“The Big Roads” purports to tell the history of the Interstate system, but it is really more than that. The majority of the book does focus on the history aspect: looking at the “Good Roads” movement, how that led to the development of the Lincoln Highway, how that eventually got subsumed into the Federal Highway system (including the first notions of Federal-Aid highways), and then how that led to the Interstate system. I found this part of the book to be mostly good. It covered a number of individuals I knew little about, had interesting anecdotes, and covered some interesting historical periods. I found myself, however, with two complaints regarding this portion of the book. The first, not surprisingly, was that it was very East Coast centric. I know, from the research I’ve done, how California was at the forefront of many of the roads movements, yet there was little mention of the Golden State’s role. But perhaps, given I’m the California Highway Guy, I’m too sensitive on California. My larger complaint was that there were no real maps. A book such as this calls for maps: maps of the growing system, maps showing the routings, maps showing how the routings changed. None of that was present, and that hurt following along with the story.
The second part of the book had a significant change of focus, and in some ways became a little bit less neutral in its presentation. This part looked at the social implications of building freeways in urban areas, focusing on the fight to build the east-west freeways in Baltimore MD (an area I have a passing familiarity with due to all my trips to Linthicum and Columbia, and my meal adventures to the Inner Harbor). This part explored how the freeway decimated neighborhoods, divided neighborhoods, and yet at the same time, drove disparate neighborhoods and constituencies to band together to fight the highways, and ultimately win. This included a bit more on California, but not much—there was a brief mention of the fight against I-480 in San Francisco; I was surprised not to see a mention of the continuing battle to complete I-710 in California. This part also reminded me of some of the thesis in David Brodsly’s book “LA Freeways“, which explored how a freeway could be used to divide a community, and to isolate the traffic on the freeway from the neighborhood around it.
By the end of my reading the book, I had transitioned from a good historical story about the development of the Interstate system to a treatise about the bad things that the system brought: destruction to our urban centers, the establishment of cookie-cutter industries and blandness, and an infrastructure doomed to a slow and steady decay as funding dwindles.
One thing I strive for on my website is neutrality in reporting. I try not to let my opinion creep in: what Caltrans or communities do is neither good nor bad: it just is. This is in contrast to many sites that like to take positions, often controversial ones (thus, for example, you won’t find my website complaining about numbering aberrations). I was disappointed that the neutral history devolved into opinion, even if the history of those developments was interesting.
But perhaps that is just me. If you’re curious about the history of the development of the road system, this book is worth reading. I’d include an Amazon link, but I have no incentive too since Amazon dropped me as an associate. I understand why they did it—they want to get out of paying their fair share of taxes to the state as anyone other brick and mortar bookseller in the state does. I wish they would just break down and pay taxes to the states they sell books in. They have the technology, and it seems to imply they don’t think they can compete on their selection and service alone. But that’s another diatribe :-).
