AARoads Forum

National Boards => General Highway Talk => Topic started by: Quillz on November 08, 2010, 11:20:53 PM

Title: Eisenhower's Original Interstate Plans
Post by: Quillz on November 08, 2010, 11:20:53 PM
Do they even exist somewhere? I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that Eisenhower's original idea was that Interstates would simply connect two cities together and terminate at the limits. They would not necessarily travel through the city like they do today. I believe he wanted almost a carbon copy of the German autobahn system.
Title: Re: Eisenhower's Original Interstate Plans
Post by: NE2 on November 08, 2010, 11:43:59 PM
The Interstates came from years of planning by the FHWA, and by the time Ike signed them into law only the general corridors had been identified.
Title: Re: Eisenhower's Original Interstate Plans
Post by: froggie on November 09, 2010, 07:24:23 AM
If anything, one could consider that FDR got the ball rolling...long before Ike gave up the uniform.  Congress also played a big factor before Ike, namely with the 1944 highway bill.
Title: Re: Eisenhower's Original Interstate Plans
Post by: J N Winkler on November 09, 2010, 08:35:22 AM
My understanding is that there was never an Eisenhower Interstate "plan" as such.  Rather, Eisenhower had in mind an organizing principle for such a network (primarily rural, with traffic distributed around cities by freeway ring roads far outside the built-up area) which was derived from his study of the German Autobahn network as it existed at the end of World War II.  This organizing principle was in fact subsequently abandoned by the Germans themselves, who went on to build Stadtautobahnen when their period of mass motorization began in the 1950's.

The 1956 Interstate highway legislation committed us to building the Yellow Book network, which was rather different from Eisenhower's conception and was essentially a fusion of the interregional highway plan of 1944 and the postwar MacDonald-Fairbanks urban highway plan which got the thumbs-down from the Truman administration.
Title: Re: Eisenhower's Original Interstate Plans
Post by: Icodec on November 28, 2010, 05:42:43 PM
I have seen a map of an interstate prototype, I guess, that shows Interstates in many of the modern Interstate corridors, but I forget where.