Night. Rain. Pavement squeegeed dry by tires of car ahead. NEW ENGLAND KEEP LEFT, chk-chk-chk from cars in opposite lanes, their headlights spaced out evenly by expert tailgating. Radio: "Hurricane Betsy is acting up again." Sensation of pleasant tension, smooth-pumping pistons, wiper-rhythm. WARNING SPEED CHECKED BY RADAR. Needle's right on 65. Cops make allowances. "Hey nonny nonny and a Ballantine beer." PAY TOLL AHEAD. Get out EXACT CHANGE. Hands resting lightly on wheel. "You don't believe—we're on the eve—of destruction." LINCOLN
AVE 2 MILES LINCOLN AVE 1 MILE LINCOLN AVE NEXT
RIGHT. Is it Dewey Threwey or Duway Thruway? Might as well edge up to 70. Everybody knows speedometers overread. NO BICYCLES OR PEDESTRIANS ALLOWED.
MANKIND takes pleasure in a certain amount of gloom.
When the talk turns to traffic, people love to speak bleakly of Gordian gluts that move like glaciers, of an ever-rising tide of blood on the roads, of a dark future in which cars multiply until they plate the nation's surface with two-ton steel locusts belching exhaust fumes that turn the sky shroud-grey. Any one man's traffic experience on a bad day can make it seem that the U.S. is well on its way to hell on wheels, that the nation faces an infinite problem. But a different experience, such as speeding through a rainy night on a broad new highway, might give a glimmer of a truer judgment: the strong and affluent U.S. can conquer traffic congestion—and is well along the road toward doing so.
The prime mover, so to speak, of traffic congestion is the U.S.'s explosive increase in motor vehicles, from 8,000 in 1900 to 90 million now. More pertinently, the car population has risen by almost 50 million since World War II, growing an average 5.7% a year while people increased by only 1.7%. Millions of families have bought their first car, or their first second car, or their first third car. Traffic engineers have been caught flat-tired. Great fleets of new cars will continue to cascade onto U.S. highways, but eventually, a point of saturation comes—probably at the ratio of one car for every person who can drive. Once the U.S. nears some realistic maximum volume of functioning cars on the road, growth of auto population will be tied to, and limited by the growth of human population. And building roads for this controlled total becomes a definable, if enormous job.
Wide Enough for a Corpse on a Cart
Mating the vehicle to the needs of man has been a challenge for a good many centuries. Around 700 B.C., Assyrian King Sennacherib undertook to keep chariots from parking along a main highway. ROYAL ROAD, LET NO MAN DECREASE IT, said the no-parking sign, and any man who decreased the road was soon deceased. Ancient Rome banned all women from driving chariots, and decreed that no one could drive near the Colosseum during the gladiator-baiting. Europe's early roads charged stiff tolls to pay for improvements, such as sufficient widening "to let a man pass with a dead corpse on a cart." The Romans, using heavy stones in layers, built a 50,000-mi. network of roads that wound through much of Europe and North Africa.