Myths/misconceptions/untrue things about road-related things

[jon daly]

I've never really understood SP's antipathy toward Route 66...

Antipathy is not the right word.  Probably the best is disregard. 

The best evidence is to look at the traffic volumes.  While the figures from the day are lost to history, the interstates that replaced it have their figures.  Mostly I-55, 44, 40 and 15.  And remember that a much LARGER %age of the populace, thanks to air conditioning, lives in the SW now than then. 

And the numbers are?  Mediocre.  Not in the top 40.  Grossly insignificant to the vast majority of Americans.  A route number combining as one a regional road connecting Chicago and St. Louis, and another connecting St. Louis and, by connection to other routes, the middle part of the east, to LA, (although you do not have to be that far north or south of STL for an entirely different US route to be the way west) across a vast and mostly empty part of the country.  Hardly the "mother road" or the "main street of America".  Legitimate candidates for the actual "main street" of America in that era would include US 1, 2, 11, 40, 50, or 51 & 61. 

I was looking at the map in the OP of this thread. It looks like the main way west out of Chicago doglegs to Nashville via I-65, then west on I-40.

BTW, whatever software this site uses puts the cursor in the middle of the quoted text when I quote posts. So I sometimes wind up putting my replies right smack dab in the middle of the body. It's mildly frustrating, but I'm learning how to overcome that obstacle and work around it.

[jon daly]

D'oh! I meant this thread:

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=22836.0

[jon daly]

[Bruce]

Surprised no one has said "speed kills" yet. If you haven't watched speed kills your pocketbook yet, that should shut most of them up.

Also some Portland examples:

One of any of the following apparently means you're a lobbyist the auto industry (people use generally only one of these), from least extreme to most extreme:
1. You are a roadgeek.
2. You support widescale freeway expansions.
3. You support freeways.
4. You drive (yes I've heard that a few times).

Reducing the amount of lanes and making bike lanes will make bikers get massive gains in ridership numbers (only true in Corvallis and Dowtown Portland in Oregon).

Adding exit-exit lanes increases accident chance.

"The only safe speed limit is 0." (WSDOT)

1 Light rail line running once every 30 minutes will run as much people as a 6 lane freeway. (True in Europe and NYC).

The interstate bridge is earthquake safe.

Public transit, specifically light rail is the only way to reduce congestion.

Freeways solve all problems on surface streets.

This is an inference based on Portland law: Pedestrians aren't the cause of any accident.

More people are driving now than in 1980 due to lower gas prices (I have a screenshot, can post if requested).

Tolling the entire roadway adds capacity.

Speeders are dangerous anywhere. (On mountain roads in in neighborhoods this is true, but on an interstate with a 55 mph limit and traffic is at 70, no).

(Location, 4 lane expressway, speed limit 45): roundabouts are safer than traffic signals and provide less congestion.

Building freeways/more lanes to relieve a congested area causes more pollution.

Most of these are only true of the most radical (akin to those "bulldoze everything for roads" types). Most modern DOT decisions are backed by studies of current and projected traffic conditions, weighted against development concerns, environmental impact, safety, and social impact.

For example: Induced demand is a well-documented and understood phenomenon. Unless there's strict limits on automobile-oriented development (or automobile use), a "congestion-relieving" expansion applied haphazardly will get more people onto the same roads and punt the problem to another spot. Transit and other alternatives for commuters during peak hours have been proven to help stave off traffic...just look north in Seattle: record population growth, yet the terrible traffic hasn't gotten exponentially worse, thanks in part to record transit ridership growth.

[sparker]

It's interesting to see I-82 in WA shown as a relatively heavily utilized commercial corridor -- but where does the traffic go once on to I-90?; neither direction of the latter route shows the dispersion of traffic from I-82.  Also, indicating railroads in dark green and non-Interstate commercial corridors in light green may be a mistake; the substantial traffic on CA 58 from Barstow to Bakersfield may be hidden because of the closely parallel rail corridor (the dark green lines cover the light green ones); the same goes for US 395 from Pasco north to Ritzville, WA.   Otherwise, this is a most useful map!

[CNGL-Leudimin]

This explains why I'm so tired of the really boring I-80 in Nebraska due to so many times Big Rig Steve has been on it. Also, what's going on Gillette WY for those thick green lines? Is there something interesting to haul on railroads from there towards Kansas City and Chicago?

Edit: Nevermid, found it in the link the previous post to the quoted one. Coal.

[ilpt4u]

It's interesting to see I-82 in WA shown as a relatively heavily utilized commercial corridor -- but where does the traffic go once on to I-90?; neither direction of the latter route shows the dispersion of traffic from I-82.  Also, indicating railroads in dark green and non-Interstate commercial corridors in light green may be a mistake; the substantial traffic on CA 58 from Barstow to Bakersfield may be hidden because of the closely parallel rail corridor (the dark green lines cover the light green ones); the same goes for US 395 from Pasco north to Ritzville, WA.   Otherwise, this is a most useful map!

The Green overpowers the Blue for River traffic on the Missouri between STL and KC. Must be a parallel rail line to the river

Also, love seeing the heavily used Rail corridors that are not roadway/Interstate corridors, but really could be

Chicago-Kansas City (despite the CKC attempt) and continuing on the SW trajectory to Amarillo, TX and I-40
Future I-57 corridor in Missouri and Arkansas
US 41 between Chicago and Hopkinsville

[J N Winkler]

The best evidence is to look at the traffic volumes.  While the figures from the day are lost to history, the interstates that replaced it have their figures.  Mostly I-55, 44, 40 and 15.  And remember that a much LARGER %age of the populace, thanks to air conditioning, lives in the SW now than then. 

And the numbers are?  Mediocre.  Not in the top 40.  Grossly insignificant to the vast majority of Americans.  A route number combining as one a regional road connecting Chicago and St. Louis, and another connecting St. Louis and, by connection to other routes, the middle part of the east, to LA, (although you do not have to be that far north or south of STL for an entirely different US route to be the way west) across a vast and mostly empty part of the country.  Hardly the "mother road" or the "main street of America".  Legitimate candidates for the actual "main street" of America in that era would include US 1, 2, 11, 40, 50, or 51 & 61.

I attribute US 66's weight of mythology largely to its 1930's role as a migration corridor.  The Dust Bowl prompted 2.5 million people to leave the Plains states, most headed west, and this is still the largest internal displacement in American history.

[jasonh300]

Building enough lanes does relieve traffic - especially if you're paving over traffic-generating buildings to do it. Induced demand stops at the point when everyone is travelling by car, and as much as they could possibly want to. With the advent of self driving cars, suburban lifestyles will be more accessible to people who can't drive.

Let's say that a bridge is 3 lanes going northbound. If there are 4 lanes before the bridge, increasing that number won't help, even if it's to 10 lanes. This is the definition of a bottleneck.

In the New Orleans suburbs, US-90 Business--the Westbank Expressway--has 3 travel lanes.  It connects to the Crescent City Connection, which crosses the Mississippi River to the New Orleans CBD.  The bridge has 4 lanes, and a bunch of onramps that enter just before the bridge.  Up until a few years ago, there was a 12 lane toll plaza between the last of the onramps and the bridge.  Tolls were abolished, and the toll plaza remained for a couple of years.  They finally demolished the toll plaza and reduced the number of thru-lanes to 4.  You should have heard the bitching and complaining about how this was going to make traffic so much worse by reducing the number of lanes from 12 to 4.  People just have no concept of what a bottleneck is, and traffic naturally flows better now than it did when everyone spread out to the 12 lanes and then funneled back to 4.

[jon daly]

The best evidence is to look at the traffic volumes.  While the figures from the day are lost to history, the interstates that replaced it have their figures.  Mostly I-55, 44, 40 and 15.  And remember that a much LARGER %age of the populace, thanks to air conditioning, lives in the SW now than then. 

And the numbers are?  Mediocre.  Not in the top 40.  Grossly insignificant to the vast majority of Americans.  A route number combining as one a regional road connecting Chicago and St. Louis, and another connecting St. Louis and, by connection to other routes, the middle part of the east, to LA, (although you do not have to be that far north or south of STL for an entirely different US route to be the way west) across a vast and mostly empty part of the country.  Hardly the "mother road" or the "main street of America".  Legitimate candidates for the actual "main street" of America in that era would include US 1, 2, 11, 40, 50, or 51 & 61.

I attribute US 66's weight of mythology largely to its 1930's role as a migration corridor.  The Dust Bowl prompted 2.5 million people to leave the Plains states, most headed west, and this is still the largest internal displacement in American history.

What about the Great Migrations during the World Wars? Many southerners, both black and white  came up to the industrial north from their farms to the factories.

[Eth]

Also, love seeing the heavily used Rail corridors that are not roadway/Interstate corridors, but really could be

Chicago-Kansas City (despite the CKC attempt) and continuing on the SW trajectory to Amarillo, TX and I-40
Future I-57 corridor in Missouri and Arkansas
US 41 between Chicago and Hopkinsville

Also looks like you could make a decent case to extend I-22 in both directions, southeast to Jacksonville, FL and northwest to meet I-49 in southwestern Missouri.

[D-Dey65]

Here's a myth; Roads are only built to benefit banks and big business, specifically the automotive industry and oil industry.

[SP Cook]

The Dust Bowl prompted 2.5 million people to leave the Plains states, most headed west, and this is still the largest internal displacement in American history.

What about the Great Migrations during the World Wars? Many southerners, both black and white  came up to the industrial north from their farms to the factories.

I have read material both ways on which was bigger.  It comes down to if you consider the "black great migration" to all be one thing, as it lasted over 80 years, while the "dust bowl" was less than 10 years; and if you consider it to be an entirely black thing separate from the simultanious similar movement of poor white southerners, especially Appalachians, to many of the same places for the same reasons. 

For that matter the populating of Florida, 1945-date, (population has increased ten fold) should be considered as well.

[Max Rockatansky]

In regards to the mythos to US 66 personally I think its a combination of things.  The Dust Bowl has been brought up which certainly has been immortalized in The Grapes of Wrath.  Had US 60 been applied to the corridor as originally planned there wouldn't have been a cool number which to make catchy songs about.  I think geography is the most important factor starting with Chicago and Los Angeles being the end points.  Really 66 is pretty mundane until you get New Mexico where it's story becomes intertwined with the National Old Trails Road and the legacy of places like the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert.  It doesn't 66 that it comes close to the Grand Canyon and likely was the route most people took during it's heyday to reach it.

[jon daly]

66 does have a mythos (even the British Depeche Mode covered the song!) I think of it as the '61 Yankees of roads. They were a very good team, but I'd put other teams ahead of them, including other  Yankee teams ('27, '39, '98.)

Regarding the Great Migration, I was reading a book about the UAW and a lot of their membership came from the hollers of Appalachia. It made me think that the Great Migration was more of a class movement than a race movement.

[Beltway]

California, particularly southern California, was a somewhat legendary place to move to back in the early 20th Century.

Chicago was one those heavily populated areas that a lot of people wanted to move away from after large numbers of men who served in the military in WW II saw other parts of the country as they were stationed at various military bases.  Most people traveled very little before then. 

That is one of the main factors in my parents moving us from Chicago to Florida in the late 1950s.  They didn't like the weather, the crowding, or the featureless landscape.

What highway connected Chicago to southern California?  Hence its popularity.

[briantroutman]

I don't get the US 66 fandom either.

I don't think that I'd primarily attribute it to migration in the Dust Bowl or postwar eras either. Even if 2.5 million people vacated the Plains during the Dust Bowl, we're still talking about less than 2% of the nation's total population at the time, and that's before you consider that not all of them went to Southern California or used US 66 to get there. Nontrivial numbers of migrants also fled to the Pacific Northwest or back toward the East.

Likewise, California's population gains in the postwar decades, though sizable, were never more couple percent of the country's total population. And of course that percentage also includes population increases from in-state births, migration to California from other countries, and in-country migration via other routes, making the actual number of people who "drove 66 to the promised land"  even smaller yet.

So in terms of the real, firsthand experiences of Americans, US 66 was never in itself a cultural touchstone as pervasive as "where were you when Kennedy was shot" , for example (which nearly every Baby Boomer can answer instantly without a second thought).

But I will grant that migrations to California via US 66 contributed to its legend in this way: If you migrated to California via 66, you might not have been greater in number than any other than any other group of domestic migrants, but you were more culturally influential than those other groups. You might find yourself living near John Steinbeck, talking about driving "the mother road" , and he later immortalized an account of your struggles in The Grapes of Wrath. Or you might be Bobby Troup driving from Harrisburg to L.A. and pen a song along the way that would become a big hit. Or you might be Sterling Silliphant, move from Detroit to Southern California as a child, and later create the TV series Route 66. One piece of mass culture beget another to the point where the road itself was less important than the ancillary imagery around it–'50s rock and roll, tail fins, Corvettes, Googie architecture.

[Beltway]

We took US-41 when we migrated from Chicago to Florida in the 1950s! 

At least to central Florida where we connected to other roads to get to the east coast.

[jon daly]

US-41 was mentioned in "Ramblin' Man." The protoganist was born in the back of  a Greyhound Bus on that route.

[D-Dey65]

And US 441 was mentioned in "American Girl" by Tom Petty.

[formulanone]

And US 441 was mentioned in "American Girl" by Tom Petty.

That's probably because it's one of the main north-south routes in Tom Petty's hometown of Gainesville, Florida. ("Thirteenth Street" wouldn't have sounded right.)

[sparker]

The Green overpowers the Blue for River traffic on the Missouri between STL and KC. Must be a parallel rail line to the river

Also, love seeing the heavily used Rail corridors that are not roadway/Interstate corridors, but really could be

Chicago-Kansas City (despite the CKC attempt) and continuing on the SW trajectory to Amarillo, TX and I-40
Future I-57 corridor in Missouri and Arkansas
US 41 between Chicago and Hopkinsville

Indeed, there is a major parallel rail line hugging the banks of the Missouri River across the state of Missouri; it's the UP (former Missouri Pacific) water-level line that's currently used for coal shipments from the Powder River area of WY and going via North Platte, NE and Topeka, KS; the destination is East St. Louis, where the cargo is handed off to rail lines operating east of the Mississippi River for delivery to coal-fired power plants in IL and IN.  These formerly used locally mined coal, but emissions standards now require the less-polluting variety from Powder River. 

The diagonal RR line from Amarillo (it actually assumes that trajectory near Clovis, NM) to Chicago via KC is the BNSF (formerly Santa Fe) main freight line from L.A. ports to Chicago distribution terminals.  If any rail line could be considered a "conveyor belt" for container cargo, this is the one!  The railroad (now privately owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holding company) has over the past three decades sunk about $2B into track upgrades, including an ongoing project to double-track the entire line (with only parts of KS and the bridge over the Missouri River east of KC still single-tracked) in order to deploy 110-car container trains at the rate of 30 per day eastbound, with a return rate (a mix of loaded and empty containers) of about 20-22 trains westbound.  The future I-57 corridor pathway is paralleled by another UP set of lines (one way SW>NE via Little Rock and Poplar Bluff, and one way NE>SW via Pine Bluff; the lines converge at Texarkana, having been fed by various lines from Houston, DFW, and San Antonio.  Much of the cargo originates in and around the "chemical coast" of TX between Corpus Christi and Port Arthur; such cargo consists of petrochemicals shipped in tank cars and plastic material shipped as sheets on flat cars or boxed up in, of course, boxcars.  Most of these are destined for offloading facilities in East St. Louis or Chicagoland.  Finally, the Chicago-Nashville-Atlanta-Jacksonville corridor (old Chicago & Eastern Illinois, Louisville & Nashville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis, and Atlantic Coast Lines trackage, now all part of CSX) has been a heavily-utilized corridor for well over a century; northbound has always been agricultural-traffic-heavy, while southbound is currently dominated by containers coming from Chicago area sorting (originating at L.A., Oakland/Richmond, Portland, or Tacoma offloading facilities).  The line parallels IL 1 south of Chicago, cutting over to follow US 41 north of Terre Haute and essentially following that U.S. route down to Atlanta; south of Macon it makes a "beeline" to Waycross, GA and then to distribution centers in and around Jacksonville. 

While some of these heavy commercial rail corridors closely parallel Interstate routes, some don't.  But it should be realized that besides connecting cities, rail lines run through areas featuring lack of gradients (trains don't function efficiently on grades exceeding 2%), many of which aren't necessarily parallel to Interstate corridors.  But the function of these high-capacity rail lines -- the BNSF line between Amarillo and KC being an example of this -- is to expedite traffic between endpoints without much interaction with what's between those points, whereas Interstate routes function simultaneously as long-distance corridors and local arterials.  It wasn't always that way; prior to most intercity roads being paved (circa WW II), railroads did duty (considered at the time "common carriers") in local and long-distance service.  But since 1980 (the passage of the Staggers Act, which largely deregulated rail service) their local obligations have mostly been lifted, allowing the rail firms to concentrate on what they're most efficient at -- moving long trains of cargo long distances between set points.  But since many of the routes traverse sparsely populated areas (like the BNSF "conveyor" between Amarillo and KC, passing through NW OK), deploying Interstates along those same corridors might not result in an AADT that would warrant their existence.  Rule of thumb: if there isn't an Interstate along a heavily-trafficked rail corridor, there's usually a damn good reason why not.  Of course, there are exceptions to this:  DFW-Amarillo being one of the more prominent; also the "US 69" corridor from, again, DFW north to KC (although that subject has been exhaustively covered in various threads).     

[J N Winkler]

I don't get the US 66 fandom either.

Question:  is there any participant in this thread that "doesn't get the US 66 fandom" who also lives or has lived west of Chicago and east of Los Angeles?

[TXtoNJ]

I've never really understood SP's antipathy toward Route 66...

Antipathy is not the right word.  Probably the best is disregard. 

The best evidence is to look at the traffic volumes.  While the figures from the day are lost to history, the interstates that replaced it have their figures.  Mostly I-55, 44, 40 and 15.  And remember that a much LARGER %age of the populace, thanks to air conditioning, lives in the SW now than then. 

And the numbers are?  Mediocre.  Not in the top 40.  Grossly insignificant to the vast majority of Americans.  A route number combining as one a regional road connecting Chicago and St. Louis, and another connecting St. Louis and, by connection to other routes, the middle part of the east, to LA, (although you do not have to be that far north or south of STL for an entirely different US route to be the way west) across a vast and mostly empty part of the country.  Hardly the "mother road" or the "main street of America".  Legitimate candidates for the actual "main street" of America in that era would include US 1, 2, 11, 40, 50, or 51 & 61. 

I was looking at the map in the OP of this thread. It looks like the main way west out of Chicago doglegs to Nashville via I-65, then west on I-40.

BTW, whatever software this site uses puts the cursor in the middle of the quoted text when I quote posts. So I sometimes wind up putting my replies right smack dab in the middle of the body. It's mildly frustrating, but I'm learning how to overcome that obstacle and work around it.

Cargo isn't really going west from Chicago, and certainly not by truck. It's either coming from the west to Chicago (to be transported east by water), or being distributed in the region surrounding Chicago. Anything going out west, as previously pointed out, would be going in containers by rail on that busy BNSF line.

Route 66 is important because it connected the mythological "Heartland" of America to the promise of California. This doesn't have that much cultural relevance today, especially not east of the Appalachians, but it once was a very core aspect of general American culture.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

As far as the arguement for/or against US 66's significance; there is a campaign to get "Route" 66 a National Historic Trail designation.
https://secure2.convio.net/nthp/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1301&utm_medium=paid+social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=route+66
From their webpage...

As our nation's first all-paved U.S. Highway System connecting the Midwest to California, it was the "road to opportunity"  for hundreds of thousands of Americans escaping the devastation of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. It also provided thousands of road crew jobs for workers unemployed during the Great Depression. Throughout World War II, critical troops, equipment, and supplies were transported on Route 66 to military bases across the country. And when the war ended, thousands of those troops traveled Route 66 back to their homes and families.

Over time, travelers began bypassing Route 66 for the Interstate, causing the independent businesses, rich roadside architecture, and kitschy landmarks and attractions that the roadway was known for to slowly diminish. By the 1960s, many communities and businesses along the route fell into deep decay...or disappeared entirely.

If you want to argue other routes were as, if not more, important than US 66, go right ahead. Just bring something more than personal recollections, to the debate.