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Each day at dawn an explosion of sound reverberates through the hills above California's Carquinez Strait, 30 miles up San Pablo Bay from San Francisco and the Golden Gate. At the sandy tip of a new superhighway pushing across the hills from Richmond to the industrial town of Crockett, an army of mammoth machines comes noisily to life; their motors growl and their exhausts spout blue fumes into the mountain air. Tough, broadnosed bulldozers hungrily tear up the soil; potbellied scrapers scoop and level it; lumbering compact-ers press it down with their massive weight. Directly before the machines looms a 500-ft. hill that stood in the way of the inland-bound gold seekers of the 1840s, forced the Southern Pacific railroad and later a highway to slink humbly around its base. But it does not deter the road builders of 1957. Their rugged and powerful machines are slashing through the hill, cutting a 360-ft.-deep, 2,200-ft.-long scar —the biggest man-made road gash since the Panama Canal. All told, the machines will move 8,500,000 cu. yd. of earth, enough to cover Manhattan Island with a 4.5-in. layer.
The road builders' monster machines were busy everywhere last week. They pushed across the green pastures of Illinois, through the swamps of Florida, over the hills of Arkansas, along the rocky New England coast. Unlike the nation's earlier road builders, who often followed Indian trails, cow paths and other roundabout routes of least resistance, today's planners lay out their roads from helicopters and planes with an eye to the shortest distance, then put their machines to cutting the highways over mountains and through trackless timberland, bridging lakes and rivers, spanning cities.
The American Art. The panorama of road builders stringing highways across the land reflects a peculiarly American genius, one that lies deep in the traditional pioneering instincts of the nation. No other country has come close to the U.S. in creating the mechanized giants of road building. "Road building," said one contractor, "is really the American art." Said the late Bernard DeVoto: "A highway is a true index of our culture. The machinery that builds it embodies developments in technology, invention, industrial progress, education, finance and so many other things that our whole cultural heritage has gone into producing it."
For the mechanical behemoths, such jobs as the Carquinez cut are only a warmup for the greatest road-building challenge in U.S. history: a vast, 16-year highway-building program that will crisscross the nation with a 41,000-mile interstate superhighway network,* plus thousands of miles of state and local roads. The program will be the largest public-works project in history, dwarfing the construction of the Roman road system and the Great Wall of China. The interstate network will reach into every corner of the U.S.—75% of it over new routes—to link 42 state capitals and 90% of all cities with more than 50,000 population. It will carry a fifth of the nation's traffic, provide vital defense routes in case of war. Total cost of the entire program: $100 billion—nearly 300 times the cost of the Panama Canal. The Government will pay 90% of the federal network, 50% of other roads, by raising gasoline, tire and other excise taxes.