by Earl Swift
So the railroad called on the Atomic Energy Commission, which at the time was gung-ho about peacetime uses for nuclear power, with an audacious idea: How about nuking a hole through the mountains? Not long after, the California State Division of Highways received a call asking whether it might be interested in partnering on what was soon known as Project Carryall. You bet, it replied.
With that, a study group of engineers and scientists convened, and in the fall of 1963 its members agreed that the Bristols could be tamed with twenty-two carefully placed atomic bombs, each packing twenty to two hundred kilotons of explosive punch. Fired in two stages, the devices would vaporize sixty-eight million cubic yards of mountain, creating a chain of connected craters more than two miles long, as much as 340 feet deep, and 330 feet wide at the bottom—plenty big enough for twin railroad tracks and a full-size interstate. A twenty-third bomb would be used to blast a reservoir into the desert to collect runoff during storms. Odds were that it would never overflow, seeing as how it could have swallowed the Astrodome with room to spare.
All this excavation would take years to accomplish with the usual tools. The nuclear option would get it done in a flash and at a 36 percent discount. All the state need do after the explosions was to clean up, which wouldn't be too tough a job—little of the rubble would be more than two feet across. Sure, a few "rock missiles" might be lobbed about, and underground rumbles might crack the plaster or knock over knickknacks in Amboy, a town a few miles to the south, but all of the risks could be made manageable with a little more research.
Nowadays that seems a brashly optimistic claim, given that Project Carryall's bombs were to flex destructive muscle at least sixty times beefier than that deployed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined. But the engineers promised that their confidence was well placed. "Based on present knowledge of the Carryall area," the highway official wrote, "safety hazards such as radioactivity, fallout, air blast, and ground shock have been evaluated and it has been concluded that there would be no hazard of such magnitude as to cause significant structural damage or endanger local inhabitants."
See, these would be "clean" nuclear explosions, which were touted as somehow safer than the standard, radiation-spewing variety. In fact, construction crews likely could spend a full shift in the new pass just four days after the blasts. Work could get started as soon as 1968. The highway could be carrying traffic the following summer. "The study group has concluded that this project is technically feasible," a California highway official reported in 1964. "It can be done, and it can be done safely."
Well. You have to admire that can-do spirit. The parties had hatched this plan even as a nuclear test ban treaty was signed with the Soviets, but it remained in play for a couple of years, until California opted to carve out the alignment using slowpoke dynamite and bulldozers. That stretch of I-40 opened in 1973.
It was a break for Frank Turner that this nuclear option wasn't shared with the American public until many years later, because by the late sixties he was already fielding enough criticism over the interstate program's leaping price tag, which in 1965 stood at $46.8 billion, and just three years later at $56.5 billion—about double the initial "cost to completion" figures floated back in 1956. It would continue to bound, by another $12.25 billion in 1970 and $6 billion in 1972, would reach a whopping $90 billion in 1975—and would keep going up from there.
Turner drew flak, too, over what had always been the program's greatest strength: safety. Two out of three fatal accidents on the interstates involved a single car going off the road, usually on the right side, and smacking into one or more fixed objects. Too often, the accidents would have been survivable, minus these roadside hazards—a lesson that Carl Fisher had learned during the disastrous opening races at Indy nearly sixty years before. And as it turned out, a good many of the obstacles had been put there by highway officials.
In 30 percent of these one-car wrecks, the first obstacle struck was a guardrail, a statistic that prompted bureau researchers to surmise that the rails themselves might be deadly. That jibed with the observations of one Joe Linko, a part-time TV repairman living in the Bronx, who cataloged and photographed the dangers he encountered while driving New York's interstates: guardrails with unbuffered ends that could skewer a car clean through; signs supported by unyielding steel legs; light standards just off the shoulder; exposed concrete culverts in drainage ditches, into which an errant car could too easily plow.
In 1967, Linko's pictures came to the attention of John Blatnik, who was still chairman of the House Special Subcommittee on the Federal-Aid Highway Program. In testimony before the group, Linko raised good questions: Why was it that officials hung signs from massive steel brackets—bridges, really—even when overpasses were nearby? Why did the concrete foundations for utility poles jut above ground? Why did bridge abutments crowd the road? Why weren't sign supports designed to snap on impact? "It is sometimes difficult to determine where 'engineering shortcomings' end and 'common sense' begins," a sympathetic Blatnik observed, adding that the rapid pace of interstate construction was no excuse. "Does it take any longer to design for breakaway light poles and sign supports," he asked, "than for heavy-duty, rigid, non-yielding ones?"
Turner bristled at any implication that safety was not a top priority. "It is a fundamental consideration in everything we do," he said. "This is so elemental with us we have not separated safety out of the highway program as a single item. It is threaded through everything." No feature of the interstates had happened by chance. Why were signs so big? Because smaller signs were tougher to read, and thus a distraction—and a sign wouldn't be there in the first place if it were not imparting important, perhaps life-saving, information. Why were signposts so stout? Because they had to stand up to gales, lest the signboards they supported became windblown dangers.
Still, Linko's evidence was compelling. Safe as they were, the interstates could be made safer. Turner promised fixes, and they came. The breakaway signpost, soon required on all Federal Aid projects, was pioneered at the Texas Transportation Institute, the Chief's old outfit; a joint at the base gave way to sudden, massive blows, permitting the pole to swing away on a plastic hinge just below the sign's face. Metal guardrails acquired ends that corkscrewed into the ground or curved away from the road. Crash cushions—"impact attenuators," in engineering lingo—appeared at exits and around obstacles. Usually clustered barrels filled with sand or water, they weren't elegant, but they were a sight more forgiving than concrete or steel.
And state after state adopted the "Jersey barrier," a thirty-two-inch-tall concrete wall that could be poured in place or trucked to problem spots in eight-foot sections. Introduced in its namesake state in 1959, its sloping face was designed to deflect a sideswipe at highway speed. In theory, a car's tires would climb that slope before sheet metal made contact with concrete and would be gently steered by the angle back onto the pavement.
Those controversies were minor next to the continuing stink over urban interstates. Protest in the cities had become so endemic that in 1968 federal and state officials appointed a national version of Baltimore's Design Concept Team to devise formulas for happy coexistence between freeways and America's neighborhoods. Insofar as the beef in many cities, as in Baltimore, was over the mere presence of the roads more than the form they took, the effort was bound to fall short of all-out success. Even with that caveat, the commission's report, titled The Freeway and the City, was feeble: "The best arterial routes," one of its platitudes read, "are those that cause the least damage to existing communities and at the same time provide good traffic service at reasonable cost." Its key recommendation was that urban expressways be reduced in scale and softened with landscaped berms and swales and massed plantings. Bushes and piled dirt would have mollified neither MAD nor anti-freeway activists anywhere else.
Turner's boss searched for his own solution. Lowell Bridwell let it be known that he believed in "creative federalism," which he defined as giving local governments
and citizens more say in decisions that previously had been the exclusive purview of highway officials; the feds, he said, were now willing to talk directly to highway protesters and broker compromises with the states.
New Orleans, where turmoil continued over I-310's close brush with the French Quarter, offered an early test of the policy. The feds "could have told the state not to worry about local protests; that it is none of our business," Bridwell said afterward. "Under the new approach we went down there, got a feel of the local situation and altered federal instructions to the state to facilitate a solution, which is on the way because federal people were willing to get their hands dirty trying to solve this problem."
The ultimate result: Bridwell would suspend federal funding for "an Expressway Named Destruction," the press's nickname for the highway in New Orleans. Some state officials resented their federal partners' striving to play daddy, but the highway administrator rejected their complaints. It was his way or no highway. "What I'm trying to do is exercise some leadership in bringing [everyone] together," he said. "We have problems of a serious nature in at least twenty-five cities. If we don't step into these situations, the highway people are going to take a beating."
Creative federalism would also see Bridwell back-burner the Three Sisters Bridge, the most contentious piece of the freeway system planned for Washington, D.C. (later eliminated altogether from the interstate program), and fly to Nashville to try to hammer out an accord between road builders and local blacks.
Congress likewise amplified the public's voice in highway decisions in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968.
Since 1956, state highway departments had been required to hold a public hearing (or at least provide the opportunity for one) before deciding to route a Federal Aid highway in or around a city, town, or village. In the program's early days, those hearings were often as not used to assuage towns up in arms over not getting an interstate.
The 1956 act had intended that officials use what they heard to ensure that they "considered the economic effects of such a location." The 1968 act swapped out that language for "economic and social effects of such a location, its impact on the environment, and its consistency with the goals and objectives of such urban planning as has been promulgated by the community." Instead of addressing people who worried the interstates would bypass them, the new hearings would solicit comments from those who worried they weren't far enough away.
This shift in orientation became public in October 1968, when the Federal Highway Administration published the regulations it planned to use to comply with the new act. They called for two public hearings, not one, on every Federal Aid project: the first a corridor hearing at which taxpayers could speak their minds on a highway's location, and the second a design hearing, at which they would have the chance to influence the project's size and style—whether it would be elevated, depressed, or built at street level, how it would be landscaped, that sort of thing.
To state officials, this guaranteed needless delay, and it was insulting, to boot. They knew how to conduct public hearings. They knew how to solicit citizen involvement. They didn't need the feds micromanaging every detail of a highway program that supposedly was led by the states. But they saved their real anger for another section of the new rules, with which Bridwell took creative federalism to an entirely new level. From now on, anyone unhappy with a state highway decision could appeal the matter directly to the feds, on any one of twenty-one grounds. Among them: that the state had failed to weigh neighborhood character, property values, natural or historical landmarks, conservation, or the displacement of households and businesses.
AASHO president John O. Morton found it "impossible to comprehend" how or why the feds would craft a regulation through which "the desires and needs of an overwhelming majority of the people... could be overridden by the action of a single individual, responsible or otherwise." He had a point; the grounds for appeal were so commonplace that every interstate project, every single one, was almost sure to be challenged. The program would drag on forever. It would never be finished.
Objectionable as the new rules were on practical grounds, it was the appeals process's implied refutation of the federal-state partnership that most left highway officials, in Morton's words, "confused, shocked and alarmed." It had never been a completely balanced relationship: AASHO and the states had always so relied on the bureau for research and technical expertise that the feds could influence a good many state initiatives as they took shape. But at no point in the long history of Federal Aid had Washington so minimized its partners.
AASHO executive director Alf Johnson, whose friendship with Frank Turner dated to the days when both worked on roads in Arkansas, blasted the "new people" in the Department of Transportation who seemed to "consider the highway program a federal program with the role of the state being subservient, or acting as an agent of the federal government." The feds wanted "to tell us how to do everything," Johnson complained, "even to the point of detailing how to handle debris or clean up after an accident." Some states, such as Texas, even talked about quitting the Federal Aid partnership outright. Why not? Washington already acted as if it were over.
All fifty states sent messages or emissaries to D.C. in opposition. Bridwell backed down. With just days remaining before Lyndon Johnson left the White House, he and Frank Turner signed off on a policy and procedure memo describing the new rules, and it did not include the appeals process.
Still, damage had been done to a pact in force for more than half a century.
The 1968 act amended the interstates in another lasting way: it lengthened the cap on their mileage from 41,000 miles to 42,500. An amendment tacked on additional miles, ultimately 500, for route modifications to the original system. Finally, the act authorized the secretary of transportation to label as interstates any completed state highway built to the system's standards that seemed a logical addition to the network; these additions were not counted against the mileage cap.
The mechanisms were now in place to enlarge the system past forty-six thousand miles. Congress would add another few hundred miles in the years to come, but conception of the interstates we know today was largely complete.
20
WITH RICHARD NIXON'S ascension to the presidency in 1969, the political appointees overseeing the highway program found themselves out of work. Into Alan Boyd's shoes as secretary of transportation stepped Massachusetts governor John A. Volpe, who'd been Ike's pick as interim federal highway administrator back in 1956. To take Lowell Bridwell's place, the new secretary named the senior-most engineer in federal employment, and a man with whom Volpe had worked thirteen years before: Frank Turner.
The quiet Texan's selection made sense to pretty much everyone. He was about to mark his fortieth anniversary at the bureau, and the projects he'd overseen since venturing north to Alaska were the most ambitious in the agency's history. American Road Builder called him "an excellent example of ability rising above politics," adding that "when the occasion called for the light of wisdom to shine through, then Frank Turner was sent for." Engineering News-Record called him "the old pro."
Outside of the industry, he remained largely unknown. To his few critics, those aware of his influence on the interstates and their advance—and on the ease with which Americans had come to own 101 million cars, in which they traveled more than a trillion miles a year—he made for a frustrating target; uninterested in power or publicity, and sincere in his Progressive Era beliefs that technical expertise, not politics, should drive decisions, Turner gave his detractors little to work with. Suggest that he understood numbers better than people, and he might agree. Call him a measurement-obsessed technocrat, and he might thank you. Label him a darling of the highway lobby, and he might quip, as he did to his boy Jim, "Son, I have one darling and I've had the same one for fifty years," or acknowledge, as he did at his March 1969 confirmation hearing before the Senate Public Works Committee, that yes, he did speak for the highway lobby—the 205 million
people who used the nation's roads. "I believe it is a fairly powerful lobby, and I believe it is a lobby that you and I should be responsive to," he told the senators. "I believe that lobby is telling us they want an improved highway program. They want us to build not only more roads but to build better roads and make better utilization of the roads we do build."
That hearing forecast the issues that would challenge him in his new position. It was friendly—the committee's members had relied on Turner for technical background and straight answers for years, and his unanimous confirmation was never in doubt—but the freeway revolt in the cities figured prominently in the questions he fielded. He did his best to keep his testimony upbeat. Disputes, he said, were inevitable, part of the road-building process. "We have had several instances where we have had a very difficult problem determining a location to choose between, to make a Hobson's choice," he said. "We are going to have to do some damage, or surgery, and that does require some pain on somebody's part."*
Even so, the pieces in dispute totaled less than 150 miles, by his estimate, divided among sixteen cities. Four miles in Atlanta. Short stretches in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Indianapolis, and another through upscale Shaker Heights, outside of Cleveland. A loop in Newark, several spurs and loops in New York, and a segment in Charleston, West Virginia. Nashville, where the noisy racial fight over I-40 raged on. The stretch through Overton Park in Memphis. The Boston area, already blighted by the ugly, invasive Central Artery, an elevated, six-lane evisceration that Fortune labeled "a road that seems to have committed all the possible sins." Several interstates in Washington, D.C., especially the extension of I-66 through suburban Arlington, not far from Turner's home, and across the Potomac into Georgetown. San Francisco, of course. And not least, Baltimore.