The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  The thing to bear in mind, Turner stressed, was that these flash points were the exception, that while they had attracted buckets of ink, the vast majority of the program was proceeding quickly and smoothly. "Out of all of these miles of the system we actually have less than a half of one percent of the mileage that is involved in these questions of controversy," he said. "So on a relative basis, it is very small in extent, and the situations are not representative of the total problem, either in the urban areas or the total program that we are engaged in." Every week, he noted, almost twice the disputed mileage was put into service elsewhere, "and everybody rejoices."

  All of which was true. The interstate system was two-thirds complete. Much of the long-distance mileage, the legs across the rural Midwest and the busy intercity highways of the East and West coasts, was carrying traffic. And as Turner testified, another 15 percent was "under construction at this moment, and most of the remainder is under engineering, right-of-way acquisition, or in the pipeline ready to go to contract and to actual construction."

  But while the mileage in dispute was small, the affected percentage of the population was not. The freeway revolt involved major cities and millions of people. Try as he might to minimize it, the urban dilemma would not fade quietly away.

  In fact, though it wasn't yet obvious, momentum was shifting to favor the protesters. In Baltimore, the historic designation for Fells Point complicated that stretch of the expressway immensely. To satisfy the preservationists, the highway men would eventually propose dismantling dozens of the neighborhood's old buildings brick by brick and reassembling them with the same care once the road was finished—a laughably expensive proposition. Money in general was becoming a major issue. The city and state had spent millions to buy properties that, with all the changes in routing, they did not now need—witness the hundreds of homes needlessly emptied in Rosemont—and during a dozen years of indecision and infighting the cost of the proposed interstates through town, once reckoned at about $200 million, had ballooned to well over a billion dollars. In a city of declining population, failing schools, aging water and sewer systems, and growing crime and poverty, the whole idea began to appear extravagant. It would take enormous political will to press on with the program.

  Older cities around the country were beset with similar problems, and in each, as in Baltimore, that will was crumbling. A confluence of national trends was shifting the mood of the governed. Historic preservation was becoming a cause beyond the ranks of intelligentsia; Vietnam had created doubt that government knew what it was doing and had the people's best interests at heart; the civil rights movement had encouraged them to take their grievances to the streets and courts. And perhaps most important, the environmental movement had gained footing among a widening swath of America.

  The cause had always had its soldiers, dating back to Henry David Thoreau and beyond, but environmentalism as a full-fledged mass movement had been around for only a few years, having been brought to life by ruinous oil spills, ever-worsening air and water pollution, and the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's best-selling Silent Spring. Still considered one of the twentieth century's most important works of journalism, the book helped Americans redefine "environment" beyond "nature" or parkland; it was the setting for their every waking moment—the air they breathed, the water they drank, the soil in which they grew their food, the noise or smell or light of their surroundings; they need not journey to Yellowstone for it.

  Silent Spring didn't mention the interstates, but its readers finished the book with a new framework for viewing the program. The environment was fragile, and the decisions that people made, singly and collectively, left marks. Some of them—such as the marks created by, say, crisscrossing the great outdoors with giant, elevated ribbons of concrete and steel—could be damn difficult to erase.

  The bureau's first nod to environmentalism came soon after the book's appearance and seemed wonderfully green: states building Federal Aid projects had to certify they'd considered their possible effects on fish and wildlife. Actually, the rule was toothless, requiring only contemplation, rather than action, to protect animal life. Still, it was good public relations and didn't require the feds or their partners to change a single thing about the way they did business. A year after that, in 1964, the bureau had directed that when choosing road locations, highway officials consider all reasonable alignments, weighing the social, economic, and environmental effects of each. Again, this seemed to address the population's budding enthusiasm for the environmental cause without requiring hard action; asking engineers to consider unquantifiable effects next to quantifiable was bound to have a predictable outcome.

  In the 1966 act that created the Department of Transportation, Congress had included a section that called on federal and state officials to safeguard the country's natural beauty. It also had ordered that the secretary of transportation not approve projects requiring "any land from a public park, recreation area, wildlife and waterfowl refuge, or historic site" unless "no feasible and prudent alternative" existed—in which case, the project had better include "all possible planning to minimize harm to such park." This, in fact, was to have major repercussions. But not right away; the act's wording was imprecise enough—what, exactly, does "feasible and prudent" mean?—that highway officials didn't feel the need to modify their procedures. Parklands remained a favored highway location.

  So it would be fair to say that when Turner took office as federal highway administrator, environmental stewardship had not yet become part of the highway community's culture. As Richard Weingroff, the Federal Highway Administration's unofficial historian, puts it: "The elements of what today we think of as 'the environment' or 'ecosystem' were simply obstacles, like mountains or rivers, to be overcome with the best engineering skills and construction equipment available to the era."

  But in the months before Turner's confirmation, another Senate committee—Interior and Insular Affairs, chaired by Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington—had been hunting for ways to incorporate the country's growing passion for environmental protection into federal programs. Jackson's solution was a bill creating a national environmental policy, aimed at safeguarding the country's natural resources, and a three-member Council on Environmental Quality, reporting to the president, to "study and analyze environmental trends" with an eye toward their causes and their impacts on America's health and well-being.

  In April 1969, a month after Turner's confirmation, one of Jackson's environmental advisers, Indiana University professor Lynton K. Caldwell, suggested that perhaps the president's office wasn't the place for the council, that the country might benefit more from an independent body empowered to review federal projects and programs—and arm-twist changes into them, if necessary—while they were still in the planning stage. The revised bill included just such an "action-forcing mechanism," as it was dubbed. Any federal agency contemplating a project that might affect the environment would have to craft a report on the nature of that impact, how it might be minimized or eliminated, and whether its irreducible effects were worth suffering—what we know today as an environmental impact statement. There lay the bill's real muscle, destined to forever transform the way government approached projects.

  Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law on January 1, 1970. "What we really confront here," the president remarked to a few reporters and photographers who turned up for the signing, "is that in the highly industrialized, richest countries, we have the greatest danger. Because of our wealth we can afford the automobiles, we can afford all the things that pollute the air, pollute the water, and make this really a poisonous world in which to live."

  Fitting that he should single out the motor vehicle, because by then the machine, along with the highways on which it traveled, was clearly producing a host of unhappy environmental byproducts. Smog had burned eyes and throats in Los Angeles since the forties; it had been so fierce at one point during World War II that the residents feared the Japanes
e had launched a chemical attack. Now, car and truck exhaust formed a dirty brown pall over even small cities. Noise, too, had become a pervasive hazard. Before the California State Division of Highways started experimenting with concrete noise barriers in the early seventies, the roar of truck traffic along San Jose's I-680 was akin to sticking your ear up to a garbage disposal. At its peak, it out-blasted a jackhammer.

  Big roads played hell with drainage patterns and water quality. All that concrete encouraged flooding, and salts and oils carried in runoff poisoned nearby ponds and streams and fostered the growth of invasive weeds. Rural interstates presented insurmountable barriers to small mammals, turtles, and amphibians, one study concluding that a four-lane divided highway was as much a barrier to small creatures as a body of fresh water twice as wide. The slaughter of game by auto approached, and would soon exceed, that by hunting.

  It was up to Turner to bring his agency into compliance with the new rules. For the first time, he and his colleagues were legally required to give "appropriate consideration" to "unquantified environmental amenities and values... along with economic and technical considerations." Just the same, Turner didn't regard the new act with any real urgency. He was among the last of the old-school technocrats, a man who viewed transportation as an essential government function and interstates as bargains—windfalls, really, if you assigned a dollar value to the time they saved the taxpayer, the lives they spared, the goods they carried; they were the only government activity, he was fond of saying, that repaid the taxpayer with interest. They more than compensated for whatever damage they caused.

  Besides, Turner believed that the highway program was already hewing to a high environmental standard, and that it wouldn't be much changed by the law. "I want to make it clear that we in the highway program recognize our social responsibilities and are doing something about them," he said in a speech three weeks after the act took effect. Fourteen months later, he insisted that the highway program had been "quick to respond to these emerging concerns—not just with agreeable rhetoric but with meaningful action.

  "We have not been constrained by blind adherence to a set of plans and specifications drawn up in 1956," he said. "On the contrary, we have approved some very significant change orders along the way. America has been changing these past fifteen years and so have we."

  In truth, the agency abided by the letter of the new policy—in the first couple of years after its enactment, more than half of all the impact statements submitted to the Council on Environmental Quality came from the Federal Highway Administration—but not its spirit. When the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest analyzed seventy-six of the agency's early impact statements, it found they "contain arguments rather than findings, opinions rather than studies, and generalities rather than facts." Most made no mention of mass-transit alternatives to highways, and one in three was mum on community disruption.

  Against this backdrop, Baltimore's Road War moved to a new battlefield: wild, wooded, and honeysuckle-choked Leakin Park, at 1,300 acres the largest open space in town and the means by which I-70 was to enter the city from the west—and a portion of the expressway long considered a done deal. With the help of the Sierra Club, the preserve's neighbors organized the Volunteers Opposed to the Leakin Park Expressway (its acronym "VOLPE") to challenge the curving, two-and-a-half-mile road's "destruction of the only natural-area park in a major East Coast city."

  They came armed. Interstate 40's routing through Memphis's Overton Park had prompted a citizens group there to press a suit against the city and Tennessee highway officials all the way to the Supreme Court, the crux of its argument being that the federal government had approved I-40's dissection of the city's most beautiful patch of green without establishing that there was no "feasible or prudent alternative" to the route, as required by the 1966 Department of Transportation Act. The government had held that in deciding whether alternatives were "prudent," it had to weigh the value of park preservation against the added costs of following a less direct highway route through homes and businesses—the sort of quantifiable, dollars-and-cents measures on which the highway community had always relied, and which had always trumped resistance in the past.

  Not this time. In the spring of 1971, the Supreme Court had unanimously reversed the lower courts, finding that parks needed special protection because non-park highways were always more expensive; an interstate should thus avoid a park unless the disruption elsewhere would be truly extraordinary. The "very existence of the statutes," the justices ruled, "indicates that protection of parkland was to be given paramount importance."

  Now VOLPE and its allies filed suit in federal court to block the Leakin Park route, their case styled as VOLPE v. Volpe. And as in Memphis, the court ruled that all work in the park should stop; only after officials held further hearings on the expressway's location and effects could it proceed. Joe Wiles spoke for many when he urged the city to junk the whole program: "Return the land already taken under condemnation to the local communities," he said, and leave it to them to figure out what to do with it.

  Shouted out of Rosemont, priced out of Fells Point, and litigated to a standstill in Leakin Park, the city now faced the very real possibility that if it somehow got its expressway system built, its traffic would violate air-quality standards due to take effect in 1977. The Environmental Protection Agency said that to make the grade, Baltimore had to reduce its driving mileage by a fifth, and warned that the 3-A system's planned "intersection of three major interstate highways in the city's urban core area is inconsistent with this goal."

  Early in 1973, MAD, now led by a fiery west Baltimore schoolteacher named Carolyn Tyson, retained a lawyer and sued in federal court to block the entire 3-A network, contending that it promised more destruction than benefit. Highway officials had not "given proper consideration to feasible and prudent alternatives" to the expressway's park leg, in the group's judgment, and had neither "made all possible efforts to minimize environmental damage" nor "based the system on the required coordinated transportation planning."

  "At no time," the suit alleged, "has any hearing been held which allowed public consideration of... not building the 3-A system."

  The court found for the highway, but by now the project's critics were so well organized and noisy, and its complications so varied and numerous, and the expense of sorting them out so extreme, that the East-West Expressway—on which the city had been working steadily for thirty-five years, and on which a good many professionals had spent their entire careers—collapsed under its own weight.

  The final blow came in 1977, when a proposal for the system's extension through Fells Point was sent to Maryland's state historic preservation officer, John N. Pearce, for his review and comment. Pearce wrote that it was so dreadful, and so defied fixing, that he could "only recommend that this road not be built as currently proposed."

  The Road War was over.

  21

  TWO YEARS INTO his tenure as federal highway administrator, Frank Turner was a man beleaguered; he'd spent his entire adult life with the bureau, had been rewarded for those decades of dedication and hard work with oversight of the entire nation's highway system, and now much of his work and his hopes for the future were coming undone.

  Public opposition to urban interstates was so out of hand in so many places that in 1971, he was moved to write a memo to John Volpe, asking that the transportation secretary keep his "confidence in us" and characterizing the revolt as the "carpings of a few dedicated critics" who were "blinded by their desire to discredit" the program.

  Such was the rhetoric the mild-mannered but heavily stressed Turner found himself throwing around with increasing frequency; in a 1972 speech he called freeway foes "misinformed persons, along with the zealots and dilettantes who regularly are opposed to anything for any reason, or even no reason at all."

  That more urban mileage might not be the right answer for some places, Turner was willing to concede; he had come to that conc
lusion himself. But a good many of the program's critics insisted that fixed-rail transit was a viable substitute, with which he could not agree.

  Turner was no foe of mass transit. He often spoke keenly of the need for it, of how no one mode of transportation could answer all of a city's needs. In fact, he was downright bullish on the idea—so long as it was provided by bus. Turner firmly believed that rail-based transit would not, could not, attract enough riders to justify the fortune it would cost to build, partly because it couldn't be adapted to changing travel patterns. Cities had changed since the days of the streetcar, were spread too far and wide for fixed-rail to take many people from where they were to where they wanted to go.

  Buses, on the other hand, made excellent sense. Fifty or sixty could move as many people as three thousand cars, provide almost door-to-door service, and follow routes that could be adjusted as needed—and they piggybacked on an investment already in place, thus requiring no costly new infrastructure. By boosting the number of buses on the highways, you could actually reduce the need for more highways.

  Like all his views, his enthusiasm for the bus was supported by research, by statistics. He could cite a 1962 study that showed that buses and subways moved people for about the same cost (3.2 cents per person per mile) but that buses were far, far cheaper to put into service. He could point to 1968 research that showed a single express lane devoted to buses could move the same number of commuters as four lanes of freeway. Of course, he had personal experience to draw from, as well, because he'd been riding the bus almost daily for as long as he'd worked in D.C. In the months after his confirmation, Turner directed the bureau's regional offices to be on the lookout for ways to use buses on metropolitan highways, backed bus transit studies in several cities, and opened many a meeting at bureau headquarters by asking: How many of you came by bus today?