No Interstate System, effects on USA

[TMOT1955]

An interstate highway system much as we have today was inevitable. There is no way modern America as we even remotely imagine it would have been possible without an interstate highway system.

You have a huge country with a large population, also many vast open spaces especially out west, to easily and efficiently transport people, goods, and services over those distances and do it with the individual freedom to come and go that we Americans have come to accept almost as a right, a system of interstate highways was a necessity.

 

[Expat]

Actually the core of the system was generally intended to avoid city centers. the decision to add routes through and into major metropolitan areas was largely done because local officials didn't want their cities to be "bypassed"

A lot of the pushback against this occurred in the late 1960s as society in general got used to mobilizing to promote various causes. If highway construction is merely pushed back, destruction of city centers should meet with more initial resistance.

Some cities won't resist and we'll still see freeways pushing through former neighborhoods. I can think of lots of examples: Detroit, a lot of Midwestern/Texan cities.

Some cities might be worse off if freeway-adjacent land on the periphery can really be made massively more convenient than downtowns. In the case of some cities, "New" and "Old" towns will emerge side-by-side as better access leads to an entirely reproduced core, only this one built around the freeway. In this model, the most likely outcome are old cities ghetto-izing only to be reinvigorated in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and/or 10s. But making an entire new city only works in certain situations. Mid-sized cities would be good targets. And certain western cities with no established ring of commuter towns to hamper development.

And then of course a lot of cities would just be better off: New Orleans, New York, DC; any place where factors other than convenience dictate office placement. In these places, we will probably see more robust development of commuter rail as a replacement for 100% driving commutes.

Not high speed rail, but something.

 

[Dan1988]

Actually the core of the system was generally intended to avoid city centers. the decision to add routes through and into major metropolitan areas was largely done because local officials didn't want their cities to be "bypassed"

So a greater use of business routes, then, so as to alleviate the concern of local officials whilst keeping the expressways to the original plan?

 

[M79]

Nobody mentioned NJ Turnpike??? (Edit: built in 1951, less relevant perhaps than I thought)

Honestly had not thought about that, but it leads into an interesting point.

Private industry might take up where the American government does not. Interstate highways will come, first to the Northeast and California, then elsewhere. Their routes and sizes may change but they will still evolve. I wonder what a USA with private interstates would look like...

I think one could set up a neat DBWI asking "What If Truman's National Health Care System wasn't passed," and a response like yours would make perfect sense.

Interesting, I'd read it.

At some point, the spending of substantial funds on national infrastructure projects became a dead otter (or something like that) and if the national interstate system's construction is postponed to that point, then, we end up with a here-and-there not-necessarily-a-network collection of "minor" limited-access highways, a few nationally recognized "turnpikes," and stuff like Route 66 sort of covering the rest.

There would probably be a network running from Chicago or St Louis to the Boston and covering just about everything in between. There would also likely be a few key superhighways connecting the east and west coast, probably one southern (via Texas and Phoenix) and one kinda northern (via Omaha and Denver) with maybe another one in between or far northern.

The Middle Of Nowhere would be a lot harder to get to, for starters.

Or not develop at all, there are places that were among the poorest counties in the nation until the interstate came through.

 

[zoomar]

A lot of the pushback against this occurred in the late 1960s as society in general got used to mobilizing to promote various causes. If highway construction is merely pushed back, destruction of city centers should meet with more initial resistance..

I think you'd have to find a way to delay the idea of the Interstate Highway for system decades, rather than years, to get a massive level of opposition to commuter freeways destroying inner city neighborhoods. Also, growing awareness of the destruction caused by the Interstates was probably the main reason for the raft of federal laws requiring environmental impact studies and historic preservation in the 1970s. If this destruction does not occur in the 1960's and 1970's, the laws now used by advocates to limit and redirect such destructive projects in the 1980's and 1990s may not have been enacted.

Also, I think the Interstate System, as an between-city connecting system, is basically inevitable given the size and population demographics of the USA (especially once you go west and South of the northeast USA) and the already existing car culture. Unless there had been an equivalently huge federal program to support and expand local commuter transit systems with an eye to keeping residences and commercial centers in city centers, people will still move to suburbs and want to drive their cars to work. In the political environment of the 1950's-1960's there is no way the federal government could have undertaken such a large public works program that did not have "interstate commerce" as its main raison d'etre.

 

[phx1138]

I think everyone may be missing the point, here.

There's a difference between "a system of major highways running between & across states" & "the Interstate Highway System". The first is next to inevitable. The second is an artifact of federal policy. The first is influenced by provision of federal (&, to a lesser degree, state) tax money. The second is entirely federal.

In short, without a dedicated federal plan, there'd still be a national system of highways. It would be much less uniform & complete, & many, many fewer centers would be bypassed. There would probably be more money for things like rail.