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

by Earl Swift

  And in September 1969 he'd helped launch an experiment in the D.C. suburbs that seemed to support his view that the lowly bus was the future of urban travel. With his encouragement, the Virginia Department of Transportation set aside new reversible lanes in the median of the Shirley Highway, as I-95 is called there, for buses alone. The lanes were a tremendous success; when the Washington Post staged a race between a bus and a car making the eleven-mile morning commute into the District, the bus won by thirty-two minutes, and soon the Shirley's bus commuters outnumbered their automotive counterparts. The experiment trimmed the highway's daily load by an estimated 3,140 vehicles and cut pollutants by 1,700 tons. Transit officials had to quadruple the bus fleet.

  "Buses are the answer and the only answer," Turner said. When the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970 offered localities the cash to build dedicated busways, he'd been elated. "There is no doubt in my mind that a few years from now we will look back on this 1970 legislation as a landmark in the development of modern urban transit," he'd predicted, "just as we now look back on the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, with its program for the interstate system, as a landmark in highway development."

  He might have been a bit carried away. Still, Turner was onto a good idea and could not fathom why environmentalists, the press, and anti-highway activists didn't embrace the bus, or why they were so smitten with rail-based transit. The "infinite combinations of routings and schedules required by today's urban citizenry dictates that any transportation system must provide flexibility of route, destination and schedules," he said. "That's why fixed-route systems which are basically spoke lines attached to a downtown hub have such a hard time financing themselves in the fare box.

  "And if they cannot support themselves at the fare box, then isn't this a good warning that they may be failing to provide that service which the customer wants?" For moving the poor, he figured "it would be cheaper to just issue them a car, or give them taxi coupons, like food stamps."

  His favorite whipping boy became the Washington Metro, a cut-and-cover subway system that would initially cover ninety-eight miles and cost about $3 billion to build, an amount roughly equal to everything spent on the capital region's roads since the very beginning of white settlement there—and, incidentally, about $4,000 for every household. "What a huge capital expenditure to provide for the movement of about five percent of the transportation load within Washington's metropolitan area," he said. Just the annual interest on the debt "would buy about five thousand new buses every New Year's morning for the whole life of Metro."

  Sensible though his position might have been, he was losing the argument. The harder he stumped for motor vehicle transportation, the more light rail and subways seemed to gather momentum. Worse, a growing chorus of critics, city officials, and members of Congress were arguing that fixed-rail transit should be financed with money from the Highway Trust Fund. Turner was almost religiously opposed to such a thing, believing that it was called a "trust" for a reason, that a sacred compact existed between Congress and the American motorist that fuel taxes would be used as promised, to build good roads. "I am a firm believer," he said, "in keeping a man's word."

  If, despite his arguments, the people insisted on buying rail transit to solve their urban transportation problems, he could live with it; he wasn't opposed to a separate transit trust fund, even. But he could not abide building transit by stealing from the interstates. The other side argued that to earmark the trust fund strictly for highways, rather than transportation, shortchanged the taxpayer. It wasn't smart spending. Did it make sense, critics asked, to use taxes on what had become a societal vice to supply infrastructure encouraging that vice? If the same principles applied to the federal tax on alcohol, New York representative Jonathan Bingham reasoned, the income would be spent building bars.

  While he fought these battles, Turner struggled to shepherd the agency's response to the National Environmental Policy Act, and he agonized over a piece of personal business that was the toughest problem of all. Back in 1962, when he'd received AASHO's Thomas MacDonald Award, Turner had given Mable much of the credit. "No man can earn this by himself," he'd said in a typically humble acceptance speech. "I am pleased to receive it in behalf of my wife, who is chief contributor to any achievements I have made, and the bureau with which I am associated."

  But even then, it was clear that Mable was in decline. He and the children could trace her troubles back to the Philippines, recalled that her moods there had swung wide and deep and without warning, that she'd withdrawn into herself, become progressively timid. On some days, the thought of meeting people had consumed her with anxiety; on a few, she'd been unable to leave the Quonset. Her social anxiety had mounted in the years after their return to the States. Her thinking grew foggy; her trepidation at leaving the house, paralyzing. With the children grown and gone her reliance on Turner had become all but total—so that as the interstates had spread across the land and his workload at the bureau had become crushing, he'd shouldered the added burden of caregiver.

  Turner had promised the children that he would look after their mother until she died. By the opening months of 1972, it seemed the task might be beyond him. He could no longer leave Mable alone. When he was called out of town, he would contact a doctor friend who checked her into a local hospital for "tests." On one occasion when he tried to take her along to a meeting in Toronto, she became so confused and anxious on the way that he had to turn the car around. He faced the worst decision of his life: move his wife into an institution, or quit his job.

  In a June 21, 1972, letter to John Volpe, Turner cited failing vision in his right eye for his decision. His letter to Richard Nixon of the same day offered no explanation at all. "After a little more than 43 years of continuous service in the Federal Highway Administration and its predecessor agencies, I desire to avail myself of the provisions of the Civil Service Retirement Act, with its special benefits available to June 30," he wrote. "It has been an unusual honor and personal privilege to have been able to serve a full career in the public service in an activity which I have felt was making a major contribution to a better America. It is with regret that I now take leave of the finest organization and most dedicated group of coworkers in Government."

  Despite his long service, Turner was only sixty-three years old, which explains why news coverage of his choice invariably noted that he'd "unexpectedly" resigned. But aside from Mable's decline, the timing was probably right; the bureau's work was increasingly seen as a threat, rather than a public service. The highway community was losing its fights in the remaining holdout cities and was being second-guessed on decisions that Turner felt it alone possessed the expertise to make.

  In March 1972, Volpe had come out in favor of breaking open the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit, proposing that an ever-greater share of the roughly $6 billion it generated each year be diverted from the interstates. The secretary's surprise move undercut Turner, who'd been so vocal against busting the trust; at best, he was made to look out of step with his own department, and at worst, an irrelevant dinosaur.

  He was bothered, too, by the slow disintegration of the federal-state partnership. The bottom-up approach was fading; the Department of Transportation seemed bent on calling the shots, and he could see the day coming when the federal highway administrator would be little more than a middleman delivering orders to the states from a secretary strong on politics and weak in know-how. He didn't want to be around when the job came to that.

  And really, he had little left to accomplish, anyway. The interstates were well on their way to completion and had delivered on much of their promise. They were fast; driving from New York to Los Angeles, which took an average of seventy-nine hours in 1956, now took just sixty-two, and that time was dropping every year. They were safe; when Turner joined the bureau in 1929, the fatality rate on American roads had been 16 deaths per 100 million miles traveled; now it was 5.5, despite a fourfold increase in the number of vehicles in service, and t
he rate on the interstates was just 2.52 and improving every year. The big roads were efficient, and convenient, and hardy. The highway program was bigger, in terms of the spending Turner oversaw, than the space program or atomic energy.

  The president's reply, written the day after Turner packed up his office, saluted a career that "spanned more than years; it has helped bring to this nation an incomparable Interstate Highway System that continues to play a vital role in our development and prosperity.

  "As an architect of the interstate system, you should feel a very special sense of pride in the fact that this, the largest public works program in world history, has been administered with uncompromising integrity and steadfast dedication to public trust," Nixon wrote. "This record fully merits the gratitude of all our fellow citizens, and, in their behalf as well as that of your many friends and colleagues throughout Government, I want to express my deep appreciation for your service and my best wishes for the years ahead."

  Turner stayed busy. He stumped for the protection of the trust fund as a director of The Road Information Program Inc., a mouthpiece for highway-related industries. He toured Virginia on behalf of another lobby group, the Highway Users Federation, to speak on "the arithmetic of transit." He was among the organizers of the No-Name Group, a small knot of leading transportation experts, most of them engineers, who met monthly over breakfast. He was one of the Road Gang, an informal lunch gathering of transportation officials. Its twice-monthly sessions were usually off the record, but a speech Turner delivered to the group in November 1972, in which he took on "self-appointed" highway critics who acted as if "they represent the public against those of us who've been in public service," was so popular that it was later reprinted in American Road Builder magazine, which received orders for twenty thousand extra copies.

  Junior members of the highway community often drove out to Arlington to seek his counsel. The news they brought, and which he read in the papers, didn't always go down easy. As he'd feared, the trust fund was broken, first for the purchase of buses, in 1975, and for any kind of mass transit the year after; Turner would complain for the rest of his days that the decision gave systems like the Metro "a free ride." In the meantime, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973 permitted the states and local governments to request permission to junk plans for as-yet-unbuilt urban interstates, and if they got the nod, to devote the unspent money to transit systems.

  Turner had little idle time to stew. Mable rarely slept, took to wandering the house at all hours; Frank would be lucky to get a half hour's uninterrupted rest. For years he fed her, dressed and washed her, and watched his wife disappear before his eyes.

  She died of heart failure in June 1982, a long ten years after his retirement, leaving Turner alone for the first time in his life. He stayed put in their house in Arlington, living simply; when his console TV crapped out, Turner bought a new model and set it on top of the old console. He continued taking the bus, even took to riding the Metro once its lines reached the suburbs, though he still groused that it did "a good job for a few people."

  On the infrequent occasions he backed the car out of the garage and steered onto one of his interstates, he stuck to the right lane. Frank Turner, the man who oversaw construction of the nation's high-speed superhighways, rarely topped fifty miles per hour.

  In 1983, the Federal Highway Administration named a building at its research campus in McLean, Virginia, for Frank Turner. The entire facility, adjacent to the CIA's headquarters, was renamed the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center and thus paid tribute to two of the three men most responsible for the concept and construction of the interstates. It was probably the greatest honor that his old employer could have paid him, short of binding his name with the Chief's.

  Turner's retirement continued to be an active one. At the 1984 gathering of state highway officials (who now called themselves "AASHTO," having added "transportation" to their name) he made what became known as the "Turner proposal" for a new design of heavy truck that would trim the load carried by each axle, thereby reducing road damage. The first interstates were more than a quarter century old now, and their use by tractor-trailers had far outpaced the bureau's forecasts; some especially busy routes were breaking down under the strain. Preserving the system required that the highway community "completely change directions by making vehicles that will fit our road system," he argued, "rather than continuing our efforts to make the highway fit any and all vehicles." A few years later, the problem still much on his mind, he suggested that the time had come to segregate trucks from automobile traffic on some interstates, to both preserve the auto lanes and relieve congestion. That idea had legs; more than twenty years later, it's still under study as a way to reduce maintenance expenses on parts of the system.

  Construction proceeded, meanwhile, on the last few unfinished segments, most of them in cities or ecologically sensitive wilds. In June 1988, New Hampshire completed I-93, an alternating parkway and full-fledged interstate, through Franconia Notch in the White Mountains. For years, environmentalists had fretted that traffic vibrations in the deep pass might crumble the Old Man of the Mountain, a looming granite profile that was the subject of poetry and folklore, and so intertwined with the state's self-image that it was emblazoned on its license plates. The unique highway through the notch safeguarded the Old Man, which collapsed and tumbled down the mountain of its own accord in 2003.

  Likewise, Colorado officials lavished attention on I-70's sinuous, 16-mile journey through Glenwood Canyon, 150 miles west of Denver, which carried the Colorado River between great limestone cliffs more than a thousand feet high. A road had passed through the canyon for generations—the earliest built specifically for autos dated to 1902—but an interstate spooked just about everyone worried over the Glenwood's fragility. In 1968, when a study had concluded that the canyon was the only viable route, Colorado legislators had asked that the state's highway department aim for middle ground between the "'wonders of human engineering' and the 'wonders of nature.'"

  With the help of citizen advisers, the department had delivered just that; with pioneering construction techniques, it built a tiered highway that rides thirty-nine bridges, traverses three tunnels, and hugs the rocky face of the canyon's north side. The canyon wasn't improved by this engineering marvel, but it wasn't ruined by it—and today the segment ranks among the most beautiful drives on any road, anywhere.

  I-70's Glenwood Canyon leg was completed in 1992, making it one of the last original interstate segments opened to traffic. It was a good note on which to finish.

  Drive into Baltimore today, and you'll find that the city's center is not crossed by an interstate highway. I-95 passes by to the south. With MAD's assent, it was built on the peninsula between the river's north and south branches, and crosses the water at Fort McHenry in a tunnel, rather than a high-rise bridge; at eight lanes wide, it was the biggest underwater tunnel in the world when it opened in November 1985. Interstate 83, the north-south Jones Falls Expressway, was never extended through downtown or the old neighborhoods to the southeast; it dumps its southbound traffic onto a wide boulevard, President Street, that ends in a traffic circle just east of the Inner Harbor.

  As for I-70, it dead-ends at the city's western line, at the edge of Leakin Park. Its stump is occupied by a commuter parking lot, from which hiking trails diverge into woods; on weekends, the lot is crowded with cars fitted with bike racks and buses dropping off day hikers. A placard at the roadside commemorates the Baltimoreans who accomplished what the Rockies could not: blocking a highway that begins 2,153 miles to the west in Cove Fort, Utah.

  Beyond the stump, just one short segment of the long-fought expressway did move from blueprint to concrete: a piece of the I-170 spur off the main line. Just shy of a mile and a half long, four lanes wide, and disconnected from any other freeway, it was built in anticipation that it would eventually connect to the 3-A network but was instead marooned when the rest of the highway was killed; it is, inevitably, the le
g through ravaged Franklin-Mulberry.

  Baltimoreans call it "the Ditch," or "the Highway to Nowhere." Both are apt descriptions. I drove it one Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2009, hunting around downtown's edge for its eastern end and, on finding it, descending the ramp from Franklin Street. I had the sense that I was traveling a Hollywood mockup, rather than an actual road. Sunk three stories below street level, its flanks sheer concrete walls, the highway took me speeding westward under ten overpasses and several interstate-style signs, and less than two minutes later launched me back to ground level just a little ways east of Rosemont. Invisible on the drive were the blocks north and south of the Ditch, among the most wretched in the city, where windblown fast-food wrappers bound among tall weeds, broken glass, and overturned shopping carts, and past the boarded windows and doors of derelict homes. The scene is sad testament to west Baltimore's agonizing decades in the path of the interstates, and to their lasting effects.

  The Highway to Nowhere has been open for traffic since 1979. From time to time there's talk of filling it in, but the expense is such that it won't likely happen anytime soon. So this strange relic of the expressway fight endures, built to the highest state and federal standards, serving little useful purpose.

  Joe Wiles, his daughters say, would shake his head when he drove past it. Would observe with quiet disapproval that homes had once stood in place of this bizarre, floating piece of an abandoned freeway system—not the city's best homes, by any means, but homes nonetheless, occupied by good people who simply didn't know how to fight the city's plans. Didn't know they could fight until it was too late. Who were targeted early, before the opposition gelled.