WI: FDR starts Interstate Highway System

kernals12

Banned
What if FDR decided to start construction of the interstate highway system in around 1934? Nazi Germany was building its Autobahns at the same time so it wasn't infeasible. Also it would've provided many jobs during the great depression and greatly lowered transportation costs. What would be the ramifications be on migration? Would the bankruptcies of America's railroads have come sooner?
 
The Federal Highway system was well under construction by 1934. Majority of it was complete. It was also mostly adequate for the autos and traffic of the era. All the states had massive road construction projects as well from the 1920s. Some interstate style roads were laid out in that era. Usually urban parkways, or special limited access roads for dense traffic areas. A 1950s style interstate road would be spectacular for the era & a step ahead. In the short run it would be overkill & for some specific reasons less popular than in the 1960s.
 
FDR actually did propose a series of turnpikes but the head of Federal Highway Administration said that no one would want to pay tolls and by the time Pennsylvania Turnpike proved a success it was late October 1940 and FDR had other uses of the materials and manpower.
 

kernals12

Banned
FDR actually did propose a series of turnpikes but the head of Federal Highway Administration said that no one would want to pay tolls and by the time Pennsylvania Turnpike proved a success it was late October 1940 and FDR had other uses of the materials and manpower.
True, it was then-California governor Earl Warren who came up with the idea of using gasoline taxes to pay for highways in the 1940s.
 
A number of problems with this:

(1) In the 1930's, you lack the national defense justification--which was only partly a pretext in the 1950's in OTL. There was not yet much real concern in the 1930's about aerial bombardment from an ocean-crossing enemy (and of course there was no concern about a-bombs and h-bombs at all).

(2) Before the post-World War II boom and the GI Bill, you don't have nearly as much in the way of car-suburbs (and therefore cars) as you later will.

(3) As a friend of mine remarked, "at the end of the 30s what we think of as Interstates (not just the main trunks but especially the interchanges, circumferential belts, cloverleaves and what have you) were still blackboard theory. That's why it was in the 1939 World's Fair Futurama exhibit instead of actual testing..."

(4) Another reason World War II made a difference: five years of constant troop movements wreaked havoc on the passenger rail rolling stock. In the 1930's, it was in better shape, and interstates made less sense compared to the existing transportation system.

All these things militate against the 1930's giving us an interstate highway system as we know it. They do not of course preclude federal money being spent on highway construction--which indeed took place.
 
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The Federal Highway system was well under construction by 1934. Majority of it was complete. It was also mostly adequate for the autos and traffic of the era. All the states had massive road construction projects as well from the 1920s. Some interstate style roads were laid out in that era. Usually urban parkways, or special limited access roads for dense traffic areas. A 1950s style interstate road would be spectacular for the era & a step ahead. In the short run it would be overkill & for some specific reasons less popular than in the 1960s.
In the thirties the state of Pennsylvania wanted to build a Turnpike and nobody would buy the bonds to pay for it. I don't remember exactly how that Roosevelt got the federal government to honor those bonds as long as it was done in 2 years, I'm going by memory here, there was already across southern Pennsylvania a perfect route almost that they've been laid out as a railroad and never built so from New Carlisle Pennsylvania to near Philadelphia you had a basically super Highway. It had limited access every 35 miles there is a rest stop in each Direction initially there was no speed limit but they had to add one because of accidents and because car is overheated it 45 miles an hour that's why the 35 mile an hour speed limit puts the rest stops 35 miles apart. I believe the deal was it had to be completed in something like 2 years or all bets are off. It was completed in that like the time using mostly manual labor and other than paying a toll it is actually part of the interstate system I 70s on part of it.
 
To lazy to look u the numbers, but have back in the 1980s seen some detailed studies comparing the differences in tax subsidy 1940s-1970s for the railroads vs automotive roads. Were the user costs or tax subsidies equal a lot of the automotive travel of that era would have been unaffordable vs passenger rail. Ditto for long haul freight.
 
If this did happen, would there be more or fewer tolls on highways today? It could go either way -- tolls could be accepted as a necessary part of a highway system and the whole Interstate system could be toll roads, or free highways could be built before the various pre-Interstate toll roads came into being. As I understand it the Interstate system as planned in the Eisenhower administration consisted of free highways but there were pre-existing toll roads.
 
FDR actually did propose a series of turnpikes but the head of Federal Highway Administration said that no one would want to pay tolls and by the time Pennsylvania Turnpike proved a success it was late October 1940 and FDR had other uses of the materials and manpower.
"Stop, pay troll!"
Shevek shudders!

I used to live in North Wales Pennsylvania just north of Philadelphia in my families in Columbus Ohio and Fort Wayne Indiana I have driven that road so much I had flashbacks posting this however one of the best roads to drive.

OK, I viscerally hate the idea of a toll Interstate; to me toll roads are just plain unAmerican.

That said, I could conjure up some Devil's Advocate arguments for them.

Now obviously I've had the privilege of living in places where tolls are largely unknown; I do understand some of y'all live where they are more or less normal, I just never had the experience.

So first of all, @fscott, what exactly is good about the toll highway?

I might guess, fewer trucks. Certainly my counterexperience of free access freeways like the I-5 suggest that if I could afford the tolls, I might be grateful for fewer damn trucks, especially if the goods were moving on railroads instead. Perhaps I should be grateful to the self-named "knights of the road", the truckers, because without the game of trying to pass them safely in their endless battle array, I might fall asleep on a road like the I-5 between the Tehachapi mountains and the northern ranges along the California-Oregon border; between Bakersfield and Redding, the I-5 lies practically arrow straight and is dull terrain to drive through indeed. With these modern cars that can steer to stay in lane and cruise control with collision alarms, a driver might indeed fall asleep, hypnotized by the sheer abstract sameness of it all. Of course few highways have the luxury of such Roman idealization as that stretch of the 5. Anyway the trucks certainly make the game interesting in a Chinese sense, and also break up the monotone landscape with a streak of industrial butt-ugliness.

But by and large, despite the damned monster trucks, having roads that demand tolls and thus must employ an army of ill-paid bureaucrats to stand guard and demand the payment, the sheer hassle of having to keep loose change handy to feed the toll monster, and the frequent stops in the free flow of traffic they might cause depending on the setup all just seems so contrary to the spirit of the New Deal age or the self-congratulatory nature of post-War US society. The Devil's Advocate in me suggests maybe this would be a good thing.

Part of my revulsion against toll roads is that I remember reading not long after Bush the Elder was elected in 1988 that the future held in store more toll roads, because advisors to Bush were advocating them, and this in the context of 1980s Thatcher-Reaganite privatization. The idea of the superhighways demanding tolls to use them strikes me as bad enough, but here the idea was to sell rights to charge tolls to some private corporation, who would be obliged to keep the roads up (as they saw fit) but would be motivated by the prospect of profits far beyond the necessary costs. Such a scheme would have been yet another engine to enrich the already rich on the backs of the working poor. If we are going to have toll roads surely an accountable government authority should own them in the name of the people, and be subject to public democratic processes to account for the rates they are charging.

Anyway the gasoline tax to pay for all roads and having those roads be communistically open to all who choose to use them (having paid toll at the pump) seems workable enough.

So, was this notion of Interstates=toll road an unnecessary diversion of the thread, or is there something inherent about demanding tolls for such roads in the period? I am pretty amazed to learn it was Warren in the '40s who first thought of gasoline taxes; I'd think that idea would have cropped up in statehouses all over the nation by the mid-1920s at the latest, for state road systems. It does raise the question in my mind, how were roads paid for before the automotive revolution? Then of course they could be and often were far simpler, dirt tracks being generally good enough for carts and carriages of the type that would have moved on them. I know that in early 19th century pioneer days in the Midwest, roads were often "corduroy" which is to say, paved by wooden planks, that weren't very even to begin with and quickly got out of alignment, tipping up here, down there, going askew, and becoming pretty terrible for carts to move over, let alone anything faster. And that the Federalists and Whigs favored "interior improvements" including road projects, and these were indeed generally turnpikes--though I can't see how access was effectively limited.

Superhighways on the other hand are broadly defined as "Limited Access;" this is the secret of their success, that cross traffic must go on overpasses or underpasses, that they are fenced off to prevent casual wandering on of local herds of animals or children; this is what permits traffic to flow unimpeded. Given limited access, then it is only necessary to police the on-ramps and off ramps. If a single fee were charged to enter, and no second one had to paid until someone got off, and then wanted back on again, that fee might be quite large, calibrated to someone planning to take very long drives, of an hour or more. Eventually every vehicle would be forced off the turnpike to refuel, which would also be an opportunity to take a general break, so if the fees were set around typical tank ranges then people would generally be encouraged to use other roads (the term used in the parts of the USA I know is generally "surface roads," don't know if that is universal or not) for more local and casual uses, and only use the Interstate for long range trips. In turn planners would try to avoid running the roads through major urban areas, and the sort of sprawl we find OTL where every exit turns into a casual extension of the nearest town would be checked--indeed every exit is an opportunity for a roadside service station or three, but not so much casual little mini-malls, geared to servicing the town it is near, because a short run down the Interstate would be uneconomical. Nor would they serve any but the richest commuters because of the high tolls, thus local traffic being limited, the lanes could be kept to a minimum 2 each way geared to the flow of people and trucks hauling goods a long way.

As such I suspect that that sort of plan would not meet with high popular approval in America; people are not going to want the barrier the road makes if they can't use it casually for short local spins. The sheer hassle of having to hand over change to enter the system seems like it would stir up some resentment. Perhaps the pressure would be on to do something like I've read the plan was for the US 101 passing through Santa Rosa CA--the idea was to provide no on ramps in town, and to dig out a deep tunnel for the lanes of the road to go through with no option to enter or exit until it got to the other side. People who were taking the 101 to Santa Rosa would exit to the surface version, above the superhighway part, which would be a stop and start limited speed boulevard, as the road approached the town from north or south, and those who were driving through would stay on the subterranean superhighway which would emerge to the surface on the other side of town. Obviously it would have been expensive to bury the highway like that, but insofar as two lanes that have no reason to stop or slow to accommodate entering traffic or prepare to exit might serve to handle very large volumes with no further expansion the investment might pay off handsomely, even granting that maintenance might be tricky, and in earthquake country (the infamous one leveling San Francisco early in the 20th century actually had its epicenter pretty much in Santa Rosa, which was literally leveled) good engineering would be especially challenging. If this were the nature of the Interstates--no entrances or exits within major cities at all, running mainly through tunnels out of sight and out of mind--their existence as toll roads might be better tolerated as unobtrusive to those who don't choose to pay to use them. But politically speaking, the "free" access versions, so that in my mind Interstate="freeway," seem better poised to cement themselves to public consensus despite the evils eventually associated with them. Allowing cities to reform around them seems to have brought some serious problems, but by the time these are recognized by the general public, charging new fees to use them is clearly a case of adding both injury and insult to injury. In early days, when they are first being laid out and approved, they looked like big win wins to the general public who therefore supported them.

Thus, I suspect if we are going to talk about early Interstates in the USA, particularly in the New Deal days, we are going to be talking about freeways, not toll roads.
 
.. I am pretty amazed to learn it was Warren in the '40s who first thought of gasoline taxes; I'd think that idea would have cropped up in statehouses all over the nation by the mid-1920s at the latest, for state road systems. ...

The idea was around. There was a lot of opposition to what amounted to a sales tax. It was not super popular with the automotive or oil industry & the populist appeal was not taxing the little man.

.. It does raise the question in my mind, how were roads paid for before the automotive revolution? ...

Bond issues were big. Those paid for the initial capitalization. License fees were a small contribution. Few to no states started with reciprocal recognition of each others vehicle licenses. While private autos gained reciprocal recognition fairly early relief was slower for the truck industry. When I was a kid in the 1950s it was not unusual to see 5-10 state license tags fastened to a interstate truck. Previous to the automobile roads were almost entirely a local question. Often passed all the way down to township trustees. The states would identify routes, & even pay to mark the right of ways. But, if folks wanted pavement & bridges, that was usually up to their city or county council.
 
A number of problems with this:

(1) In the 1930's, you lack the national defense justification--which was only partly a pretext in the 1950's in OTL. There was not yet much real concern in the 1930's about aerial bombardment from an ocean-crossing enemy (and of course there was no concern about a-bombs and h-bombs at all).

(2) Before the post-World War II boom and the GI Bill, you don't have nearly as much in the way of car-suburbs (and therefore cars) as you later will.

(3) As a friend of mine remarked, "at the end of the 30s what we think of as Interstates (not just the main trunks but especially the interchanges, circumferential belts, cloverleaves and what have you) were still blackboard theory. That's why it was in the 1939 World's Fair Futurama exhibit instead of actual testing..."

(4) Another reason World War II made a difference: five years of constant troop movements wreaked havoc on the passenger rail rolling stock. In the 1930's, it was in better shape, and interstates made less sense compared to the existing transportation system.

All these things militate against the 1930's giving us an interstate highway system as we know it. They do not of course preclude federal money being spent on highway construction--which indeed took place.

I agrees with this, especially point 4. Also, don't forget the secondary purpose of the system which wasn't noted until after the war: using sections of the interstate system as emergency runways for military aircraft (the Germans used sections of the Autobahn for their jets, Ike noticed)...
 
In the thirties the state of Pennsylvania wanted to build a Turnpike and nobody would buy the bonds to pay for it. I don't remember exactly how that Roosevelt got the federal government to honor those bonds as long as it was done in 2 years, I'm going by memory here, there was already across southern Pennsylvania a perfect route almost that they've been laid out as a railroad and never built so from New Carlisle Pennsylvania to near Philadelphia you had a basically super Highway. It had limited access every 35 miles there is a rest stop in each Direction initially there was no speed limit but they had to add one because of accidents and because car is overheated it 45 miles an hour that's why the 35 mile an hour speed limit puts the rest stops 35 miles apart. I believe the deal was it had to be completed in something like 2 years or all bets are off. It was completed in that like the time using mostly manual labor and other than paying a toll it is actually part of the interstate system I 70s on part of it.


First, there isn't a "New Carlisle"; it was Carlisle. Second, the route followed a proposed railroad right of way that had been laid out on paper in the first decade of the 20th century, but apart from a mile or so of grading and a number of tunnels, had never been built. Third, cars could easily do better than 35 mph in 1939 (I have a 1940 La Salle that will do 85 mph readily with something left), and even the most poorly maintained flathead engines won't overheat in that short distance unless working against a steep grade. The limit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike going back into the '50s and before was 60 mph for automotive traffic. Fourth, not only is it part of I-70 but I-76 as well. Fifth, the section from Irwin (the west end, about 20 miles east of Pittsburgh) to the Ohio state line was completed in the early 1950s, followed by the Carlisle-to-Delaware River section later in the 1950s. The Northeast Extension (some of the dullest driving on the eastern seaboard, IMO) followed that.
 
Actually for a short time after it opened the PA turnpike opened their were no speed limits though one was posted fairly quickly. About the popularity of turnpikes on opening day they ran out of the tickets they used and it was very popular until the US got involved in WW2.
 
Interesting: the no speed limit provision isn't mentioned on the official turnpike history. But I did find out I was off on the dates of the extensions: the road was extended east from Carlisle to Valley Forge in 1950, west from Irwin to the Ohio line shortly thereafter, with the last portions (the northeast extension to Scranton) finished in 1957. Of course there were modest extensions to Clarks Summit / junction with I-81 some years thereafter.
 
... About the popularity of turnpikes on opening day they ran out of the tickets they used and it was very popular until the US got involved in WW2.

It seems clear enough part of this high popularity up to late '41 related to there being very few limited access superhighways of any kind in the USA to compare the new Turnpike to. My as yet unanswered question, which I eagerly await some enlightenment on, is why I am hearing from modern American drivers who have freeway alternatives to compare to, about the superior aspects of this Turnpike component of the Interstate today. I think most people would readily agree that some features would at least be annoying, if not deal-breakers (or horribly un-American and a vicious stab at the working class, which is my reflexive reaction) so I am waiting to hear precisely why either things like having to stop and do some sort of transaction at a toll booth are not nearly as bad as I foresee, or what other countervailing advantages exist that make the turnpike worth putting up with any annoyances these perhaps admitted drawbacks present. i know that nowadays, new technology that had no workable counterpart back in the 1940s and '50s can ease the hassle by automating either account charges or crediting membership in some monthly or annual pass scheme so that drivers equipped with such tech can simply drive through an access lane just for them and enter, presumably more easily than either a freeway (where the hoi polloi from all over the nation compete with regional members of these access schemes) or a traditional toll entry, where all must stop and wait in line, even those with paid up passes. But clearly that would be an unfair comparison to 1940s conditions unless one can envision a fraud-proof method of efficient verification of paid status allowing smooth unimpeded access workable with the tech of the day.

I do want to say that I am envisioning a bunch of perhaps Utopian ATL possibilities, some of which might be helped by turnpike Interstates, perhaps--so far nothing good seems to require them, but perhaps some nice compensations might emerge in a toll Interstate ATL I have not thought of. So if someone can explain to me just why in their experience as a driver of modest means (not specifying grinding poverty here, just average wage earner income would be reasonable) a turnpike is more desirable than a freeway. I'd like it spelled out, please!

Meanwhile, speaking of primordial limited access superhighways, one of the more pleasant ones to use in 1980s Los Angeles was one of the other originals, namely the Pasadena Freeway. {edit--in the decades since I left my beloved Los Angeles area it seems some gladhanding PR happy idiot or another went and officially restored its primitive name of "Arroyo Seco Parkway," which is pretty and descriptive enough too, but not at all what anyone in LA ever called it in my lifetime up to 2010!} Let me specify the conditions--if one lived at one end or the other and wanted to use the freeway to get to the other end, not to some intermediate destination lying on the Freeway (I almost never had occasion to get off it, let alone try to get on, between the ends) then it was much more likely to be rolling smoothly, free of jams, even during the classic long portion of the day (from mid-afternoon to mid evening, say 3 PM to 8 PM, or so it seemed to me, any week night) when the majority of freeways would be expected to be jammed or severely slowed at numerous crucial chokepoints, stretching from horizon to horizon at the worst times. Not the good old Route 110!

Two secrets of success for the automotive commuter on this route connecting South Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles:
1) no damn trucks. As a road designed without modern heavy tractor-trailer trucks in mind, they were banned from it.
2) a primitive form of road access at intermediate entry/exits made it night impossible for new traffic of any kind to enter the road once traffic levels built up to incipient jamming levels. {Wikipedia links in describing these call them "folded diamond" junctions but the article these link to does not seem to describe this particular ultra-flat "diamonds" in all their stupefying one dimensional glory, presumably because once the global freeway era proper began, everyone realized they'd be insane to replicate this feature and no one does it anywhere else in the world. I hope! So I will not bother with a linky. I describe it well enough below I think.}Unlike most limited access highways, no elaborate system of onramps and offramps was provided between the two termini (well, maybe a couple cloverleaf intersections with other major superhighways--but no on or off ramps from or to surface roads!) The intermediate entries/exits were designed, in the naive and trusting 1930s, to be simple perpendicular intersections with surface roads "controlled" by a plain old Stop sign. Someone proposing to enter anywhere but at the ends or by joining from another freeway via the rare cloverleafs would need to pull right up, nose to the sides of vehicles streaming past at 60 MPH or worse, and wait for a gap to open in the right lane permitting them to turn and accelerate from a dead stop to full traffic speed. In olden pre-war days or perhaps the immediate postwar years, perhaps traffic was light enough that plenty such opportunities came along naturally and people had pretty free access (to whichever direction is to one's right facing the road, to go the other way one would have to cross the freeway somehow and make a U turn to approach it from the other right on the other side!) in the middle. Not so by 1989! Perhaps one of my sisters, who did briefly live in a neighborhood the 110 ran through, could tell me in what hours of the day or week, if any, one could count on getting aboard the Freeway by this simple means.

But during the hours I tended to drive it, I was part of an iron wall of cars driving much too close to each other to possibly allow anyone new to enter the road. Thus one can see that the tendency of this design of road was naturally less likely to jam, for as the density of traffic rose to a level where propagating waves of preemptive braking to prevent collisions with vehicles ahead, new cars were effectively barred from entering (but not exiting) at intermediate access points. Thus the flow might slow but would not grind to a halt, and remain so fast (over 50 mph at least) that even very daredevil drivers could not dream of surviving an attempt to force their way in. In these conditions, the Pasadena Freeway became the equivalent of the Great Wall of China, impassible except at any over or underpasses provided, and otherwise of no use to the people of the neighborhood until traffic died down very late in the evening.

Reaching the end of the Freeway, one was dumped, at the north end, onto a wide surface boulevard in the city of Pasadena at its southwest border--one could turn left and head for the southernmost end of a spur of new freeway long ago intended to be driven south as an alternate, but had been blocked by neighborhood activists in the 1970s and '80s from being completed, and drive up a mile or so of pristine and deserted 6 lane freeway until it came to the east-west 210 connecting Glendale to Pasadena, at which point the expected traffic jam would be in full force. Continuing north traffic would rapidly fill and jam it not long after passing that artery. The smart thing to do was drive on the surface road instead and gradually work one's way toward one's destination. (Me and my partner I chauffeured around lived near the far east of Pasadena, and by waiting to go home until pretty late at night I could instead take that ridiculous empty freeway spur up to the 210, enter that route across the city and exit at the second to last Pasadena exit going eastbound, and then turn right twice in quick succession to park at her apartment right there--getting onto the freeway west bound was a wee bit more involved but quite rapidly doable, when traffic on it would be light enough to make this worth doing-when the road flowed, taking the spur route to zigzag over to the Pasadena Freeway north terminus was also easy and quick).

Therefore I loved the Pasadena Freeway, because its poorly thought out design made it useless to the people living along it but a great boon to those of us who lived near either end.

Could it be that some of the desirable features for many who enjoy aspects of the Pennsylvania Turnpikes are also legacies of immature superhighway design that did not take into full account saturation conditions and therefore privilege some types of driver over others, with trucks banned, or access actually more limited than intended leaving others SOL? Or are they more logical direct consequences of the toll level and form in which they are paid?

My experience with toll roads boils down to some bridges in the Bay Area (the toll situation there making passage in the toll direction a bloody nightmare, backed up miles before the bridge itself) and some distant childhood memory of a turnpike in central Florida in the region of Cape Canaveral, where one would toss quarters into a kind of trough and when they fell down the central hole, the gate would open. I was just in first grade at the time so I didn't remark very carefully on what using this road was like.
 
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What about extending US-61 north of Baton Rouge (known to people in the area as Airline Highway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge) as a modern 4 lane road to St Louis and on up to Chicago?
 
Few to no states started with reciprocal recognition of each others vehicle licenses. While private autos gained reciprocal recognition fairly early relief was slower for the truck industry. When I was a kid in the 1950s it was not unusual to see 5-10 state license tags fastened to a interstate truck.

That was due to regulation that mandated what routes a company could use, among other things.
It was just a moneygrab that ended with Carter.
 
The redundant plate thing ended a lot earlier. Some time in the 1960s we could no longer use the big transport trucks for multiple hits playing the license plate game. My memory is there were several 'transportation' reforms for interstate trucking during my early life. Unfortunately I wasn't taking notes :(
 
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