Getting to the road less traveled will probably lead you to an onramp of one of the 46,000+ miles of the United States Interstate Highway System roads. We take them for granted today, however, their creation forever changed the landscape of the country. You probably drive on one of them every day, yet what you do you know about the road that you are traveling on? This is true wandering geekdom, but I present to you, the 5 things that you may not know about the Interstates!
1 ~ Do we still like Ike?
Even though Eisenhower gets the credit for signing the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 the concept and planning started much earlier. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 called for a 26,700-mile interregional highway network. In 1941, FDR appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee to evaluate the need for a national expressway system. The committee’s January 1944 report, Interregional Highways, supported a system of 33,900 miles, plus an additional 5,000 miles of auxiliary urban routes. Post WWII, according to Eisenhower, the Act, eliminated unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of “speedy, safe transcontinental travel.” At the same time, highway advocates argued, “in case of an atomic attack on our key cities, the roads would permit quick evacuation of target areas.” For all of these reasons, the 1956 law declared that the construction of an elaborate expressway system was “essential to the national interest.”
2 ~ No Need for GPS
Remember this simple rule:
- Odd numbered Interstates run North/South
- Even numbered Interstates run East/West
Of course, you need to know if you are going north or south, there are easy reminders of this too:
- Mile marker numbers (you know, those green vertical signs on the side of the road) always get larger as you travel north or east on one or two-digit interstates. If an interstate originates within a state, the numbering begins from the location where the road begins in the south or west
3 ~ The Longest Routes
- At 3,020 miles, I-90 is the longest interstate highway. It connects Seattle, Washington, with Boston, Massachusett
- I-80 clocks in at 2,899 miles from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey
- I-40 from Barstow in California to Wilmington, North Carolina at 2,555 miles
- I-10 with 2,460 miles from Santa Monica to Jacksonville
- I-70 at 2,153 miles from Cove Fort, Utah to Baltimore, Maryland
- I-95, which serve DC and 15 states is 1,925 miles long from Miami to Houlton, Maine
4 ~ Roads to Nowhere
When the Interstate Highway Act was first passed, most Americans supported it. Soon, however, the unpleasant consequences of all that roadbuilding began to show. Most unpleasant of all was the damage the roads were inflicting on the city neighborhoods in their path. They displaced people from their homes, sliced communities in half and led to abandonment and decay in city after city.
People began to fight back. The first victory for the anti-road forces took place in San Francisco, where in 1959 the Board of Supervisors stopped the construction of the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway along the waterfront. During the 1960s, activists in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and other cities managed to prevent roadbuilders from eviscerating their neighborhoods. (As a result, numerous urban interstates end abruptly; activists called these the “roads to nowhere.”) Source: History.com
5 ~ More Stats
The highest in altitude is 11,158 feet at the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado. The lowest on land is -52 feet in California and underwater -103 feet in Maryland. The heaviest traveled is I-405 in Los Angeles with an estimated 400,000+ vehicles per day. Think about that next time you are stuck in heavy traffic!
My recommendation is to always take the road less traveled, but you have to get there, and this public works project has provided us with the means to get there. I long for the days of Route 66, however, it’s really not realistic with the population being what it is today. When we’re traveling along and whizzing by towns that you would once travel through, you can’t help but think how that affected their lives and livelihood. Progress isn’t always positive to all. If we remember that, take that off-ramp in remote places, and have lunch at a local diner, you may put a smile on someone’s face. No better telling of that story than in the Disney/Pixar classic road trip film, Cars.
Be Forever Wandering But Not Lost