The Interstate Highway system, the seeds of which were planted in 1944, blossomed in 1956 with the passage of the Federal Highway Act. The bill was lobbied for heavily by a coalition of vehicle, oil, tire, cement, steel, and union interests and ironically, given its carbon footprint, championed by the elder Senator Albert Gore (Lewis 1997). This national system included over 46,000 miles of limited access highway - the largest and most expensive public works project ever undertaken (Kunstler 1993; Kaszynski 2000). The construction process was greatly expedited by the use of standardized designs and advance condemnation of properties along the Interstate right of way (Rose 1979; Kaszynski 2000). Although states participated in the construction of these roads, coordination, oversight, and funding were largely Federal (Vale and Vale 1983). The first sections of the Interstate Highway system were opened less than a year after the bill's passage. The target date for finishing the system was 1969 (Kaszynski 2000) but it took a more than a decade longer before the entire Interstate Highway system was complete. In Vermont, Interstate Highway construction spanned four decades, the late '50s, '60s, '70s and early '80s.
The Interstate Highway system was designed to replace a mix of different road types with a network of multi-lane, limited-access roadways built to a uniform design specification (Kunstler 1993; Hayes 2005). The system was birthed of the Cold War, as the word "defense" in its title, The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, reveals. Many suspect that Eisenhower's support for the road system was influenced by his war-time experiences with the German autobahn (Dicum 2004) and his difficult, two-month journey across America's primitive two-lane highways in 1919 as part of the War Department's Transcontinental Motor Convoy (Eisenhower 1967). By the late 1920s, a national network of paved two-lane roads was substantially complete (Liebs 1995) providing the first a real alternative to rail and water-based means of travel (Kaszynski 2000). The 1956 launch of the Interstate Highway system was the realization of a planning process for a national, limited-access road system that had begun in 1944, more than a decade earlier (Liebs 1995; Hayes 2005).
