Highlights Archives
Celebrating the Interstate's 50th
June 29 marks the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway System. Why celebrate a highway, you ask? A highway that often keeps you sitting bumper-to-bumper, angry and annoyed? Because the Interstate Highway System brought amazing changes to our way of life, putting us within a few days drive of practically everyone else in the country and redefining the relationship between home and work, the city and the country.
Although the Federal-Aid Highway Act was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, the system had already been in the works for nearly half a century. General John J. Pershing, Army Chief of Staff, submitted the first report on a nationwide system of express highways in 1923, but Congress did not allocate any funds for further study or construction until the 1940s.
Highways became an issue of national defense during World War II. In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the Commissioner of Public Roads, Thomas H. MacDonald, to investigate the number of roads needed, possible routes, and the total cost. MacDonald's report, titled "Interregional Highways," led Congress to approve a National System of Interstate Highways as part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, a plan that would include up to 40,000 miles of roads.
The routes of the first 37,700 miles of highway were announced on August 2, 1947, but Congress provided no federal funds to begin construction. Some preliminary funding was finally passed in 1952, but the real green light came with the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, authorizing construction of more than 40,000 miles of road.
Initially, Wisconsin was only to have two interstate routes, I-90 and I-94. Wisconsin's Department of Transportation, however, was able to convince the federal government to approve another roadway, I-43 between Milwaukee and Green Bay, a route that was extended to Beloit in the 1980s. Interstate construction began in Waukesha County in 1956. Between 1959 and 1969, more than 75 percent of Wisconsin's Interstate system was built. In 1999 Wisconsin got its fourth Interstate highway, I-39.
Today the nation's Interstate Highway System comprises 46,837 miles of road, from Seattle to Boston (3,202.52 miles), Miami to Houlton, Maine (1,919.71 miles), and nearly every large community in between. Wisconsin has some 743 miles of Interstate highway that carry 18 percent of the state's total driving miles a year. Because Interstates go through downtown areas, the highway system helped to facilitate the growth of suburbs throughout the United States. Virtually all of the nation's goods and services travel, at some point, along the nation's highways as well.
Take a drive through history and witness Wisconsin's dramatic transformation from a horse-dependent society during the 19th century to the automobile-based culture of the present in our online image gallery Horses to Horsepower and in our exhibit Hit the Road.
:: Posted June 28, 2006
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