(3 of 6)
This project—at once the biggest public work of all history and the source of many a state's worst corruption scandal—undertakes to tie together every city of 50,000 or more in the U.S. When finished, it will total only 41,000 miles of the nation's 3,600,000 miles of road, but will carry more than 20% of all traffic. It is a bit less than half complete, and to travel it now is to see the ideal when one is on some freshly built stretch with not a car in sight, and the obsolete when the sign says FREEWAY ENDS and the car is dumped onto a truck-jammed road bearing the telltale black-and-white shield that identifies the old federal-aid highway system. Interstate 40, for example, turns into Route 66, once famed in song and legend, and now a dreary bore lined with signs like SEE GILA MONSTERS 1 MILE.
The building costs for these broad, eight-to 36-in.-thick roads average $1,141,000 per mile. Columbia Professor William Vickrey says that the "subsidy" on some expressways is as much as 10¢ per car-mile, roughly equal to the vehicle's operating cost. On balance, however, the motorist saves big sums in reduced operating and accident costs, saved time and lessened strain. The road-building money is extracted from the motorist himself, in taxes on fuel, tires, accessories and truck weight. In the Interstate system, which is supposed to cost $46.8 billion by the time it is finished in 1972, the Federal Government pays 90% of the cost and the local governments chip in 10%. Once the road is built, local taxes must pay the whole tab for maintenance—and this year maintaining old roads is costing no less than a third as much as building new ones. "It's like giving a Cadillac to a guy making $1,000 a year and saying 'O.K., you take care of it,' " says one traffic man.
The good roads also have a cost in monotony. The antiseptic highway stretches on and on and on. The green-and-white signs are the same. The little clusters of commerce-at-the-cloverleaf are eminently the same. Even the jargon on the menus of the identical restaurants ("char-broiled steak smothered in mushrooms sauteed in fresh country butter") is the same. Yet, happily enough, as the freeway driver highballs from one similar place to another, leisurely and nostalgic souls who want to sample the color and culture of America's side roads can do so readily.
Invariably, another kind of nostalgia rears up whenever new freeways are about to be carved into the countryside—the sensation that Nature is being suffocated beneath spans of concrete. "In many parts of the country the building of a highway has about the same results upon vegetation and human structures as the passage of a tornado or the blast of an atom bomb," protests Critic Lewis Mumford, one of the foremost save-our-trees esthetes. In San Francisco, Folk Singer Malvina Reynolds became so angry with the California Highway Department that she wrote a song:
There's a cement octopus sits in Sacramento, I think
Gets red tape to eat, gasoline taxes to drink
And it grows by day and it grows by night
And it rolls over everything in sight.
Oh, stand by me and protect that tree
From the freeway misery.
Downtown Headaches