HOW THE 1956 HIGHWAY ACT CHANGED THE NATION.

Although named for President Eisenhower, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 was in fact inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt who saw a toll-free national system of limited-access highways as a way to lift the country out of the Depression and especially to benefit the poorer states of the South and West where light traffic and immense distances made toll roads impossible.  When built the Interstate system did indeed benefit the Sunbelt over the Northeast and Middle West, as well as suburbs over cities.  But it did give the United States the world’s best highway system, paid for entirely by federal gasoline taxes.  Today these taxes cannot even keep the system repaired.

Professor Fishman is the author of “Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia” (1987) and “Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier” (1977). He recently contributed “Detroit: Linear City” to “Mapping Detroit: Land, Community and Shaping a City” (2015).

http://www.olli-umich.org/programs_activities/lectures/5th_Lecture_Series.pdf