Before freeways were built, most people travelled short distances and stayed close to where they lived. People who travelled longer distances took trains or planes like my mother did in the early 1950s when she went with her family on a train from Texas to Minnesota. Then on June 26, 1956, Congress voted for the Federal Highway Act, which meant that the government would pay for more than 41,000 miles of interstate highways to be built. One of the many questions was where should these highways be built?
They started building the highways right away. This project gave jobs to tens of thousands of workers and used billions of tons of gravel and asphalt. The new highway system gave the interstate trucking industry a jumpstart, and trucks began carrying cargo in place of trains. It also made the restaurant industry take off and grow, which gave even more people jobs. In 1960 or so, my mother and her family took a road trip and drove their car instead of taking a train to visit my great grandpa who lived in Arizona. By the 1960s, it was thought that 1 out of 7 Americans had jobs the automobile industry, making America a nation of drivers.
