The Interstate Highway System: A Review
Your highway designers were so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped to ask whether they should
It’s summertime, which means Americans have one thing and one thing only on their provincial little minds: Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Dwight D. Eisenhower.1
Yes, Eisenhower-mania is—once again—sweeping our fair nation.
Among his litany of accomplishments in war and peace2, he left us with the interstate highway system. A marvel of engineering stretching from coast to coast, from north to south, from Wawa to Sheetz to Culver to Buc-ees to whatever’s going on out there in California3, the highways connect Americans from diverse regions and walks of life. As we have seen with social media, this was a huge mistake—many Americans, myself included, are “not ready for primetime,” and should work on ourselves before we go out into the world, or operate heavy machinery.
Nevertheless, what’s done is done. This weekend, my wife and I drove to Michigan and back on I-80, which let us appreciate the rolling hills and brilliant greenery of Ohio, the undulating topography and breathtaking verdure of Pennsylvania, the hills and valleys and vast forests of New Jersey. Ok, it was all pretty much the same. Lots of trees. But occasionally, it would be interrupted with a billboard featuring a 40-foot high stack of pancakes4, so it wasn’t all bad.
Here’s where I have to extend a minor apology to Robert Moses. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro frequently describes Moses’s vision of crisscrossing parkways that let drivers zip along tree-lined roads, essentially cruising through beautiful parks. Moses’s crucial mistake was thinking this would work in the most congested urban area in the country, a notion that city planners, with the benefit of hindsight, refer to as “moronic.”
But outside the city? Cruising along in your car and looking at the trees as you zip by? Honestly, pretty great. For me, I should clarify. It is probably not so great for the trees. If they were able, they would likely pull the passive aggressive move we non-smokers would pull back when people were still allowed to smoke in restaurants and day-care facilities, ostentatiously coughing to show their displeasure at our car exhaust. Fortunately, though, the trees are silent, which means—and here I’m making a prediction—we humans will never have to pay any price for our degradation of the environment. Pretty sweet!
For any readers interested in driving on America’s highways5, I have a few pieces of advice that may make your journey safer and more pleasurable.
Following distance: your Driver’s Ed teacher may have told you to multiply the tens place of your driving speed times car lengths to find the appropriate space to leave between you and the car in front of you. So, if you are driving 70 miles per hour, you should leave about seven car lengths. If you try this in the real world, you will get killed. Not from a car accident, of course, but because your fellow drivers will beat you to death with a tire iron. The drivers on America’s highways hate empty space. If you are driving at 70 miles per hour and leave seven car lengths ahead of you, that space will promptly be filled by nine cars. Anthropologists aren’t sure why this is the case, but it is believed that drivers want to ensure that any collision will result in catastrophic injuries, totally demolishing their internal organs, thus keeping them safe from the rapacious bodysnatchers who stalk America’s trauma units.
Turn signals: Much like the human body’s appendix, cars have many vestigial features that no longer have any use in modern life. There is a little lever to the left of your steering wheel—if you push it down, it will make a little light blink on the left side of your car; if you push it up, it will make one blink on the right. Do not touch this lever. Other drivers find this incredibly condescending—after all, it will be clear enough that you’re turning when you erratically jerk your steering wheel to the left, coming within microns of deleting the family line of a nice actuary from Indiana. When you use a turn signal, other drivers get haughty—from their perspective, it feels like you are patting them on the head: Now junior, I’m about to execute a left-hand turn. Remember, if you hold up your forefinger and thumb, the one that makes an “L” is your left. Oh, and this big machine I’m in is called an “automobile.” There is no space for this kind of paternalism on our roads.
Good luck out there!
Notes:
Why did I write this? A common theme in my life: when I go outside and observe my fellow creatures, I think: were you raised by wolves? But really, as an adrenaline junkie, I love driving.
What I’m reading: I finished Way Station, which, despite having the lurking specter of nuclear war in the background, ended on a pretty optimistic note. The next book in my sci-fi collection is Daniel Keyes’s Flowers For Algernon. This one is rightfully considered a classic, and tells the story of a man with an extremely low IQ whose life is altered when he undergoes an experimental procedure to raise it. Told through the protagonist’s “progress reports,” we trace his rise and fall and experience of life as someone of low intelligence, then high. We were assigned this book in seventh grade and I vaguely remember the beats of the story, but it’s nice to return to it with an adult mind. It’s fun to see how you process things differently at different stages of your life. For example, I probably like Flowers For Algernon a lot more now, but I think I appreciated Balls Of Fury more as a 7th grader.
As I was “researching” (noodling around the internet) for this article, I came across this amazing comment from a now-deleted Reddit account, responding to an article about Eisenhower: “That article shows a side of him I never realized. Interesting. However, he's still the guy who greenlit the CIA coup in Iran and look how much long-term damage that's done for what was at the time a relatively small reward. Overthrowing another country's democratically elected government is always a bit of a dick move, regardless of your motives.” I don’t really have anything to say about this—I just wanted you to have the same experience I did, of seeing someone refer to the overthrow of the Iranian government as “a bit of a dick move.” I think this is great, and more historians should talk this way. “Targeted assassinations? Sheesh—that is no bueno, my guy.”
Just nod your head and smile here—if you don’t ask me to name any, I will extend you the same courtesy, and that way, people will think we’re smart, and no one will guess the truth, which is that we are both picturing Eisenhower crossing the Delaware on a freezing Christmas Eve, or—possibly—wearing a loincloth and fighting off a wooly mammoth with a spear.
Exxon Mobil? Sound off, Golden State readers!
Smart, iHop—you know what I want after sitting motionless for nine hours? A gigantic stack of pancakes. This is—I imagine—the closest a human being can get to experiencing “being a calf raised for veal.”
I realize some of you may have driven on the interstate before—the consulting firm that provides analytics on my subscribers tells me my average reader is a minor European lord or lady living in a mouldering, once-great country manor who rarely leaves and spends their days obsessed with developing a theory that unifies zoology and French cooking.