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by
Richard F. Weingroff
The first Battle of New Orleans took place, unbeknownst to the participants, after the end of the War of 1812. On January 8, 1815, Major General Andrew Jackson, commander of the Seventh Military...
On April 2, 1971, Associate Administrator for Planning E. H. "Ted" Holmes retired after 43 years of service with the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) and the Federal Highway Administration. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had joined the BPR in 1928...
The novelist John Steinbeck and CBS Newscaster Charles Kuralt knew and wrote about roads. Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, is a classic of road literature; its description of Dust Bowl refugees driving to California along U.S. 66 has...
A Peaceful Campaign of Progress and Reform Autumn 1993
Compiled by
Richard F. Weingroff
Altshuler, Alan, and...
The following are selected from the Federal Highway Administration's Highway History Web site. In addition, ...
To help the authorities, Interregional Highways included a 16-page section on "Principles of Route Selection in Cities" and followed it with a 4-page section on "Illustrations of Principles of Route Selection." The principles (quoted here with minimal ellipses for ease of...
The following information is from W. Lee Mertz' "Origins of the Interstate System," which can be found elsewhere on this website. This excerpt describes the 1937 report Our Cities:
In setting the background for the Interstate System, there was yet another activity going on in...
The following is an expanded version of a sidebar accompanying "The Genie in the Bottle" (Public Roads, September/October 2000).
The proper name for the proposed expressway system came up unexpectedly when Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief of the Bureau of Public...
by Richard F. Weingroff
The urban Interstates proved to be the most difficult to build. They would have been difficult in any event because of the physical challenge of building freeways on new locations in an urban setting. However, they also proved...