The Superhighway to Everywhere

"Out here, our measure of congestion is, can you set the cruise control at 70" mph, notes Mike Lackey, a highway engineer retired from the Kansas Department of Transportation. "In Kansas, you can usually set it as soon as you're on the highway. But my daughter in Boston -- she's forgotten what cruise control is for."

Still, the interstate system is a quantum leap ahead of the haphazard collection of country roads that Eisenhower set out to fix when he entered the White House in 1953.

Dan Holt, director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan., said the president's concern about highways began in 1919, when he was part of a U.S. Army convoy traveling by road from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. The trip took 62 days on roads so rotten the Army had to abandon nine trucks along the way.

A quarter-century later, as supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower saw the impact of a modern highway system when his soldiers used the German autobahns -- four-lane divided highways with on- and off-ramps and no traffic signals -- to pursue Hitler's army toward Berlin.

"Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land," Eisenhower wrote later. "After seeing the autobahns I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the [U.S.] would benefit by it."

But Eisenhower had trouble getting his $50 billion dream through a Democratic Congress. The Republican president proposed paying for the interstate system through tolls, but that was rejected. A giant bond issue was suggested -- and rejected, in a period when it was not considered acceptable for the federal government to run up large debts.

The late Rep. Hale Boggs (D-La.) solved the impasse by proposing a dedicated highway trust fund, financed mainly by the federal tax on gasoline. This fund would reimburse the states for 90 percent of the cost of building the system.

As the states jumped at that prospect, cities and towns mounted intense lobbying campaigns to make sure the interstate came their way.

"To be left off the superhighway was almost a death sentence for a lot of rural towns," notes McNichol, author of "The Roads That Built America: The Incredible Story of the U.S. Interstate System." The fast new roads also meant commercial oblivion for towns, businesses and hotels that had flourished on existing highways. U.S. Route 1 still exists, though I-95 is the preferred road along the East Coast. U.S. Route 66, the storied highway to the West Coast, was decommissioned two decades ago.

Through trial and error, a uniform look and feel were devised for the national network. The red-white-and-blue shield marking an interstate highway and the white-on-green exit signs were universally adopted. Federal planners decreed that every interstate must have at least four lanes.

Following long-standing practice, east-west routes were given even numbers. North-south routes have odd numbers. Urban spurs and circumferential routes have three-digit numbers, such as the beltways around Richmond (I-295), Washington (I-495) and Baltimore (I-695).

Eisenhower wanted the interstate system completed by 1972, but the last two-lane section of the network, through Colorado's dramatic Glenwood Canyon on I-70, was not improved to interstate standard until 1992. The longest interstate, I-90, finished its 3,020-mile run from Seattle to Boston this year, with the completion of Boston's "Big Dig" project.

To mark the 50th birthday, federal and state highway departments have organized a 14-day drive that reverses Eisenhower's 1919 cross-country odyssey.

With Merrill Eisenhower Atwater and other highway luminaries in the lead, a chain of cars, vans, buses, trucks and motorcycles has made its way over mountain and plain. The convoy stopped at Kansas Exit 275 on I-70, to visit Eisenhower's childhood home in Abilene; at Akron, Ohio, on I-77 to see where Harvey Firestone developed the modern automotive tire; and at Emmitsburg, Md., off I-70 -- where Eisenhower's 1919 convoy got hopelessly stuck in mud, prompting him to start thinking about building better highways.

On Thursday, the official birthday of the interstate system, the cross-country caravan is to arrive at the Zero Milestone on the Ellipse in Washington, the place where Eisenhower's convoy started a journey that would have momentous implications for American drivers.