Interstate Highway Act of 1956

In April 1939, General Motors opened its “Futurama” exhibit at the New York World's Fair. Immediately the fair's most popular attraction, each day thousands of visitors rode in cars around a track, observing the exhibit below that showed fast-flowing traffic, farmlands described as “drenched in blinding sunlight,” [Page 388]and cities featuring buildings characterized as “breath-taking.” To residents of a nation still suffering the effects of dull Depression days, Futurama's designer, Norman Bel Geddes, emphasized the idea that fast-flowing traffic on new, limited-access highways would help restore prosperity and hope to residents of city and countryside. Also in 1939, senior engineers at the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads published a report titled Toll Roads and Free Roads. Similar to Bel Geddes, authors of this report contended that urban road improvements would eliminate decaying properties and make way for newer, more important ones. The unlikely convergence of a World's Fair exhibit and a government report written by little-known highway engineers set in motion planning to fund construction of the Interstate Highway System (IHS). In 1944, Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act, including authorization to construct the IHS. During the remainder of the century, competing ideas about jobs, traffic relief, urban renewal and suburban growth, and federal management of the pace of economic activity informed highway politics. In 1944, however, Congress did not allocate funds to pay for construction of the expensive IHS.

Although engineers and ordinary Americans liked the promise of traffic and urban improvements, during the next 12 years no one wanted to finance the immense costs of building a national freeway system. Objecting to higher gasoline taxes, truck operators urged federal officials to focus limited funds on construction of the costly Interstate system. Nonetheless, rural leaders argued against any plan that limited spending on farm roads. Convinced, however, that freeway construction including inner belts around downtown would relieve traffic congestion, boost property values, eliminate nearby “slums,” and lure suburban shoppers back downtown, starting in the 1940s merchants and political leaders in every city had advocated accelerated construction of the IHS. Then, in 1955, members of the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a plan to freeze funding levels on rural roads while greatly increasing spending to construct the IHS. Not even support from the popular President Dwight D. Eisenhower could rescue highway legislation.

In 1956, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and Representatives Hale Boggs and George H. Fallon fashioned IHS legislation. First, truckers relented to a small increase in gasoline and truck taxes. In turn, Congress promised increased spending on urban and rural roads not included in the IHS. Before 1956, the U.S. government had paid 50 percent of the cost of building roads on the federal-aid systems, but in 1956, Congress and President Eisenhower agreed to pay 90 percent of IHS construction costs, leaving only 10 percent of the expenses to state highway officials. Also in 1956, Congress and Eisenhower approved creation of the Highway Trust Fund, which would designate gasoline taxes (and excise taxes on tires and trucks) for exclusive use in financing construction of the IHS and other federal-aid roads. As part of assembling successful highway legislation, early in 1956 members of the Senate-House conference committee changed the name of the IHS to the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (but it has always been referred to in everyday conversation as the IHS). Continuing a long-standing federal and state highway practice, in 1956 Congress and the president conferred authority on engineers in the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads and their counterparts in the state highway departments to build the 41,000-mile IHS, including approximately 5,000 urban miles. During the next decades, Congress approved additional mileage for the IHS, and by 2002, the rural and urban total stood at 47,742. True to the promise of IHS enthusiasts, by the late 1980s, the compact IHS carried more than 20 percent of the nation's automobile traffic and a whopping 49 percent of the truck-trailer combinations. By early 2004, the federal government had spent more than $59 billion to construct the urban portions of the IHS and more than $40 billion to construct the rural sections.

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