WI Turkey adopts a US-style highway policy?

Just browsing around Wiki and found that the Turkish Ministry of Public Works has an associate membership with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), which regulates the Interstate Highway System and the U.S. Highway System, which I thought was cool, and gave me an idea - say if, for example, Adnan Menderes in the 1950s decides to adopt an American-style highway system, with motorways akin to the American Interstate Highways and dual carriageways akin to the U.S. Highways, as well as adopting American highway standards, adapted for the metric system? How would that change the transport network in Turkey?
 
By my estimate, the GDP of Turkey would have increased exponentially in relation to the programme. Road transportation would have increased by 300% (at least!), leading to an increase in infrastructure - schools, hospitals etc. - throughout the hinterland.

Although I'd rather have it based on the German model.
 
Just browsing around Wiki and found that the Turkish Ministry of Public Works has an associate membership with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), which regulates the Interstate Highway System and the U.S. Highway System, which I thought was cool, and gave me an idea - say if, for example, Adnan Menderes in the 1950s decides to adopt an American-style highway system, with motorways akin to the American Interstate Highways and dual carriageways akin to the U.S. Highways, as well as adopting American highway standards, adapted for the metric system? How would that change the transport network in Turkey?

There are models of highway systems that are closer to Turkey and easier to implement. The German or Italian motorway systems come to mind.

Right now Turkey invests quite a lot into a high-speed train network - or at least a network backbone.

Edit: In any case it does not matter whether Turkey takes over the US, German or Italian road-building standards as long as they put serious money in their road insfrastructure.
I wonder how this decision is linked to the population density?
 
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How are the roads in Turkey now? If they're anything like what the West Germans found in the East after unification, there will be quite a lot of repairs and modernization to be done before the roads resemble anything like a Western-style superhighway.
 
I spent about a year in Turkey and the drivers there are extremely aggressive. I think driving on a Turkish interstate like the autobahn or interstates here in the states would be very interesting.
 
How are the roads in Turkey now? If they're anything like what the West Germans found in the East after unification, there will be quite a lot of repairs and modernization to be done before the roads resemble anything like a Western-style superhighway.

It really depends. Istanbul-Ankara has full on eight lane or larger highway for parts of the journey, but anywhere east of that....well.....

It generally follows development patterns. The coasts, the west, and anywhere leading to Ankara have decent road networks, but nothing like a US superhighway. Much more in line with general southern europe road development. That said, there is a large amount of road construction that has gone on in recent years.


The modern Turkish passenger bus system is really the best I've ever experienced. Beats the crap out of Greyhound, that's for sure. In-drive movies, all the tea you could drink, little snack cakes...aaah. If only the rest stops were more frequent.

But I digress.

The possibility of a surviving Menderes/Demokrat Partisi government is interesting in and of itself, and is pretty much essential to the highway system taking off. Turkey in the 50's/60's was a heavily statist economy; something the American-friendly DP wanted to move away from. Part of the Turkish development schemes- before the DP came along and after it was removed- was an attempt to cultivate local industry through Import Substitution Industrialization, which called for pretty epic protectionism. Part of this was something like a one hundred percent import duty on cars, which I think may have persisted to this day.

While Turkey now has a car industry focused on building cars for the European market (several European car conglomerates maintain factories in Turkey, labor prices, etc. etc.) or for domestic/middle eastern consumption (like every third cab in Cairo was a TOFAS Sahin), this was NOT the case in the 1950's.

Basically you would have Menderes rolling the dice on a massive highway system in a country where there really was no mass personalized motor transport. To do that he would need to 1) change tariff laws AND 2) get enough cars on the road to justify expanding the road network, which IMO, needs way more political capital than he had.
 
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Basically what I'm saying is that you need a Turkish economic liberalization wank in order to 1) keep the DP in power and 2) get the prosperity to have heavily motor-vehicle centric transport in Turkey, which really isn't plausible before the 1970's IMHO.
 
I think they should have adopted the Armenian model.

Steps back, then starts videotaping.

Well, that's ironically somewhat OTL at least before the late 60's. The USSR and Turkey had pretty similar road networks (minimal) geared towards major population centers and carrying little private motor traffic. Even today you could cross the Turkish/Armenian border (hypothetically) and find little difference in infrastructure quality (although that is probably changing).
 
Turkey's highway system already seems crazy and excessive to me. I think it would have been better to invest in rail transport. Especially a subway system for Istanbul - ay carumba! WWI interrupted the original scheme, but still - 80 years?
 
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