As part of my membership in the American Automobile Association (not AAA - that's an honor student's report card), I get the magazine AAA World. The big picture on the front cover is an Interstate highway sign saying "50": The Interstate Turns 50. After some hunting around for it because the front page of the contents looked more like a blary ad than like a table of contents, I found it on page 62. On 2006 August 13, the Interstate System will be 50 years old. Interesting. It started on my 10th birthday, so on that date I will be 60 years old. 10 + 50 = 60, and the Interstate System has been an integral part of my life, as it has for everyone around me.
The article contains some interesting information on the Interstate highway system, including its history. It seems that Dwight Eisenhower started it by going on a tour of the United States in 1919 to document all the places in our country that it was hard or impossible to get to by automobile as justification for his plan to build a network of superhighways in our country. Later on, when this adventurer was President of the United States, on 1956 August 13, Congress passed and Eisenhower signed into law the Federal Highway Act of 1956. It mandated the construction of a network of superhighways across the nation. These highways would have no stop signs, no intersections, no rail crossings, no highway traffic jams, and in fact nothing to impede auto traffic. When you get on one, you just simply go and go and go forever into the distance. This made distant places a lot easier to go to and changed drastically our lifestyle in this country. In fact, it has been called not only an economic force, but a democratizing force as well.
Some of the early cartoons presented in the article are interesting. For example, one has the treasury secretary put a stethoscope to the highways of our nation; in his other hand is a doctor's satchel. Another one has a series of letters to Congressmen soaring in to the air to the nation's Capitol, with cars driving on it as though the letters were a superhighway. The cartoon was urging us to prevail on our leaders to construct such a highway system. The system is just about complete now, and in many places it looks like something unearthly or extraterrestrial, with all these highways crisscrossing all over the place. Take a look at Rochester, New York's Can of Worms, Richmond, Virginia's James River Bridge, Bryan Park area, or I-895 bridge, or Washington, DC's Springfield Mixing Bowl, and you see what I mean.
But has it all been good? Think of all the land that was used up in constructing the Mixing Bowl. It must be a square mile or more. And they are still making it bigger and bigger. The highways have encouraged us to drive cars all over the place and to go out farther and farther into the suburbs, engaging in what Jim Kunstler ("Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles") calls "an idea with no future". This network of highways makes us dependent on the automobile, and it does not do all what it was intended to do. It avoids city traffic jams, which are annoying, all right, but it causes superhighway traffic jams, which are colossal and waste huge amounts of our citizens' time and fuel. Further, the fuel which drives all of this Interstate is about to run out. The world is nearing "peak oil", after which production will decrease from year to year, causing shortages all over the place. This could lay waste to this entire assemblage of concrete ribbons. Maybe the superhighway system is the Great Moai Statue of our society, like the statues that Easter Islanders built before they ran their remote island out of trees and their way of life.
The AAA article says nothing about this ominous future of our interstate system, and further, they have the gall to praise, in a subarticle entitled "A Recipe for Success", Colonel Sanders and his Kentucky Fried Chicken enterprise. That's right, AAA. With these highways comes Kentucky Fried Cruelty and We Do Chickens Wrong, not to mention trans fat as well.
The Interstate System of highways is a great achievement of humankind. From out of dust and dirt arises an intricate and complex network of concrete ribbons throughout our nation. I say we should use what's coming up, the system's 50th birthday, to say "Mission Accomplished" and not build any more Interstate highways. Instead, let the rising cost of gasoline take traffic jams off the highways.
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