WI: FDR starts Interstate Highway System

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?

I wonder if the water transport between New Orleans & Chicago would make that less than a ideal route? A number of rail routes between those two as well. Earlier mega roads might do better where water transport is lacking & rail competition thinner.
 
A good read on this topic is "The Big Roads" by Earl Swift. It has been a couple of years since I read it so the details are a little hazy.

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..."
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Actually, by the early 30's most of the basic ideas you mentioned had been developed or discussed. They had laid out most of the routes, developed the numbering system, etc. The biggest issue was how to fund the roads which took until after the war to resolve.

I was dead set against toll roads until about 10 years ago but now I see there is a need for them. With politicians too dang scared to raise the fuel tax rate, roads everywhere are getting worse and worse. If the tolls are actually used to maintain the roads, I don't have much of a problem but too often they are used a money maker for other efforts in a state. From what I remember the toll roads in Kansas and Oklahoma were well maintained; the New York Thruway system is okay, not great, not terrible; the toll road in Delaware is a total rip-off, roads are bad, always torn up, and the rates are high.
 
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 :(

The IRP Apportioned plates were introduced in around 1974, and not all States signed on at first for that Tax revenue sharing between them
25 States and Canadian Provinces signed on by 1981.

Rhode Island held out till 1996, and all of Canada by 2001
 
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