In the United States, the Interstate is a major part of the nation, helping people move quickly around the country and making the average person more independent. But why do we have this? And further, how did it get created?
The origin of the Interstate began in 1916, with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which gave grants to states to encourage repairing their highways. Five years later, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, which encouraged building more highways to create a national highway network. While the FAHA (of 1921) did help develop vast amounts of highways, ten of thousands of miles, it didn’t help with traffic congestion and didn’t help with long-distance travel by car.
The modern Interstate System began as an idea in the minds of civil engineers Thomas MacDonald and Herbert Fairbank, Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads and the bureau’s head of the Division.
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the National Interregional Highway Committee, led by MacDonald and with Fairbank as secretary. After three years, the Committee presented a report to the U.S. Congress titled “Interregional Highways” that encouraged building a nationwide network of highways. This helped lead to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, which created a system of highways but included no provision on how to fund the construction of or actually build the highways, which, given that highways need to be built to be used might be useful.
After the FAH Act of 1944 failed, the next major step towards what we know today came about under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term. After World War II, Eisenhower greatly respected the German Autobahn, a network of high-speed highways crisscrossing Germany, allowing for rapid transit and more efficient logistics throughout Germany. In 1954, Eisenhower appointed an engineer, Lt. General Lucius Clay, to lead the President’s Advisory Committee on the National Highway System. This Committee created a plan to build a national highway system, citing increased safety, economic development, and benefits to national defense and the military as reasons to invest the massive amount of money it would take to create the highways. Along with these reasons, as the Cold War intensified, the need to be able to evacuate a city rapidly because of a nuclear threat became more critical, and helped gain support for Eisenhower’s highway plan, and in 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (sometimes called the Interstate Act of 1956) passed through Congress and created the Interstate System that we know today.
After almost 40 years, in 1992, the last section of I-70 was finished, and the Interstate had finally finished construction. By this time, over 48,000 miles (77,000 km) of highway had been built across the country, and cities and towns were connected with fast and high-quality highways. You can now travel from Washington D.C. to Washington State exclusively by car, and while not the most rapid, it certainly is much quicker and easier than it was 80 years ago before the Interstate Act was passed.
Related Stories
https://www.history.com/topics/us-states/interstate-highway-system
https://www.history.com/news/route-66-rise-decline-highway-system
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Interstate-Highway-System
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