Can America’s Road Builders Break the Highway Habit?
The Biden infrastructure plan pledges a rethink of federal transportation priorities. But the government agencies that build and maintain U.S. highways might not all be along for the ride.
The last time an American president launched a major infrastructure campaign, the politics of federalism aligned to support it. State highway departments worked in lockstep with federal officials in the 1950s and ’60s to lay down 41,000 miles of “straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways,” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later write of the Interstate Highway System, his vision to boost domestic defenses and the economy.
The federal government picked up 90% of the tab, but it largely fell to the states to decide where to put these ribbons of asphalt, and to their highway commissions to build them. These agencies, the forerunners to today’s state departments of transportation, comprised a formidable freeway-making machine in the interstate era, and they remain the country’s primary road builders.