The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and its consequences have been a disaster for the United States. Since the dawn of time, mankind has striven for ever more economically beneficial modes of travel, innovating new ways to move faster, further, and more efficiently. On its face, the Interstate Highway System may seem like another brick in the long golden road of transportation progress. However, the decision made by President Eisenhower and Congress to spend 25 billion dollars1 on this particular project was not only a massive opportunity cost, but a driver of major national problems such as pollution, racial inequality, and suburbs.
As many here know, the data support an overall negative view on the preeminence of cars as a means of transportation. One study found dozens of social and personal ills caused by automobiles and the infrastructure required to support them, including the deaths of tens of millions, environmental devastation, inefficient land use, and heightened economic inequality.2 Conversely, public transportation tends to lead to gains in health, productivity, accessibility, and overall equity.3
If cars bad and roads bad, then it stands to reason that more cars on more roads would be more bad for the same reasons. Indeed, the Interstate Highway System has contributed to all the usual woes brought by an overreliance on cars, including pollution, subpar land stewardship, and racial and economic inequality.4,5 However, due to its scope, scale, and geographical specifics, the IHS has also created problems that smaller local roads could never match.
Perhaps most infamously, the IHS was built in a way that cut through the heart of many urban areas. Construction ran right through major cities, slicing minority communities in half, creating physical borders between them and “whiter” areas, and driving members of minority groups from their homes. This was no accident; urban planner Robert Moses and his ilk fully intended to destroy the communities they viewed as “slums”, their aim being to “kill two birds with one stone” by boosting transportation and purging the undesirables in one fell swoop.6 The effects of their decisions continue to be felt by American minorities today, exacerbated by the general tendency of cars and their associated infrastructure to contribute to racial inequality. By disrupting cities and making road travel easier across greater distances, the IHS has also allowed suburbs, a grossly sparse and inefficient use of land, to blossom and flourish.
Cars suck fucking ass on net. They take up so much goddamn space with their seemingly unlimited need for infrastructure; you can try and expand them to “one more lane” over and over again, but that just increases the demand for cars and rarely succeeds at easing congestion.7 They kill a shitton of people, not only in crashes because you have a bunch of goddamn idiots piloting high-speed slugs of metal the size of an ankylosaur instead of stowing them all away safely in one big vehicle with one or two people who are hopefully not idiots at the helm, but by polluting everything to shit.8 Interstate Highway System defenders may point out the economic necessity of constructing major transportation arteries across the country; indeed, it’s impossible to deny that the system has benefited the economy.9 What those bitches don’t understand is a little something called OPPORTUNITY COST. In terms of government-funded transportation infrastructure, America should have gotten railed instead, and not in the sense that it has been since last January (lol xD).
The complete eradication of automobiles is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable. However, for publicly-funded intracity and intercity transit, rail transport provides significant advantages over ever-expanding automobile infrastructure. Not only does it produce far fewer societal ills than cars, ranging from environmental to medical to racial, but travel by train benefits the average American in ways that are easier to grasp and more personally felt; most notably, taking the train and paying fare tends to be much, much cheaper than using a personal car and paying for gas.10
While trains in 1956 were significantly slower and less advanced, it is inexcusable that the President and Congress did not see the folly of investing so heavily in automobile infrastructure rather than seeking ways to bolster public transportation. With the rise of high-speed rail, we are now in a position to begin dismantling the oppressive systems of interstate automobile travel and building the transportation arteries of the future. Regulatory overreach frequently stymies any ambition to construct such railways, a topic which has been explored in other works,11 and of course the Interstate Highway System already exists.
That said, while we cannot right the wrongs of the past, we can begin to forge our own path and right the rights of the future. As a nation and a society, we would all benefit from a shift in focus toward trains and other forms of public transportation by policymakers as they plan the infrastructure that will serve our children and grandchildren. Our environment, our health, our communities, our economy, and our personal pocketbooks would all benefit if we chose not to let Eisenhower’s Folly define us forever and instead strove together for a brighter, denser future.
References:
1 https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/national-interstate-and-defense-highways-act
2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
4 https://research.library.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=environ_2015
5 https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/The%20Polluted%20Life%20Near%20the%20Highway.pdf
6 https://www.history.com/articles/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation
7 https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
8 https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-11/The%20Polluted%20Life%20Near%20the%20Highway.pdf
9 https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2021/q2-3/economic_history
11 https://books.google.com/books/about/Dune.html?id=B1hSG45JCX4C
I wrote this for a Dorothy watch, /u/dynamitezebra DM me 😘
Posted by TheCornjuring
2 Comments
Stickied first before reading so hopefully it’s good
You’re overlooking an important downside which is that it lets Ezra Klein drive his prius to middle aged mothers’ houses and hook up with them. And there’s no record of it because he didn’t have to buy a train ticket