Summary
Fifty years ago this week, President Eisenhower changed the way we live, signing the bill that created the interstate highway system. The interstates gave Americans unprecedented mobility, more choices in where to live and work, significantly increased highway safety, and made possible today's huge trucking industry (which now hauls 80-90 percent of all goods, by value a massive portion of our economy).
Today we view the interstate system as completed. And insofar as the original 41,000 miles have all been built (the actual total today is nearly 47,000 miles), in a sense it's true that the original plan has been fulfilled. Yet a highway system that was planned for a country of 170 million people, mostly east of the Mississippi, is not necessarily what we would design today for a country of 300 million with a burgeoning Sunbelt and massive international trade.See the full content of this document
Extract
Interstate Ii Overdue
Consider how much America has changed in the past 50 years. In the early 1950s there were no container ships disgorging millions of intermodal containers onto trucks. ...
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