The Interstate Highway System: What Worked, What Did Not

Posted by: Chris Steins
Thanks to: Randal O'Toole

6 July 2006 - 1:00pm

It's been 50 years since President Eisenhower signed the bill creating the Interstate Highway System, one of the most successful federal programs ever. Randal O'Toole offers a few indicators of the success of the Interstate Highway System.

Among the indicators:

Interstate highways make up less than 1.2 percent of the mileage of all roads in the U.S., yet they carry nearly half of all heavy truck traffic and nearly a quarter of all passenger traffic.

Since the Interstate Highway System was created, per capita miles of driving have tripled without any increase in the share of personal incomes spent on driving.

When combined with freight containers -- which, coincidentally, were also developed in 1956 (or 1955, depending on which history you read) -- the Interstate Highway System greatly contributed to the 90-percent reduction in shipping costs during the twentieth century.

"...When Congress was debating the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1955, engineers estimated they could build the entire system in twelve years for $23 billion. In fact, the system was not declared complete until thirty-five years later at a total cost of $129 billion. Even today, some short sections remained unfinished.

After the system was more-or-less complete, the money kept pouring in. With no firm goal for the money, it might not be surprising that Congress turned highway funds into pork. The truth is a bit more subtle and involves the transfer of policy-making and planning power from engineers to urban planners. One reason for this transfer was the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s."

Full Story: The Interstate Highway System: What Worked, What Did Not

Source: The Thoreau Institute, July 5, 2006

Login or register to post comments
Email this page

Cities Better Off With Freeways? Let's Clarify

Submitted by Michael Patrick on Thu, 07/06/2006 - 17:36.

Would cities have been better off without freeways penetrating into the hearts of downtowns? Answering that question could take an entire book, but the short answer appears to be "no." The freeways did nothing to accelerate residential suburbanization, which began long before 1956. The freeways may actually have protected some jobs in downtown areas by reducing inner-city congestion, but they encouraged the growth of other jobs in suburban areas at the intersections of beltline roads and radial roads.

It would be helpful for this part to be clarified and/or backed up. On the first sentence, suburbanization was definitely happening in 1956, but freeways did not accelerate it? That's hard to understand, especially considering that in the same paragraph he says freeways encouraged job growth at freeway interchanges. If they encouraged jobs, wouldn't housing have followed?

And what is this "suburbanization"? Is it growth of suburbs in terms of population, jobs, housing, etc.? Or is it decline of center cities in the same terms? In other words, is the scope limited to the success of suburbs, or could it consider the suburbs' success at the possible expense of center cities, if that is the case?

How reducing inner-city congestion protected some downtown jobs is also not clear. Congestion is a cost to businesses that require mobility, but only some industries rely on constant mobility. Were certain types of jobs protected but not others? Logically, employees' commutes by automobile would not account for this job retention, since employees have typically borne their own commuting costs and have followed, not created, the jobs. In today's terms, congestion reduction is typically achieved by economic decline, so congestion reduction as success seems to indicate a different 1950s-1960s paradigm that could use some explaining.

As the author says, the topic of this paragraph could be a book in itself. However, some footnotes would be in order, as would an explanation of the paradoxical statement that freeways encouraged suburban job growth yet did not accelerate suburbanization.

the real deal

Submitted by Michael Lewyn on Sat, 07/08/2006 - 20:38.

Nearly every American city gained population during the 1930s and 1940s. (See http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1952-02.pdf pp. 18-21).

But quite a few big cities lost population during the 1950s, and even more lost population during the 1960s. http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1973-02.pdf pp. 22-24)

So to say that there is no difference between pre-Interstate suburbanization and post-Interstate suburbanization is flat wrong.

Some side points:

1. O'Toole completely overlooks the impact of freeway-induced destruction of urban neighborhoods.

2. O'Toole points out that transportation spending as a percentage of personal consumption failed to rise between 1956 and 2006. Two caveats:

a) given the long-term decline in the national savings rate, doesn't this still mean transportation spending is a higher percent of household income than in 1956? (That is to say, if consumption spending is 100% of income but was, say, 90% in the 50s, that means 11% of consumption spending is a bigger financial burden today).

See http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/working/98-2.pdf p. 8 for savings data).

b) If you look at the tables more carefully, you will note that transportation spending has not been at its 1956 level (11 percent of consumption spending) forever. In 1946, auto-related spending was about 6 percent of consumption spending, then started rising for a decade until it peaked in 1956. I don't know what to make of this statistic, but its kind of interesting.

c) Isn't there a difference between spending 11 percent of your income on cars in a society where doing so is essentially a "fun" discretionary expenditure (e.g. most cities until 1956) and spending 11 percent of your income on cars in a society where doing so is essentially mandatory (e.g. many cities today)?

Induced Demand Is Not Success

Submitted by Charles Siegel on Thu, 07/06/2006 - 14:49.

Tripling per capita VMT is not a sign of sucesss. In most cases, people have to drive those longer distances because our cities have been rebuilt around freeways. All that extra driving means we have less convenient transportation -- as well as energy shortages and global warming.

Note how O'Toole lies with statistics in these two claims:

-Since the Interstate Highway System was created, per capita miles of driving have tripled without any increase in the share of personal incomes spent on driving.

-As the safest roads in America, the interstates played a major role in the 76-percent reduction in auto fatality rates (from 60.5 to 14.5 fatalities per billion vehicle miles) experienced over the last fifty years.

In the first one, he talks about share of income, not about the absolute amount spent. But income has gone up dramatically since during this time, meaning that the absolute amount spent on transportation has gone up dramatically.

In the second one, he talks about fatalities per billion miles, not fatalaties per capita. But if per capita VMT has tripled, fatalities per capita have not been cut by about three-quarters (as he implies) but only by about one-quarter. I suspect that seat belts and airbags alone would have cut fatalities by much more than this -- if per capita VMT had not increased.

Charles Siegel