Colin Fiske, Coalition for Responsible Transportation Priorities Executive Director
This is the fourth in a series of articles in the EcoNews about the history of how American communities were designed for cars. The first three articles described the origins of traffic laws, the criminalization of walking in the street, and the rise of zoning laws that led to segregated, car-dominated communities.
By the 1950s, the fight for legal and cultural dominance of the public street had largely been won by car companies and drivers, and zoning laws which enforced low-density development had been implemented in cities and towns across the country. The federal government had been subsidizing road construction for decades by then, but the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act signed by President Eisenhower marked a major escalation in the nation’s commitment to infrastructure for cars and trucks. It wrote into law what had previously been just a fantasy of car-boosters in industry and politics: a nationwide network of “superhighways.”1 And it committed $25 billion (equal to about $250 billion in today’s dollars) to do it.2
Contrary to popular belief, however, the Interstate Highway System (and US roads more generally) have never been funded entirely by gas taxes and other “user fees.”3 It soon became clear that even the billions of dollars allocated by the 1956 law would not be enough to build the Interstate system, and in the early years of construction many considered it a boondoggle. But John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower’s successor, doubled down on the Interstate program, and the federal government responded to the public skepticism with even more billions in funding along with an all-out public relations effort. By the mid-1960s, it was pretty clear that the Interstate Highway building program was here to stay.4 Over the following decades, the federal government pumped an ever-increasing amount of money into the Interstate Highway System.
Although the Interstate Highway System is generally thought of as a long-distance rural network, urban transportation and transformation were key justifications for it from the very beginning.5 Interstates were conceived and designed as quick and efficient ways to get massive numbers of drivers into and out of city centers. They were also intended and widely used to destroy neighborhoods populated by people of color—designated as “slums” or “blight”—and create physical barriers to segregate people by race. Instead of the intended “urban renewal,” however, the mass urban displacement exacerbated poverty and poor living conditions. These impacts, combined with superhighway access for cars directly in and out of downtowns, supercharged the suburban building boom and “white flight” that had already begun under the influence of new zoning rules and changing transportation norms.6
In fact, studies estimate that urban Interstate highways reduced urban housing stock by 15 percent7 and urban populations by as much as 18 percent, all while suburban populations exploded.8 In other words, a lot of the blame for the hollowing out of city centers and today’s urban housing shortages, along with the sprawling car-dependent suburbs that characterize most modern American metropolitan areas, can be attributed to the Interstate Highway System.
It may seem like all this has little to do with the North Coast. After all, there is no Interstate highway here—the nearest point on the Interstate Highway System is I-5 in Redding. But the impact of the Interstate system can be felt even here.
For one thing, the Interstate system introduced the nation’s first highways purpose-built exclusively for cars and trucks, which became the model for highways throughout the country, including those on the North Coast. Later iterations of federal transportation legislation formalized these design standards and extended them to other highways. Notably, the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 designated a “National Network” of highways, largely overlapping the Interstate Highway System, which were required to accommodate the largest tractor-trailers (now called “STAA trucks”). The Act also basically required that all other highways have to be built to accommodate these trucks whenever feasible—which is a large part of the reason that highways in our region are so big and wide even when they go directly through downtowns.
Without the Interstate Highway System, then, we would not have massive limited-access highways connecting most of the North Coast’s major communities—and cutting vast swathes of asphalt and concrete through those same communities. It is interesting to imagine, for example, what Arcata would look like today had local environmentalists prevailed in stopping Caltrans from cutting the Highway 101 canyon through the middle of town—how much more walkable and bikeable the town might be, and how much more desperately needed housing might be standing in the center of town. And bedroom communities like McKinleyville likely wouldn’t exist in their current form without direct freeway access to the job centers of Arcata and Eureka.
Speaking of “freeways,” the Interstate system is also associated with the invention of that term. By associating the term “free” with an enormously expensive type of transportation infrastructure, and one which comes with huge societal costs, this became one of the most effective and insidious branding efforts in American history.9 Far from being free, the Interstate Highway System—along with the vast network of connecting highways which extend its reach to the North Coast and the rest of the nation—constitute a massively expensive multi-decade public works project that prioritized cars and trucks, enabled suburban sprawl, and destroyed some of the most vibrant walkable, bikeable, and transit-friendly urban communities in the country.
1Mertz, Lee. 2017. Origins of the Interstate System. Federal Highway Administration.
2Weingroff, Richard. 1996. Federal-aid Highway Act of 1956: 3Creating the Interstate System. Federal Highway Administration.
4U.S. Public Interest Research Group and Frontier Group. 2015. Who Pays for Roads?
5Weingroff, Richard. 2006. The Battle of Its Life. Federal Highway Administration.
6Weingroff 2006.
7Stromberg, Joseph. 2016. Highways gutted American cities. So why did we build them? Vox.
8Nall, Clayton and Zachary O’Keefe. 2018. What Did Interstate Highways Do to Urban Neighborhoods?
9Baum-Snow, Nathaniel. 2007. Did Highways Cause 10Suburbanization? The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
11Stromberg 2016.