects anymore. Complacency is the word of the day.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"See Russia, we can out-fight, and out-produce you, and we both have nukes, so even if its close to a draw, we'll win."
Thanks Ike, for giving the US the upper hand in the Cold War. He's also the one whose parting words were something like "Beware the military-industrial complex." A wise man, why can't we get Presidents like this anymore?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
But how much is that in Libraries of Congress per Nielsen market shares?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Something I've wondered about is what will happen when, sometime in the not-too-distant future, we no longer need roads for transportation because we've invented some kind of autonomous flying vehicle. What are we going to do with all that real estate? At least where I live, the roadway is too narrow to be used for additional home construction, so does all this land simply become a vast system of pedestrian malls? Or can somebody think of a better use for it? Of course the realpolitik of the situation is that the various government landowners will try to maximize the revenue to be had from selling this freed-up land, so what kind of monstrosity are they going to foist upon us?
Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.
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...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
- H. L. Mencken
Sheesh, he wasn't a troll... it's a valid point, if simplistically put. /rolls eyes
We need both highways and mass transport, and the failing of 1950s planning was that it prioritized highways above all else. A better use of resources would have been to build the rural and interstate parts of the system the same way they were built, but to substitute trains for some of the capacity in the urban network.
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.
At this point I'd like to see the next big infrastructure investment be in a European-style intercity, high-speed train network to give people an alternative to highways. It wouldn't work across the great expanses of the West, but it would work just fine from Chicago eastward and along the West Coast. Imagine getting from Boston to Washington in 3 1/2 hours without the hassle of airport transportation, TSA bullshit, etc., etc. and simultaneously reducing airport congestion. Sounds worthwhile to me.
One major thing that Ike failed to bring over from the German system: driver's education.
The U.S. education, licensing and renewal of drivers is a joke. Personally, I don't want anyone who didn't make 95% on their test on the road, but here we have most of the drivers who made 70% and it shows, every day. To further agitate the issue, law enforcement and insurance companies have too much forgiveness: four tickets/year allowed (in TX), defensive driving courses (what a joke).
I wouldn't drive to work every day if I had an alternative. Personally, I'd rather go back to horses.
"why can't we get Presidents like this anymore?"
Because anyone with huevos enough to buck the status quo or speak unpopular truths gets the Rove treatment.
So we'll be getting agreeable dunces from now on.
Dunces with strings to make them dance.
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 United States needed to develop. Just too bad it is STILL one of the things that the United States needs to develop. The Autobahn is a meticulessly well maintained super-highway with engineered drive surfaces, well gradiated turns, and minimal obstructions of view to drivers. The surface itself is designed to remove water from contact with tires, which greatly enhanses performance in wet weather. With almost no "small hills" to obstruct/obscure the view in front of the driver, situations do not exist for a slowdown that is over a blind hill to cause an accident since drivers always have more then enough warning of traffic slowdowns, accidents, or broken-down vehicles in their lane to either change lanes, slow down, or otherwise avoid the problem. This is also the reason why parts of the Autobahn system have no speed limits, only strict rules for which lane to be in and rules to let vehicles traveling faster then you to pass you... We STILL don't have ANYTHING NEAR LIKE THAT.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
1. In the USA, everyone can drive, and does. Every kid 16 and over drives on the freeway. In Germany, I understand that a drivers license is not a gimme like it is here. I hear there are higher costs and stuff like that. So that filters out a lot of people as dumb as you and I were when we first drove on I-70.
2. Cost. They showed the way the Autobahn is constructed, and it can handle higher speeds than the freeway.
3. Terrain. From the little I saw, there are no Rocky Mountains for the Autobahn to cross. This makes a difference in what is a safe speed, and what kind of money you spend on making expensively-safe surfaces.
4. Tradition. I guess the Autobahn was always a speeding zone, and land speed records were even set there.
5. Congestion. Does the Autobahn have anything like the amount of traffic that the Interstates have on them?
Now, not all of these factors apply in all cases (no Rocky Mountains in Nebraska (That John Denver's full of crap!), no congestion on I-70 in Utah, etc.), but I think that when taken together they make a good case.
I guess there are other reasons, too, like different traffic laws that might have a greater impace or something, but I don't know.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Americans, we like our freedom.
I have never felt more free than when I hopped on a Shinkansen with little more than 30 minutes' notice, and traveled all the way across Japan in less than four hours -- all while reading a book.
I have never felt less free than when paying for an auto loan, auto insurance, registration, maintenance and gasoline, just to make life in my home city possible.
Latent taxation, poor public transportation and a national dependence on black goop sucked from beneath some of the most US-hostile countries on earth: you have a funny definition of freedom.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
What's this obsession with using screwdrivers to bang nails in?
Your example of a camping trip is possibly the absolute worst thing that a mass-transit system would be good for. Nobody in their right mind would suggest building a railway simply to take three people out into the wilderness. That's the kind of thing that cars are ideally suited for.
Conversely, commuter traffic, or bulk transport, are the absolute worst thing that personal transport systems are good for. You're using a separate vehicle, each with its own engine, for each person? When most of them are travelling the same route at the same time? That's just silly.
What's appropriate is to use a rail system for commuting from suburbia to the city centre twice daily, or to carry a million tonnes of coal from Texas to New York City (or whereever). And you use the car when you want to go camping.
The first step when decided what the right tool is for a particular job is to be aware that more than one tool exists!
While all of the glory is nice and neat, let's look at the drawbacks: 1. For all the money spent on the interstate system, we could've built up our public transportation infrastructure, which needed a makeover, and have enough money to invest in cities, which also needed a makeover. 2. Sprawl and Suburbia: Now we are faced with sprawl and suburbia. While some may find this a good thing, I personally prefer the European lifestyle in large built-up cities. Suburbia is not self-sustaining. A public transportation system is not feasible in surubria. Do you know of a suburb that is not next to a city? If so, it's not called a suburb, but a rural area. 3. Strip Malls: they existed in very limited quantities before the interstate system. 4. Bad Maintenance: While we built the highways we don't know how to maintain them... pieces are going to crumble bit by bit until we have a makeover or until everything's gone 5. America is a gas-guzzling addict: Even Bush said so. The first step to fighting this adiction is admitting it. Before the interstate, we relied less on cars and more on public transit. Of course, it was harder to get around too. 6. Ever try breathing in L.A.? Yeah... you know what I'm talking about. 7. Trucking Industry - transporting things by train and using trucks for the last n miles is far more efficient, and using electric trains is even more efficient. 8. American teens are now forced into cars at the age of 16, which not only promotes bad lifestyle habits, but also continues the sprawl and suburbia. 9. Declining health/obesity: I admit, I'm not thin as a string. I tried both walking and driving to work for 6 months at a time... after 6 months of walking/public transit (which increased my commute by about 20 mins) I found amazing results - not only had I lost weight but also started feeling better, less stressed ("Ah another train will be along in 7 minutes, no big deal, no need to rush") and I also got some work done on the train/subway. Talk about benefits Of course some may find these things as benefits, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or however the saying goes). Now for the benefits: 1. Easier to get around the country. 2. Drivers are independent from public transit's schedules (of course this is a chicken and egg question: if there were more passengers, the service would be more frequent). 3. Americans can enjoy their suburban dream (although I don't think suburbia is a dream.... even considering the fact that crime rate in suburbia per 100K people is higher than it is in the city; also, in the city you know where most of the crime's happening and you can avoid those areas if you so desire). 4. Cars are not a luxury anymore, but rather a necessity. 5. American teens can break out of their shell when they turn 16. 6. ......
In the end, it's all about what kind of lifestyle you want to lead and whether or not you're a typical suburbanite or the new urban type.
-Palal
Although some historians claim that Eisenhower's motivations were military in nature, the nation's civilian population reaped the rewards
True, but the military aspect played a huge part in the funding for the interstate highway system. The interstates provide a tried-and-true platform for moving tanks and other heavy war material a very long distance, with minimal fuel and minimum time. A column of tanks can move across the whole of our nation in about three days time. That's significant when you consider an enemy force not wanting 2,000 M1s staring at them.
Informatus Technologicus
I've driven the Autobahn, and I've done tens of thousands of km driving on the US Interstate highway system (running a SCCA race team means a lot of long-haul driving going from event to event)
The only thing the Autobahn has going for it are the occasional unlimited speed sections, most of which seemed absent on my drives from Stuttgart->Nurburg and Stuttgart->Munich - there were speed limits on most of the distance (either 120 km/h or 140 km/h)
Incidentally, posted speed limits notwithstanding,average car traffic speed on Interstates in the Midwest is between 120-140 km/h.
So what has the US system got on the Autobahn?
1) Interstates are numbered odd numbers North/South and even numbers East/West. Main routes have 2 digits, and connectors and bypasses have 3 digits, where the last two digits are the ID of the MSR that it connects to. This makes it very easy to tell (in most cases) which Interstate you need to be on, even if you don't know local geography that well. If you are West of Detroit, and you want to go to Toledo (south of Detroit) and you are on I-96 approaching the the I-275 interchange, you can tell that:
a) you are travelling E/W
b) 275 runs N/S
c) 275 links up with 75, also N/S
d) So taking 275 to 75 is moving you in the right direction.
2) There is only one allowed intersection between any two Interstates. The intersection of I-69 and I-94 is unique. That is NOT the case with Autobahns, which can loop back on each other and cross in multiple places. This very nearly got me lost on the way to Stuttgart from the Nurburgring, and the only reason I caught it was that the sun was in the wrong place after the interchange....
3) On/off ramps onto Interstates are labelled with the name of the nearest major city AND the direction of travel - so you might see "I-70 West - Topeka" and "I-70 East - Kansas City". Autobahns are labelled with the name of SOME city in that direction, but I never discovered the pattern; and with the city density in Germany, trying to find the city on the map (in one of two directions) while rapidly approching the exit, without the aid of a dedicated navigatrix, can be daunting.
4) Exits are numbered with the current mile marker value, and the mile marker value itself is the distance along the Interstate within that state. Working out time, distance, and fuel problems in your head become VERY simple. If I am at mile marker 20, and I need to take exit 140, and I am travelling at 60 MPH, then I have 2 hours of travel before my exit. Note that this wasn't always true - Florida and Georgia held out on sequential exit numbering for a long time - but as far as I know, everything is mile marked now.
5) I refute the claim to "highway hypnosis" being a problem; having done multiple all-night driving stints trying to make it to events on time, the general straightness of the Interstate makes the road network safer (especially in bad weather) gives you much better sightlines, and saves fuel, especially with big rigs. The few exceptions to this rule can really stand your hair on end imagine coming around a corner at 70 MPH with 14,000 lbs of car hauler to find that traffic has stopped dead... yikes!
Seriously, the US Interstate system is a wonder of design and is transportation networking done nearly perfectly. It takes almost all the best features of the Autobahn and then improves on them.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
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.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Please stop comparing our size to the size of other things; please stop covering us to a certain thickness in material; please stop laying our women end to end (and remarking that no one would be surprised); please stop filling in other places or events with multiples of our population. Enough is enough!
-- Connecticut Residents Against Nonconsensual Comparisons
The same is more or less true of most of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, which first opened in 1938. Most of the on and off-ramps have been lengthened and straightened, and a couple of big highway interchanges added where new roads sprung up, but the road itself hasn't changed in my lifetime. Believe me, the new ramps were necessary. The old ones were all decreasing radius blind curves dumping right into traffic with no runoff room. The Exit 27 Southbound onramp (technically on the Hutchinson Parkway, but essentially demarcating the border between the two as well as between NY and CT) was literally a 90 degree spur two car lengths long with a stop sign at the highway. It hit the highway right after an overpass with no visibility so there was no way to see if cars were coming. You just stopped your car perpendicular to the road, checked that there was nobody under the bridge at that moment, punched it and crossed your fingers. Another feature which has just recently changed is the Sikorsky Bridge over the Housatonic River. This engineering marvel did not previously support pavement. Instead its surface was an open steel grate. I'm not kidding. Riding a motorcycle over this in the rain with a passenger was perhaps the scariest thing a human being could undertake. But to be fair, at least half of this structure was part of the Wilbur Cross Parkway, not the Merritt (the WC, the Merritt and the Hutch were all Rt. 15 and shared an exit numbering scheme). The road itself is exactly the same size and shape as when it opened. It retains its rural charm scores of unique and beautiful overpasses.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
The structural steel could ... meet nearly half of the annual requirements of the American auto industry.
The sad part is when you look at it the other way: The American auto industry would only survive six months on all the steel in all the Interstate highways in the entire United States. Do we really need that many cars?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
The Autobahn is built differently. The biggest difference is that the road surface throughout the Autobahn system is somewhere around 27 inches thick. Most interstates, by comparison, are only 16-18 inches thick. The extra durability makes for a road that's consistently in better condition, which is why it's no big deal to do 100+ mph with a properly-maintained car over there. OTOH, they're more expensive to build. If the interstates were built to the same spec as the Autobahn, the system wouldn't be nearly as extensive as it is.
This page has some interesting Autobahn info.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Exactly. The autobahn also has variable speeds to better accomodate traffic.
....
You would think with us being the country that depends on cars more than anyone else we would have at least gotten this right
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Sign, burning two mod points on this (both +funny, whatever), but it's an issue that comes up whenever I talk with Europeans about mass transit, and how they can't understand why we don't have a rail system.
The fundamental problem is that Europeans cannot fully grasp the difference in scale invoved in America, especially in the American West. (It's big. It is really really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it is long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Texas.) I travel rather often from San Diego, through Los Angeles, and to the Bay Area / San Francisco (these are the three major cities in California, incidentally). The trip takes 8-10 hours to complete, depending on traffic passing through Los Angeles. There is a single rail line that runs down the coast. Once per day it travels between SF and SD, and you have to get up at 5AM to catch it. It takes 11 hours.
San Francisco and San Diego are 500 miles apart.
By comparison, Amsterdam to Paris is 500 *km* apart. The distance from San Diego to San Francisco would span the breadth of England (London to Inverness was 8 hours by train, and is about 550 miles, as is Paris to Nice). When I was in Europe, I was constantly surprised about how little time it took to travel from one city to the next while I was on a train. When you live in the American West, you get used to 6 hour drives at 75-80 miles per hour where you literally see no living human beings outside of the gas stations and rest stops. And maybe some farms.
Europe is very heavily built up. It's dense. Rail networks make a lot more sense in dense networks than in sparse ones. That same rail line that runs to Oxford (60 miles from London) can be used to connect to Warwick, or Stratford-upon-Avon (if my memory serves). The rail network in California is essentially a 3-node graph with a line between SF, LA, and SD. With two mountain ranges in between, to boot. The train company loses money on the line pretty consistently. There's literally nothing in between to make the run profitable. San Luis Obispo and Santa Cruz are nice places, don't get me wrong, but they simply aren't volume destinations. And because it's not profitable, there won't be any more private infrastructure development. The State of California has been toying with the notion of building a high speed line from SF to SD for a while now, but, hell, I ran the numbers myself. Japan wouldn't have built a high speed rail line if their cities were all 500 miles apart. It's too costly. The main island of Japan is about 600 miles long, total.
It's not a better-than or worse-than comparison, I'm simply stating the facts. You have to have a certain critical mass of density to make rail networks worth your while. An analogy that works well with Europeans I've met: Imagine France. Now imagine there is nothing in the country but Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. None of the little villages, towns, and cities. Nothing but desert. Now consider the practicality of a rail network in the country. This is Texas.
-----
This isn't an America-is-bigger-is-better argument. In fact, I can pretty firmly say that I would greatly prefer being able to travel to another city in an hour or two. I lose an entire day whenever I make the trip. A drive to Phoenix, first major city east of San Diego (Yuma doesn't count) is 6 hours (@75 MPH) through almost nothing but desert. To the average San Diegan or San Franciscan, the other city is akin to a vacation destination. Road Trips are boring as hell unless you find a way to entertain yourself -- I personally go through audiobooks like water.
Rail Networks simply don't work when the graphs are so sparse. Out in the middle of the desert, a car moves faster than a train, and costs less, so why bother going to the hassle of parking your car in long term parking (unless you have a garage of your own), and paying more money to travel slower? I'd do it just for the scenic-ness of it, except you have to board at 5AM to get in