Not to worry.....we're building a super highway to facilitate it.
Posted on 06/28/2006 11:04:21 AM PDT by Graybeard58
On June 29, 1956, President Eisenhower signed a bill to build the Interstate Highway System - a dream of his since he crossed the US in 1919 and, later, after he saw Hitler's autobahn. Little did he know what 46,876 miles of expressways would do.
Fifty years on, the nation is still taking stock of the impact of high-speed roads connecting big cities. The system was finished only last year with the completion of Boston's "Big Dig" project. Instead of taking 10 years and $50 billion to build as envisioned, the 62 routes took nearly a halfcentury to finish and, in today's dollars, cost $425 billion.
Just as the "information superhighway" (the Internet) is now taken for granted as essential to daily life, so, too, is the Interstate Highway System. Both require amazing levels of cooperation to build and maintain. Both have helped unify the country. And yet both are bearers of good and bad effects. In fact, lessons from the Interstate are worth applying to the Internet, which is still in relative infancy.
As the world's largest public-works project, the Interstate fully transformed Americans into a car-centric, oil-guzzling, and pollution-spewing people. Soon after the system's first cross-country link (I-80) was completed in 1986, Al Gore declared, hyperbolically, that the automobile's environmental effects is "more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront." That warning is quite a contrast from an original reason for the Interstate, which was to allow quick movement of military forces and, possibly, mass evacuations of cities during the cold war. (The exodus of 1.5 million people before hurricane Katrina proved the worth of big highways.)
The Internet, too, originated as a useful tool for sharing military research, and while serving the public immensely, it also serves as a vehicle for terrorist communications and forfor other vice from porn to gambling.
Some say it has adversely altered community life, creating new forms of isolation, much the way Interstates tore up cities and helped create sprawling, pedestrian-unfriendly suburbs. More communities now want sound-barriers along Interstates and to limit the highways' impact on downtown life, while many people want to limit the Internet's effects and return to face-to-face talking.
What really pushed both the Interstate and the Internet into full blossom was business. (Both systems greatly boosted economic productivity.) The trucking industry lobbied heavily for new highways, while Internet-dependent businesses today are fighting to expand (or control) the Web.
Both these people-connectors are suffering from congestion and inadequate maintenance. To keep up with repairs of the Interstate, some states are turning to private ownership and mileage fees. To expand the Internet, cable and telephone companies want to charge for high-speed access.
Indeed, both systems allow Americans to speed up their lives. But the Interstate's effects show society must humbly, carefully adopt the Internet.
At the 1939 New York World's Fair, a General Motors exhibit called Futurama predicted fast highways by 1960, with speeds up to 100 m.p.h. A narrator's voice carried both hope and caution: "Who can say what new horizons lie before us?"
As opposed to eco-friendly peasants who never wander further than seven miles from the place where they were born
..one of the major reasons I chucked my job in L.A. four years ago and moved to the desert....when you walk out in the morning and flip your car the bird, you know it's time to hang it up.
Not to worry.....we're building a super highway to facilitate it.
Well you're supposed to get off the Interstate now and then and see the sites. If you read travel magazines or study geology you can get a better insight as to the best places to go. Even studying a detailed map will give you ideas of where to get off and what to do. AAA have some great travel guides.
In Sacramento, you should have gone East on Highway 50 to Placerville and from there up the road to Coloma where gold was discovered in California. On your way back you would stop in Sacramento, see the Capitol, the museums, old Sacramento and take a ride on a riverboat.
I guess Ike wasn't gay enough.
Our problem is that we're always hell bent for leather to get to or from Santa Maria, CA - Lincoln City, Oregon. Kind of goofy on our part, now that we're retired. I think we're still in the old "we only have a week for vacation" mode.
Kid just arrived back in the States today after three years on Okinawa. SIL will be stationed at MCRD-San Diego. Now that we're living on the Oregon Coast, looks like we'll be up and down the I-5 ribbon quite often.
I wan in Germany once and saw a section of Ike's inspiration for this, the Autobahn, under repair. You cant beleive the depth of the concrete, almost three feet! I was told by a German colleague that the oldest sections of the Autobahn were constructed to allow for massive movements of tanks, and thus the insane strength of the roads. The US interstates arent quite so robust!
You know the flip side is it makes it easier for an invading army to conquer you.
I hate all those federal requirements as much as you do. The government busybodies would have passed those laws had there only been a half-ass interstate highway system.
On top of that having to pay and repay for shoddy workmanship done half ass by construction crews that know they're working off the government's dime.
The Interstate highways for the most part are built and repaired on a contract basis. If the employees of those contractors are going to goof off or perform substandard work, then it's the private contractors who are going to suffer financially.
More like yet another curse laid upon us by the national government
OK you stay home and cry in your pillow. No one will miss you on the tour of Carlsbad Caverns.
-Iggy
Pedantry.
Now we need a major overhaul.
Almost every interstate in this country needs an extra lane added.
I propose that all on-ramps not merge but become the "far outside lane" and that that lane will always be "Exit only.
The two left lanes would never (well, almost) have to worry about slow, merging traffic.
What the hell does this mean? I mean, I know what it means, but it's a very strange phrase. Who is bent to Hades for dead animal skin?
I know! Let's build TWO interstates!
Signed,
Future President Laz
Ohhhhhhh!
Never mind.
;)
Looks like the modern Mississipi River trade route. At least the Brits don't hold one end of it and the Spanish the other. Or the French. Or do they?
I read this and thought, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is this $hit!". What a biased, self-hating article! It also helped transform America into the economic, social, and intellectual capitol it is today.
One of these days I'd like to the luxury of time and money to travel I-80 all the way from Boston to San Francisco.
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