Divided Highways Quotes

“In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the Third World Power Conference in Washington, D.C., on the importance of engineering in solving the nation’s social problems. At the conclusion of his speech, he pressed a button that stirred the turbines in the Boulder Dam to “creative activity.” “Boulder Dam,” said the president as his right index finger came down, “I call you to life!”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“About thirty truckers in Brighton, Colorado, refused to move their rigs in protest of the high cost of diesel fuel, fuel shortages, and the fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Other drivers followed suit in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Nebraska, Connecticut, and Delaware. In New Jersey, the governor had to call on the National Guard to remove blockading trucks. The truckers complained that higher fuel prices and lower speed limits were threatening their profits.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“In the nineteenth century, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux proposed a series of roadways through New York City, to which they gave a name of their own devising, “parkways.” Two of their projects, the Eastern and Ocean parkways, survive today.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat axe,” said Moses in response to the new challenges. “I’m just going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“That year the Louisiana Highway Department hired New York’s Robert Moses, the one whom everyone revered as the most progressive highway planner in the nation, to address New Orleans’s traffic problems. Moses’ solution was to ring the city with multilaned expressways that would bring automobiles and trucks to the city’s core.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“A leader of the state legislature, Virginia Peterson, opposed the path of Interstate 215 around the southeast quadrant of Salt Lake City on the grounds that it would take the land and house of a constituent who happened to be a famous local artist. The artist, Ms. Peterson claimed, depended on the particular light on the property for his painting. She was able to delay construction for a decade.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“the Bureau of Public Roads built a special, three-mile test road off an expressway near Greenbelt, Maryland, and selected hundreds of motorists to drive over it at sixty-five miles per hour. Along the way they passed three signs—blue, black, and green—that led prophetically to: Fifty-eight percent of the drivers favored signs with green backgrounds, twenty-seven percent blue, and fifteen percent black.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“Robert Moses never made the journey to Pennsylvania to celebrate the turnpike’s opening. From his office at the Triborough Bridge, he sent a letter to the Turnpike Commission belittling the achievement: “Jones says that he felt that he was at a disadvantage in building the Pa. Turnpike because no one else in this country had ever built a superhighway…. He goes on to say that he went to Germany to get his ideas. This is sheer rubbish.” The parkways and arterial roads in New York were evidence enough for Moses that he alone had led the way to high-speed superhighways.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“FROM THE EARTH COME THE MATERIALS, read the huge letters Teague inscribed on the wall behind the display, TO BE TRANSFORMED FOR HUMAN SERVICE BY FORD MEN, MANAGEMENT AND MACHINES.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

“Next to the education of the child,” he wrote, road building ranked as “the greatest public responsibility.” It contributed to the common good and did more to increase the “possibilities of enjoyment and happiness of life than any other public undertaking.” Good roads could improve the living standards of all, but especially rural Americans. For decades, agrarian life had been on the decline as young men and women on farms, unable to tolerate their isolation, abandoned their parents’ land and succumbed to the lure of the city. It was only a matter of time before people living in cities would outnumber those living on farms. Surely, MacDonald and others believed naively, roads connecting the country with the city could reverse this decline.”
― Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life