Highway system in a larger USA

JJohnson

Banned
I'm only putting this here since the PoD is before 1900. For the sake of argument, by 1900, the United States covers:

-OTL USA
-OTL Canada
-Baja California, Durango, Sinaloa, and the Republic of the Rio Grande at the southernmost border
-Cuba, Hispaniola, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Bermuda, French Polynesia

In that scenario, what would the interstate highway system look like?

Would it be reasonable to have I-5 go from the tip of Baja to Alaska? Would I-95 in the east go from Miami to New Brunswick/Nova Scotia? And do you see any major alterations in where the highways might go, assuming that most major population centers stay the same?

The only major state differences in this scenario are a row of 3°-tall states starting with "British Columbia" going east till the Great Lakes, Ontario's peninsula, a smaller Quebec, and a unified NS/NB/PEI state, plus Rio Grande, Durango (+Sinaloa), South California (Baja), Sonora, Chihuahua, and Arizona and New Mexico's southern borders moving south enough to give Arizona sea access.

Last question - what effect does having sea access have on Arizona, say at 31.2° N?
 
One obvious change would be the probable lack of the OTL Trans-Canada Highway across the Canadian Shield. This is a very tough landscape to build a highway on, through almost unpopulated terrain. It would have been less expensive to construct the middle section of the highway south of the Great Lakes, but it was necessary OTL to build it north of them to keep the highway entirely on Canadian soil.
 
Since east-west highways are numbered based from north to south (for US highways) and south to north (for Interstates), you might have to fudge some of those route numbers to keep the sequence intact or come up with a whole new numbering scheme.

On the whole, though, I can see that your suggested extensions of north-south Interstates would probably happen.
 

JJohnson

Banned
One obvious change would be the probable lack of the OTL Trans-Canada Highway across the Canadian Shield. This is a very tough landscape to build a highway on, through almost unpopulated terrain. It would have been less expensive to construct the middle section of the highway south of the Great Lakes, but it was necessary OTL to build it north of them to keep the highway entirely on Canadian soil.

Interesting. Would this alternate Interstate cross the Upper Peninsula at Sault Ste. Marie, you think?

Maybe have I-90 in NY cross the Ontario peninsula over to Detroit in this version, I-94 crossing the Upper Peninsula to Sault Ste. Marie and then east to Labrador, I-87 hitting up to Quebec City, I-29 to Winnipeg, and so on?

And a bit of an aside, what's the population effect of a unified North America? Most of Canada's population lives along the border OTL, but if Durango to Baffin Island is part of the USA, what do you think the population distribution would be? And from north of the 49° parallel, how many states would you think get made? I'm thinking at least Nova Scotia (NS, NB, PEI), Quebec, Ottawa (Ontario's peninsula), and Columbia (49°-52° or 54°40'), at a minimum.
 
Certainly some significant fraction of the current population of Canada would have headed for warmer climes, but on the other hand there would be a migration in the other direction as well. The Canadian Prairies are prime agricultural land (the very long daylight hours during the summer mean bumper harvests) and if somebody wants to live in "the frontier", there's a lot of it in the north. I believe that the Peace River district of northern Alberta / British Colombia is the only part of North America that is still opening up new agricultural land (could be wrong about that, though).

It seems plausible to me that the (relatively large) percentage of OTL Canadians who move south would be balanced by the one-tenth the percentage of OTL US residents who move north (but applied to ten times the population, compared to that of Canada).

Vancouver and the Frazer delta would likely be less populated, with competing ports to the south (Seattle, Portland) taking away some of the immigration to the region. I would expect the Prairie provinces to have greater populations than in OTL, and northern Ontario to be lower in population. Southern Ontario? Hard to say, but given that Toronto is currently surpassing Chicago in population in OTL, even with a national border hindering trade flows, I would guess that it's even more populated and economically active in TTL.
 
Interesting. Would this alternate Interstate cross the Upper Peninsula at Sault Ste. Marie, you think?

Maybe have I-90 in NY cross the Ontario peninsula over to Detroit in this version, I-94 crossing the Upper Peninsula to Sault Ste. Marie and then east to Labrador, I-87 hitting up to Quebec City, I-29 to Winnipeg, and so on?

Yes, I think all these are spot on. Even Canada's first transcontinental railroad (the Canadian Pacific) wanted to avoid going north over Lake Superior. ITTL, I can't imagine taking time to run a US/Interstate highway though what will be even less-populated country.

The I-90 and I-96 moves north might require splicing in a new I-92 but that's fine.

The north-south extensions are easy and would almost certainly happen ITTL.
 
In any TL in which the US and Canada are one country, there would be zero reason for anyone to live north of the Great Lakes. The climate is harsh, the land is infertile, and the terrain is unsuitable for infrastructure. The railroads would all go south of the Great Lakes and then fan to the Canadian prairies as well as the US Interior West. I-5 to Alaska would not happen, for the same reason OTL's Alaska barely has any Interstates.

For a look at what US-influenced Caribbean freeway systems would look like, look at Puerto Rico, which has a thoroughly American transportation system, complete with high car ownership.

US+Canada means higher per capita domestic oil production, but the US Interstate system predates the 1973 oil crisis, so the road map would look pretty much the same. Canada is less auto-oriented than the US despite having more oil for institutional reasons: a weaker federal government, no postwar white flight, a British tradition of absolute parliamentary authority to raise taxes (including fuel taxes), a political system that makes environmentalism more acceptable, a lag behind US trends that ensured that urban freeways couldn't be built before the political opposition to them matured. These institutional reasons would not exist in a TL in which the US was larger (as opposed to, say, one in which North America remained in British hands), so you'd expect larger networks of urban freeways in the major Canadian cities, about on the same scale as in similar-size American ones.
 
In any TL in which the US and Canada are one country, there would be zero reason for anyone to live north of the Great Lakes. The climate is harsh, the land is infertile, and the terrain is unsuitable for infrastructure. The railroads would all go south of the Great Lakes and then fan to the Canadian prairies as well as the US Interior West. I-5 to Alaska would not happen, for the same reason OTL's Alaska barely has any Interstates.

Not ZERO reason. Many of the reasons that exist OTL would still exist in TTL, such as massive mineral wealth and abundant trees for lumber and paper, as well as other resources like hydroelectricity. On the other hand, people who live in OTL Canada would have more options to live elsewhere.

The main east-west ground transportation routes would all run south of Lakes Superior and Huron, but there would almost certainly be plenty of feeder routes into the Canadian Shield for resource extraction.
 
Not ZERO reason. Many of the reasons that exist OTL would still exist in TTL, such as massive mineral wealth and abundant trees for lumber and paper, as well as other resources like hydroelectricity. On the other hand, people who live in OTL Canada would have more options to live elsewhere.

Not literally zero, but close to it, same way about zero people live in the areas of Northern Quebec, Northern Ontario, and the Territories with all the mineral wealth.

Now that I think of it, another factor reducing people's desire to live in those areas would be electricity costs. In Canada, cheap hydro power, often owned by the provinces, is a major dampener on living expenses, especially in remote areas. If Canada is part of the US, then this hydro power is owned by private concerns that will sell it to states farther south, reducing electricity costs in places like Upstate New York and Michigan and increasing them in Ontario and Quebec, and this would substantially increase living expenses north of the Great Lakes.
 
I've spent a diverting number of hours fooling around with Google Maps and my atlas to see if there could be any way there could be a continuation of the Interstate 5 beyond the OTL site of Vancouver to say Anchorage, Alaska.

(OTL the highway from Anchorage north to Fairbanks is apparently part of the Interstate system--I-4. Which violates the "even numbers are east-west, odd north-south" rule; I guess they were afraid of running out of numbers between 1 and 5!)

My conclusion is that yes, it could be done with enough money and determination. It wouldn't be an economically rational thing to do of course!

Remember that the Interstate project was legally speaking supposed to be a military defense measure, and that Alaska and the OTL British Columbia coast would be potentially vulnerable to seaborne attack if there were no transport infrastructure there whatsoever, so military logic might override economic and an extra effort to put roads where there is little economic need for them might be made.

On the other hand, I suspect the real reason the Interstates were proposed as a military thing in the 1950s was a way to circle around conservative ideology that said that the Federal Government shouldn't be involved in things like road projects, and that nearly everyone involved understood the primary purpose was in fact going to be civil infrastructure.

Parts of the stretch from Puget Sound to Anchorage would not call for roads because they are deserted. All of it is challenging topography to put driveable roads in, especially considering severe winter conditions and coastal storms would make them expensive to maintain and often impassible.

And the inhabited parts had infrastructure of sorts long before automobiles became popular--shipping. Looking at the atlas and online maps, one reason a road is daunting is that what settlement there is is as likely as not to be on the islands as on the mainland; a road would require many bridges and still leave some communities isolated anyway. Instead ferries run through the inner fjords, where they are somewhat protected from the storms and icebergs I guess. (Nowadays there are also lots of seaplanes landing on these waterways).

So I suppose the rational way for I-5 to be extended to Alaska would be to organize a system of reliable ferries, which between Canadian and US patronage does sort of already exist OTL. When I was thinking of roads I figured the Army Corps of Engineers would be stuck with the job of building and maintaining them; a "Maritime Highway" would give the Navy a portion of the benefit (and burden!) of being involved in the nominally military Interstate system. I actually think they would spurn it though; the Navy doesn't like being bogged down in infrastructure. In WWII OTL the Navy disdained to operate the Army's transport ships with the result that the Army actually commanded a more numerous fleet of ships than the Navy did!

The obvious fallback is the Coast Guard of course. I wonder if, between the prestige of keeping the "road" open in all weather and the premise that after all a certain amount of transport capability is needed for military emergencies, the service might develop extra-tough, "unsinkable" heavy-weather ferries that can operate even in the worst coastal weather, and operate enough of them to maintain skeleton service even then, with priority going to military needs, followed by humanitarian emergency traffic, and then charge a hefty fare on a space-available basis for otherwise unregulated civil traffic. In good weather I suppose licensed private ferries operating cooperatively under Coast Guard supervision would serve the regular traffic needs.

And all this is bearing in mind, given that ferry ships are rather slow compared to automobiles (and less flexible of course) much traffic would be diverted inland, the way Google Maps would route it first, to the highways in Canada that run along the eastern edge of the Rockies to Fairbanks. Perhaps there would be more pressure than in OTL to make the coastal route a bit more competitive, say by means of faster ferries in good weather.
 
IUS+Canada means higher per capita domestic oil production, but the US Interstate system predates the 1973 oil crisis, so the road map would look pretty much the same. Canada is less auto-oriented than the US despite having more oil for institutional reasons: a weaker federal government, no postwar white flight, a British tradition of absolute parliamentary authority to raise taxes (including fuel taxes), a political system that makes environmentalism more acceptable, a lag behind US trends that ensured that urban freeways couldn't be built before the political opposition to them matured. These institutional reasons would not exist in a TL in which the US was larger (as opposed to, say, one in which North America remained in British hands), so you'd expect larger networks of urban freeways in the major Canadian cities, about on the same scale as in similar-size American ones.

How was the Canadian federal government weaker? The settlement of the West certainly seemed to have a stronger hand from the federal government in the Canadian case than in the US.
 
How was the Canadian federal government weaker? The settlement of the West certainly seemed to have a stronger hand from the federal government in the Canadian case than in the US.

Not was, but is. The federal government's share of total government spending is lower in Canada than in the US (and in most democracies). Canada's division of federal and state responsibility made the federal government stronger in the late 19th century, but weaker in the second half of the 20th, since infrastructure, health, education, and social welfare are largely provincial responsibilities.

As an example, while American urban public transit lines routinely receive federal funding, Canadian ones rarely do, to the point that when it got a federal funding share that's not even that high by US standards, the Vancouver-Airport-Richmond SkyTrain line was named the Canada Line, after the federal government. The same is true for the much greater government spending on roads. With this weaker federal government, 20th-century Canada could not undertake any project as big as the US's federal-aid highway program, culminating in the Interstates; instead, the provinces built roads on their own, leading to freeway networks that are smaller and focused on shorter-distance travel, while the Trans-Canada Highway remains a two-lane road with grade crossings.
 
Vancouver and the Frazer delta would likely be less populated, with competing ports to the south (Seattle, Portland) taking away some of the immigration to the region. I would expect the Prairie provinces to have greater populations than in OTL, and northern Ontario to be lower in population.

Southern Ontario? Hard to say, but given that Toronto is currently surpassing Chicago in population in OTL, even with a national border hindering trade flows, I would guess that it's even more populated and economically active in TTL.

I'd argue with both points. Without a border Vancouver is a better port than Seattle in just about every conceivable way. An American BC seems a lot more likely to shrink Seattle than Vancouver IMO. I'd fully expect Seattle (if it exists as anything recognizable to OTL eyes) to be very much secondary to Vancouver.

Toronto OTOH loses a lot of it's reason to exist without a border. Doubly so when you consider that business bleeding off of Montreal is likely to scatter all over the country. This is going to depend quite a bit on how unification happens, but I'd expect Toronto to look a lot more like a rust belt city with some British influence than a competitor to Chicago. I wouldn't predict it as such, but I wouldn't be shocked to see Toronto facing a lot of the same industrial decline and racial problems as Detroit.

As far as the Trans Canada goes, I would remind everyone that the highway is not, and certainly wasn't built as, something comparable to an interstate. A lot of it is still undivided, and can drop down to two lanes. No, you aren't going to see an interstate over the top of the lakes, and a railway will happen later if at all, but I don't think there's much possibility of an all weather highway not being built at some point.
 
I'd argue with both points. Without a border Vancouver is a better port than Seattle in just about every conceivable way. An American BC seems a lot more likely to shrink Seattle than Vancouver IMO. I'd fully expect Seattle (if it exists as anything recognizable to OTL eyes) to be very much secondary to Vancouver.

Yes, exactly. In addition, the Rockies have lower passes between Alberta and BC than in Montana, and this means that there would be a railroad over Yellowhead Pass or Kicking Horse Pass before there would be one over Marias Pass or Bozeman Pass.

Toronto OTOH loses a lot of it's reason to exist without a border. Doubly so when you consider that business bleeding off of Montreal is likely to scatter all over the country. This is going to depend quite a bit on how unification happens, but I'd expect Toronto to look a lot more like a rust belt city with some British influence than a competitor to Chicago. I wouldn't predict it as such, but I wouldn't bew shocked to see Toronto facing a lot of the same industrial decline and racial problems as Detroit.

I sincerely doubt it. Assuming Toronto exists and is the capital of Ontario rather than a random village - which means unification happened after the 1790s (maybe the US extorted Canada from Britain after the Louisiana Purchase in exchange for neutrality or even support for Britain in the Napoleonic Wars) - it'd become a major city, if not nearly as big as in OTL. Assuming this TL doesn't majorly change the history of race relations - we are after all adding multiple hardcore abolitionist states to the Union - Toronto would probably not get much black migration during the Great Migration, for the same reason that Minneapolis and Boston didn't: it's too far. Black people would come to Detroit, and Windsor would emerge as a major suburb, lying in a different state. Toronto would have a smaller black migration, and would not be the immigrant destination that it is today. It would still be the state capital, and would have a strong eds and meds economy as a result, while Windsor and Hamilton would be totally rusted (as they are in OTL).
 
Top