ShmoopTube

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turns out it's a big step from sure we can pave a few roads too let's build the

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massive standardized highway system that covers the entire country. [men in hardhats shovel blacktop]

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well the 1920s definitely saw a big boom in a road building the country. had a ton

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of extra cash and automobiles were selling like breath mints at the annual

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Gilroy Garlic Festival. well it's best breath mints oughta sell at the annual

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Gilroy Garlic Festival. some of the first Turnpike's at parkways were built during

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the 20s. mostly on the eastern seaboard in 1925 the country took an even bigger

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step. folks decided to get crazy and organized their road building efforts.

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major routes were given a system of numbers and called highways and the

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federal government helped States fund improvements to them. oh and by the way

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don't confuse a highway with an interstate road. Nazis hate that. highways

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were just winding country roads with pavement and numbers added to. an

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interstate was something radically different. [interstate pictured]

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it's bigger faster and more standardized. but wasn't until 1956 that President

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Eisenhower scraped together the funding and popular support to get the

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interstate system really going. yes he found a lot of spare change under that

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oval office couch. fun fact the Eisenhower good roads were an issue of

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national defense. he wanted to be able to cruise down u.s. interstates in tanks

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and trucks in case we got invaded by the Russians or Germans or Chinese or aliens

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or well whoever it was we were afraid of on that particular day. building

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interstates wasn't so much about new technology although stuff like [steam roller at work]

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steamrollers and bulldozers definitely helped. a lot. it was more about a bunch

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of new ideas that made road Transportation wildly different. well one

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thing to think about is the idea of limited access where and how we get on

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an interstate is actually tightly controlled. there are on ramps and exits

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which are carefully planned out in advance. unlike every other Road in the

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country farmer Joe couldn't just run his driveway straight into the interstate

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and pull into traffic on his tractor. with limited access traffic moves faster

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and more smoothly and keeps the interstates from becoming a high-stakes

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version of bumper cars. there are also restrictions on curves and Hills.

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automobiles were getting faster and more dangerous and some clever engineers [man smiles while driving down the road]

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realized that there were ways to build safer roads.

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well they determined that steep inclines and hairpin turns weren't really cool .so

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they set limits on how steep and curvy roads could actually be. lanes also got

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wider along with the shoulders of the roads. most roads in the 30s and 40s were

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pretty narrow to help cut the building costs but interstates were built with

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multiple lanes and nice wide shoulders pull over into when people spilled

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coffee on their laps. interstates also have the brilliant policy of making it

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much harder to swerve across the yellow line and slam into oncoming traffic. they

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separate traffic in different directions on two entirely different roads. which is [woman drives as cell phone goes off]

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smart because nothing quite ruins your day like a head-on collision. Engineers

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also got better at road surfaces adding tar and concrete to the macadam process

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we talked about before . but perhaps most importantly all of the things we just

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listed were required and standardized. an interstate in California was

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supposed to work just like one in Texas because no one likes a surprise when

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they're pushing 80 miles an hour. [ car drives a vertical loop in the road]

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